★★★★☆
It’s not every day you see two 73-year-old Brazilian men get an entire auditorium up on its feet and dancing along to the sound of gentle bossa nova on acoustic guitars, but Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil are no ordinary Brazilian men.
In 1967 these two Bahians helped to launch the Tropicália movement, a surrealist amalgam of high and low art that aimed to reflect Brazil’s place in the Sixties revolution. The country’s dictatorship took a dim view of Tropicália’s hippy tendencies and jailed Veloso and Gil before exiling them to London — turning them into countercultural and, eventually, establishment heroes: from 2003 to 2008 Gil was Brazil’s minister of culture.
The mostly Brazilian, surprisingly young and very enthusiastic crowd at this concert of duets clearly held the two, now rather frail, men as heroic figures, variously singing along and cheering to every song.
Much of the affection for Veloso and Gil comes from their songs being not only a staple of modern Brazilian life but also imbued with so much meaning. Veloso wrote Terra, a delicate, poignant love letter to the Earth, in a Rio prison cell in 1969, after he saw a newspaper featuring photographs of the planet taken by the first astronauts to land on the Moon. Nine Out Of Ten, partly in English, came from his time of exile in London, and the words describe both his excitement and sense of dislocation from walking down a vibrant Portobello Road and feeling alive yet alone.
Gil’s songs were for the most part more celebratory of the mother country. Back in Bahia and Expresso 2222, released on his return to Brazil in 1972, combined samba, rock and funk and established Gil as one of the country’s biggest stars; that he and Veloso could transpose them on to acoustic guitars without losing their power in the process was emblematic of their melodic strength.
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By the end of the concert, Veloso got up from his stool to do some samba moves. Even Gil, leading the crowd for an encore of his joyful, Beatles-inspired Domingo no Parque, couldn’t help but do a bit of dancing of his own. If only Britain had former ministers of culture like this.