Bom dia! As they might say in Portuguese-speaking nations.
The other week, a strange thing occurred to me: Apart from songs in English, my favourite language for music is Portuguese. I'd always assumed it was French (Jaques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, Sylvie Vartan) or Welsh (Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Super Furry Animals). However, if you take the 60s psychedelia boom and couple that with the cool jazz of bossa nova, and various other oddities, Portugal and Brazil have supplied some truly
First is arguably the greatest introduction to Brazilian psychedelia you could ever wish for. There's so much wonderful Brazilian psych out there, from the Beat Boys' O Meu Tamborim to, well, there's too many to mention. Check out some Nuggets albums!
But, top of the list is Rita Lee and Sergio Dias's group Os Mutantes. There's so many styles of music in the Mutantes' back catalogue - bossa nova, tropicalia - but they're best liked by me for their fuzzy psychedelia. There's no better example of this than A Minha Menina. The Bees covered this too and Os Mutantes' influence is easy to spot in their music...and it's all the better for it!
The quirky Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou brought to my attention a Portuguese musician called Seu Jorge. He starred in the film and provided some cool musical interludes. Most of these were Portuguese language cover versions of David Bowie songs. The best is probably the chilled out take on Life on Mars.
But the song that's been in my head all week is from an odd source. I first heard it on 2009's Eurovision! The stage show was lush - as if designed by Lemon Jelly. Have a look at it here. It was such a happy and musically interesting song I fell in love with it. How it only finished 15th I'll never know. That's not true, I think we all know why it finished there!
I've heard that Flor-de-Lis, the band behind the song Todas As Ruas Do Amor, are releasing an album in December. It's a strange time to release what will hopefully be a sunny slice of tropicalia, but I'm certainly looking forward to it. I like Eurovision, but there are songs that are just too good for it, this is one of them and Sebastian Tellier's Divine was another.
* In case you were wondering, the title means 'check the oil level'.
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