Luke Howard, Horse Meat Disco

0:13Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. this time we'll be dancing to Disco and Boogie from Brazil as we're featuring the latest compilation by the disco connoisseurs of Horse Meat Disco. Horse Meat Disco presents Disco and Boogie from Brazil, Volume 1 is the name of the compilation. For a discussion about cool Brazilian deep cuts and his passion for Brazil, a pleasure to welcome a member of the Horse Meat Disco crew, Luke Howard.

1:03Well, I love Brazil. Anyone who knows me knows I love Brazil. I do speak Portuguese well enough to, you know, get by, converse with people there. I taught myself really by listening to a lot of music luckily I did speak okay Spanish so it wasn't that hard to make the jump and also I've so I first went to Brazil in 2003 actually that was quite late on in my life I'd done a lot of life before that I always wanted to go but I never got around to going until 2003 but now that's 22 years ago so actually it's quite a long time and I've been going every year since because I fell in love with Brazil when I went.

1:44I just went to Rio and Sao Paulo. I went with my friend Princess Julia, who's a DJ, and she was DJing. So I tagged along and whilst I was there, I got taken to an ensayo rehearsal, a school of samba to Mangueira, the best one, of course. I mean, if you go to Mangueira, of course, you're going to fall in love with Brazil. and so yeah I mean I knew about samba schools and I knew a little bit about you know but I didn't I only knew just what friends had told me I'd never didn't really understand anything about the culture so that was really my my introduction also went to a bailey funk as well and that was super fun and I just I I just met some great people and I had a couple of friends who were a Brazilian who had lived in the UK and had moved back.

2:37So there was a little bit of a connection through them and fell in love with it. And I thought I'd never been anywhere like that in my life. And I'd never sort of felt the connection that everybody has to music and dancing, actually. You know, that's the reason I became a DJ, because I love nightclubs, I love music, and I love dancing. And so Brazil is, you know, culturally, there's so much music, there's so much dancing and singing. so to see everybody how free they are with music with singing with dancing i think for an english person it's just so beautiful you know it's really like freeing liberating and and yeah so i guess that's the version of why i like brazil you're making me emotional look here in the studio and in a way do you feel brazilian music matches the music that you guys do at horse meat disco as well Because I think that there are some hedonism, you know, the danceability, the suaveness, perhaps.

3:36I mean, I would never sort of compare and say, does it compete or does it match? Because I think it exists in its own world and it is as good as any music anywhere in the world. And obviously has such a heritage for music, Brazil. So when I started discovering there was kind of Brazilian disco, there was Brazilian boogie, there was kind of versions of kind of maybe more Western types of music or music that came from the US, let's say, not necessarily Western, but with a Brazilian kind of touch, a Brazilian flavor. And also, like, I think Brazilian brass sections are like the best in the world.

4:12So that goes really well with soul and disco to have like really good brass section. So I think that's why Brazil is particularly good at doing that kind of music as well. And there's a lot of cover versions of disco tracks that have been done by Brazilian pop stars back in the day and with different lyrics and stuff. But there's also a lot of good original stuff as well. So it definitely, you know, it's his own kind of flavor. It has its Brazilian flavor. But it's taking its influence perhaps from soul and disco and funk from the US. But I think Brazilian music is inherently funky anyway. It has its own type of funk.

4:54because it's so rhythmic and it can be so raw and so kind of, you know, let's say rootsy or something like that, you know. It comes from, like, the street, you know. And looking at a sad list from the album, I mean, I could see that there was a lot of research I've done here because, for example, I'm a big fan of Gretchen. You know, she's a little bit of a Brazilian icon. There's a track by her, Ela Tem Raça, Charme, Talento e Gostosura. I think it's quite interesting to introduce this to an international audience as well because perhaps Gretchen is known by many Brazilians. She has her own history with us, but not outside Brazil.

5:29No, I don't think Gretchen is really known outside. I think, unfortunately, a lot of Brazilian musicians are not known outside of Brazil. Maybe they're known more in Italy or Spain, Portugal, obviously. But I think in the anglophone world, we do music a disservice by not paying attention to artists from countries that don't speak English.

