Two Friends, One Century of Music

In August 2015 the two great names of tropicália – Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil – performed an all-acoustic set together in São Paulo to celebrate 50 years of musical collaboration. The show was a more sedate affair than the TV Record musical festival, which catapulted them to the forefront of the national music scene on their arrival in São Paulo in 1967. Then they were young, avant-garde experimentalists, shocking conservative Brazilian society with their outlandish lyrics, their adoption of electric instruments and their embracing of the accoutrements of psychedelia. They would be exiled by the military government as cultural subversives only a few years later.

Now Veloso and Gil are the venerable old men of Brazilian music – white-haired bastions of the soft left-wing establishment. Gil in particular sounds every one of his 73 years – the verve of his voice gone, his timbre a little thin and tired on songs like ‘Coração Vagabundo’. Veloso is in better form. His voice retains much of its supple sweetness and is particularly good on tracks like ‘Sampa’ (a homage to São Paulo in the 1960s) and ‘Super Homem (A Canção)’. The repertoire pulls highlights from their combined back catalogue – which between them stretches to well over 30 albums. Such highlights include ‘Expresso 2222’ – sung mainly by a husky voiced Gil, ‘Filhos de Gandhi’, ‘Tropicália’ and ‘Domingo no Parque’ a song whose subversion of the standard romantic themes of 60s Brazilian popular music (the story tells of a double murder by a jealous lover), and use of electric guitars contributed to Veloso and Gil's eventual exile in London.