If it’s Sao Paulo, it must be TrocaBrahma

May 23rd, 2007 Posted by Tiff

If it’s Sunday it must be Sao Paolo, and if it’s Sao Paolo it must be TrocaBrahma. I explore Perdizes district a little further and find the little corner café deli shop and evidently, neighbourhood gossip centre all rolled into one. In Brasil these places are called lanchonetes: everybody knows everybody – its sort of like Cheers but with caffeine and cakes.

Within minutes the deli counter guy is excitedly making me try all his tasty pastries a moment on the lips… The patrao is telling me the history of the bar (and probably his life) in a crystal clear but rapid fire Paulistano Portuguese, which I’m struggling to keep up with. I ask for a bolo de nata and am gently reprimanded. “Ah, you want pasteis de nata? OK but where did you learn to speak Portuguese like that?”

“Um, Portugal.”

“Ah well, that explains it,” say both the barista boys at the counter with a cheeky grin. “No one knows how to speak Portuguese there…”

Smiling I swing off down the street with a two litre bottle of Guarana a handful of new Portuguese phrases and a good bet for the first scorer in the title decider in the football tonight. Now THAT, my friends, is service. Eat my beans and die, corporate coffee chains!

We meet the artists for the first collaboration in a local restaurant. Etienne and Johan from Radioclit are bright and breezy and visibly delighted to be in Brazil. In true rock and roll star de jour style, Bonde do Role rock up late and a little worse for wear after a music festival the night before.

Diplo says that “Bonde Do Role is like digging through the garbage in Brazil and using the pieces and making a club mess with the volume turned up plus 10.” We have to agree.

Gorky and Pedro are animated, loud and actually like characters from a Brazilian version of Scoobydoo. Gorky is ordering everything off the menu for everybody and Pedro is relating stories of afterparty carnage from recent gigs.

Singer Marina has the instant lightbulb wattage more commonly known as star quality – she brings the room to focus on her without even trying. She just glows and radiates with intensity and more than a boccato of louco. I’m man enough to admit she’s a bit intimidating at first…

The studio sessions begin and everybody starts to get into character, Etienne and Johan are clearly the ones with some method in their madness, plugging in laptops and checking levels, Gorky’s narcolepsy comes to the fore and Marina and Amanda spend hours doing their makeup… for the studio?

Dougal and I sneak off for a crafty pizza in the neighbourhood bar. I spotted a wood oven which is practically a guarantee of grade A pizza and we’re not wrong. Stuffed to the gills we waddle back to the hotel and head off to the club.

Gorky is DJing in a superbly tacky nightclub called Vegas that fittingly enough is in a seedy downtown street filled with strip joints and bars of dubious clientele. The tunes are great and remind us of home, Dougal and me dance like Optimo Sunday casualties and the Paulistanos play ‘check out the weird gringos’.

Back at the studio things are hotting up for the gig and the atmosphere is intense but not at all tense. Gorky still wants to just go to sleep and Pedro is grinning like a maniac and talking about his favourite subject: women. Amanda and Marina are using their laptop webcams as makeup mirrors (iPhoto has many uses) and I realise that if you sit in a room with Bonde and make everything silent, you’ll hear the sound of a chicken gently flapping its wings, ready to escape… cidade de bonde. Legao?

We leave them in peace for a while and go meet our new gringo amigo, Terry Techno, the London DJ. Terry is in fact the character Human Traffic forgot, and I mean that as a compliment. He speaks Camden Portuguese, has a great record collection and is a top, top geezer. Brahmas go down and the fat is chewed on his balcony over looking metropolitan Sao Paolo. Then, somehow, we end up in the VIP section at D-Edge (after a quick trip to newer club Audio Delicatessan) which is Sao Paolo’s oldest and most venerated electronic music club. We dance badly, drink too much guarana (a superfood fruit) and what’s really weird (apart from me singing Jorge Ben Jr tunes badly to the poor taxi driver) is that the DJs look exactly like JD Twitch and JG Wilkes (from Glasgow’s legendary Optimo) and play the same tunes. Was it Twitchao and Joao Wilkezinho?

The party goes until the wee small hours ending in a freestyle rap session by me and Dougal that I’d really rather forget about. And by that I mean that we made MC Hammer look like Kool Keith. Gringo amigo!

If it’s segunda feira it must be gig day and we check out club Gloria. It is palatial. Balcony, gold taps… the works. Great club, booming soundsystem and everybody is starting to get hyped about the gig. Especially Johan from Radioclit who so loves making music and playing it really LOUD that I think he’d get excited about doing an Ableton Live set in a geriatrics home. With no speakers.

We rush back, grab a bite to eat then soak up the pre gig atmosphere with the artists. Amanda is pacing around memorizing lines, Gorky is, well, sleeping and Johan and Etienne have just pulled out a bottle of cachaca — the professional musicians’ warmup of choice! We’re all keeping it together til Marina comes in to preview her stagewear,
Marina that’s a lovely dress… then she whips it up and over her head to reveal some kind of purple spandex catsuit hotpants number underneath… Marina gasolina!

The gig is the kind of beautiful chaos that reminds me of early Beastie Boys and with Radioclit’s beats and production beefing up the Bonde Do Role sound it’s a perfect match. Pedro, Marina and Amanda are raw energy fizzing around the stage and spilling out literally into the crowd some of whom get a private dance they didn’t pay for! (Dougal.)

Johan turns into some sort of ravemeister swinging his hands into the air at the breakdowns and Etienne quietly, methodically, Gallicly you might say, keeps the whole machine seamlessly ticking over.

And with that, we are out of here, a broken wreck after the afterparty, where Marina Johan, Etienne and us discussed deep concepts into the early hours, you know, what would your superpower be, shall we tie lightsticks to Johan’s goatee’s to make him Nu Rave. That kind of thing.

And so we’re gone, til we come back, and if it wasn’t for the guarana toothpaste I might never have made it at all.

Entry Filed under: Stories