5:59And yeah, Gretchen is a big diva. You know, she's a gay icon. Sometimes you could sort of compare her to someone like Sam Fox or something. She's a bit of a pinup. But, you know, the gay guys love her and she's fun. And she did do some kind of disco tracks as well as, you know, she did some kind of like lots of sort of Brazilian types of pop, different styles, but she did some disco and stuff. and the track on the album is a kind of very good funky kind of track, actually. It's like a really nice sort of boogie-ish tune that she did. So I think it only was on one of her albums. It wasn't ever released as a single.

6:34So, yeah, I'm really happy to have a bit of Gretchen. I have a friend, Benjamin Ferreira, who's a DJ in San Paolo, and he kind of introduced me to Gretchen because he loves... If Gretchen's on a dance floor in San Paolo, I'll tell you, things will go crazy. Exactly, yeah. Tell us about this process of discovery. you were discussing, I mean, you do go to Brazil quite often. Do you go to those kind of vinyl stores, to those record stores to buy? Because there's a lot of rarities. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's getting harder and harder to find the Brazilian music now, especially this type, because a lot of people are looking for it and a lot of people, foreigners, are going over and buying it.

7:14Also, you have this site called Discogs, which lists every single vinyl that's ever been released. and you can buy and sell on there. So then people can see how much something has sold for on Discogs and often things go up in price if someone plays it or if a DJ puts it on a mix or something like that. So now, often if I'm going shopping in vinyl stores or whatever in Brazil, you know, people who own the stores will have looked on Discogs to see how much it's being sold for internationally. I mean, I can remember one time I was in this shop called Casa de Vinyl, which means the big house of vinyl, like the vinyl mansion.

7:54And it's a house in Sao Paulo that's literally every single room is full of vinyl. But they don't have prices on and they just have everything piled up. There's no sections. I spent all day looking for music in there one time, got my hands very dirty. I took my records to the till and the guy went on Discogs to price them. And I was like, dude, I just spent all day doing this. like I did the work for you you know so I actually said I'm not buying them because I just felt like they weren't in great condition anyway and he was going to charge me the like top whack so I just said okay fair enough like but you can still you know I'm not I don't mind paying money for things I want to help people but I felt like that was kind of like cheeky you know safado safado yeah it was very safado and let's blame these cogs a little bit it's good but also bad at the same time Yeah.

8:45Let's talk about more music, because there's been a lot of discoveries for me as well. Anyway, no shade to Casa de Viennil, by the way, because I don't want to give them a bad name. I'm sure it's a great store. But, you know, sometimes you just have a moment where you're like, OK, I'm not paying£50 for one seven-inch single. Sorry. I completely agree. There was a lot of discovery for me as well. As a Brazilian, there were some tracks I did not know until I saw. For example, I love this one by Zé Carlos, Venha. Remix. Beautiful.

9:25I wonder, do you like the song or is there a favorite or any song that perhaps you'd like to mention? That's an interesting track because basically I didn't know that one either. So originally I had a list of tracks I wanted for the compilation. When you do a compilation, you give your list to the record label and then they try to license the tracks from the record labels that originally released them or from the people who own the music. Sometimes that's the family of the artists. It's kind of a hit and miss kind of experience because some people might not respond to your email or your letter or your phone call.

10:01They don't care whether you want to license it. We're not interested. Some people, they might say, yeah, but then they kind of want a lot of money. And, you know, you don't actually make a lot of money from putting stuff out these days. you might, but you know, you can offer somebody a fee, say, look, I can give you this much to license your track. And obviously you'll get a percentage of sales, et cetera. So the original list, I had a long list and it was difficult to get a lot of the things that we wanted. Actually, it was, it was hard because a lot of labels say, no, we don't license to compilations.

10:32We will do it ourselves someday. Or we'll, you know, we're just sitting on it. We don't, we're not interested. So we got a friend of ours, a friend of mine and also of Mr. Bongo is called Ticadachi. He's an American guy who lives in Brazil. He's married to a Brazilian and he is obsessed with music. I mean, he, like, my knowledge is tiny compared to him. And he literally spends his whole life finding bargains, finding old records, finding music. He goes around all the flea markets, all the junk stores, all, you know, he gets his hands really dirty. So he knows a lot about music. So we asked him, have you got any, because sometimes it's easier to license from an independent label than a major label so we said do you know any good tracks that we could put on this comp that are on independent labels because that's sometimes easier to that they're more interested in licensing their music than major labels and he was the one who came up with this carlos vena track and actually the track is originally released in italy it wasn't released in brazil so it's by a brazilian artist and you know it's got a very brazilian sound it's in Portuguese, but it was released in the 80s in Italy.

