Watching the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy in action in Europe for the first time last week was oddly nostalgic. This was the way punk used to be. On stage were five scruffy young women, four of them holding guitars they could barely play, the other a short but sweet singer called Lovefoxxx. Her first rowdy chant, CSS Suxxx, held its shape thanks mainly to pre-programmed accompaniments from the group's one proper musician, Adriano Cintra.
A mustachioed fellow in a trilby, Cintra spent most of his 40 minutes behind the drums before stepping forward as the band battled through the final selections from their recent album, Cansei de Ser Sexy (Portuguese for "Tired of being sexy"). Essentially, CSS are all about Lovefoxxx. When she wasn't waving her arms like a deranged traffic cop and yelling choruses such as "The bitch said yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!", from Meeting Paris Hilton, she was flinging herself into the audience. "Everybody's so polite here," she said after being carefully returned from one body-surfing excursion. But in our reserved English fashion, we were as glad to see these art punks from Sao Paulo as they clearly were to be here.
CSS return for a full UK tour in November