11:37So he was the one who introduced to that track. And I have to say, it's one of my favorites on the album. I love it. It's same. Same here. It's so good. I have to thank T for introducing me to the track. Will you do any kind of promo work about this album in Brazil? I know you're going there. I'm going to go on the 2nd of April and I'm going to do some listening bars. There's a place called Facia in Rio that I'm going to play. And then I'm also doing a party with my friend Benjamin called Stay Free. We're doing a little kind of launch party for the album at his night called Stay Free. And then I'm going to do, there's a little kind of daytime outdoor party in Brasilia, which they have a few times a year, I think on like holiday weekends.

12:18And I think there'll be a holiday in April. We always have a holiday. Every month there's a holiday. I think it's like Brasilia Day or something. So there's going to be a holiday on the Monday of one of the weekends in April. And there's this little festival called Picnic. and my friend Miguel he runs this festival and it's a festival where he has like a little feira, he has a there's like stalls selling crafts and clothes and then they have a little DJ area so I'm going to play a picnic as well in Brasilia and you know I have a copy of this CD here I love CDs but I know there's a vinyl there's a beautiful t-shirt the artwork for this is amazing as well do you have a poster as well?

12:59we don't have a poster but Mr. Bongo use one of their artists. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it looks really nice. Listen, look, what a pleasure to welcome you here. And my final question, actually, do you know how to samba, by the way? You'll say samba. Because we have to actually talk to the listeners. In 2012, you were there for the, kind of when London went to Rio. Yeah, you can see on YouTube. Tell us a bit more about it. So I'll tell you that. So basically, I was in a samba school in London called Paraíso. and when the 2012 Olympics happened in London the closing ceremony they have a handover ceremony where they give the flag to the next city that will host it so the next city was Rio and that city will always do like a five minute show at the end of the closing ceremony after they've given them the flag I think UK did one in China at Beijing it was a very bad one with the double decker bus anyway so Rio were having to do this show and they brought over Marisa Monge.

14:01They had Pelé, they had Zéu Georges and they had School of Samba. I think it was Portela. Anyway, so they needed extras for the show. So they came to our School of Samba in London, Paraiso, and they said, they did like an open casting. They said, we need extras to be in this show. But if you want to be in it, you're going to have to rehearse. You're going to have to be available to rehearse for two weeks, like every day, every evening. Anyway, there was a part going where they needed like an English-looking person to be in the show to play the part of a security guard. And what they did was they, there's a famous street sweeper called Sohizo who became famous after every samba school has paraded.

14:42They sweep the samba drone, the Avenida. And this guy Sohizo, he became famous because he would start dancing and the crowd would go crazy. So in the show, they used Sohizo in the show. and what happened was he was in the middle of the stadium sweeping and I was pretending to be a security guard and I run on and I tell him to get off the stage and then he starts to show me how to samba and I do very English type of dancing to try and copy him. I can actually samba much better than that. And then the show began and then it's like he's showing this English person Brazilian culture and Marisa Monches comes on and so Georgie and a school of samba and capoeira dancers and all the rest of it.

15:27And it ended up with Pelé coming on. So I got to meet Pelé. I got a photo with me in LA. You're a Brazilian now, look. Let's be honest. So that was a fun experience, actually. That was in 2012. And you can actually see it on YouTube. So there I am. Yeah, it's funny. That was like my 15 minutes of fame. And there was on the front of Folio de São Paulo the next day, they had a big photo at the end of the show. And I was like, so I was on the front. I mean, I was obviously, I was in the front with like Pelé, with Marisa Monge, with all these people. And I was actually, yeah, on the front of the Folha de São Paulo.

15:58That's my claim to fame. That's amazing, Luke. Thank you so much. Muito obrigado.

16:17Thank you very much, Luke Howard there. Horse Me Disco Presents Disco and Boogie from Brazil Volume 1 is out now, released by Mr. Bongo. The show was edited by Elliot Greenfield and thank you very much for listening.