Interview: Os Mutantes

Arnaldo Baptista of Os Mutantes is telling me why South American music can be so compelling: "It's the historical mix, Incas, black Africans, Europeans, beings from Outer Space." I beg his pardon. "Oh, yes, I have seen many flying saucers". Arnaldo is being perfectly serious and launches into his theory of Time (he has formulas and diagrams) which state that once humans go faster than the speed of light, we will be able to travel back to the past. He thinks will freeze himself cryogenically and be unfrozen when this is possible, travelling in the future to go to the past. He has theories about the Age of Fire (we are, he says, about to leave it). Then he goes into a rambling but detailed and convincing comparison of the psychic effects of Gibson and Fender guitar sounds.

Arnaldo and his brother Sergio Dias were the creative heart of perhaps the wildest but coolest band of the Sixties, Os Mutantes (the Mutants), born in the psychedelic fervour of the Sixties Tropicalia movement in Brazil.  The band imploded in the early Seventies ("it was drugs and stupidity," says Sergio) and a version of the band produced a few highly variable Prog albums after that. Kurt Cobain among others implored them to reform and he invited them to tour with Nirvana. Beck is a huge admirer. For David Byrne of the Talking Heads their music is "as original and beautiful as anything being made anywhere", and that was even before he put them out on his label.

Watch video of Os Mutantes with Gilberto Gil:

Indeed, Byrne liked the band (pictured below right, in their early days) so much he put out the best compilation of their music, called Everything is Possible! on his own label Luaka Bop, and 40 years since their heyday a version of the band reformed, playing their first gig at the Barbican’s Tropicalia season in 2007, and are playing at the South Bank Centre tomorrow as part of their current Festival Brazil.

Among some Brazilians, the band reforming in 2007 created the kind of excitement that reforming the early version of Pink Floyd would here and many Brazilians bought tickets to London just for the occasion. Even if the end result from the Barbican concert was disconcerting, like seeing a tribute band made up of the original musicians (except the original singer, Rita Lee, who steered clear, perhaps sensibly, from this self-cannibalistic ritual of reformation).

The early Floyd comparison works in that both bands were producing spacey pop at the height of the hippy era, the lyrics of one song consists of the word Batmacumba, with a syllable removed each line, and then built up again (see below). Arnaldo has often been compared to Syd Barrett, the "crazy diamond" of the Sixties era Pink Floyd. Both musicians burned out from an over-indulgence of hallucinogens.

For a time in the Seventies Arnaldo was in a Brazilian insane asylum, and even now, as Sergio puts it, "You can't have a normal conversation with him, he's a genius. But then I imagine you couldn't have just chatted with Einstein about girls and football, either." Talking about his brother produces some comments like "One stare, and it's like looking in the face of the sea, but you can see what lies underneath. The depths, they're abyssal." Who talks about their brother like this?

The two brothers are total opposites, Arnaldo is the spaced-out visionary while Sergio is articulate, organised and determined and says things like "You can't be lazy and have to work hard to produce anything concrete in this life". Sergio has done well from writing music for adverts and I visited him in his impressive villa with panoramic views on the hills outside Sao Paulo.  Walking in, he is stroking his white cat called Lilly, looking for all the world like Blofeld in the James Bond films. In Os Mutantes' case, their diabolic plot was to warp the mind of the world through weird, seductive, mind-expanding pop music. Possibly the strangest ever petrol commercials starred the band, which can be seen below.



The fact that their first date as a reformed unit was in London, where they never played as group in their original incarnation meant a lot to Sergio and Arnaldo. It was in London that fellow Tropicalistas Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were exiled at the time of the Brazilian military dictatorship, and England, particularly the Beatles (the "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Tomorrow Never Knows" element of the band), which provided much of the musical inspiration. "Here in Brazil we receive information, but like through a kaleidoscope. We never get the full picture - which actually is a good thing, we collected bits and pieces and made our own quilt out if it. Not just the Beatles, but black American music and the avant-garde music of the time." They were aided by their elder brother Claudio, who wasn't in the group but as soundman was responsible for creating some of the stranger, distorted sounds and colours on their early albums.

An entire career could be based just around the guitar sound on tracks "Batmacumba" and "A Minha Menina" (see video below - the music was used for a McDonalds commercial), and many of their formal innovations have yet to be followed up. They were discovered as teenagers by Rogerio Duprat, who ended up being their George Martin, an avant-garde composer and follower of John Cage who did the orchestrations for some of their best-known tunes like "Panis et Circenses" (Bread And Circuses), an orchestral song that interrupts in the middle to reveal the sound of clinking glasses and Strauss's Blue Danube.

See video of live version of "Panis et Circenses":


Their music is a wild brew of everything from samba-rock, funk, cod Latin pop, French chanson and Stockhausen. Their saving grace is that unlike most experimental musicians they often manage to be both intellectually and emotionally engaging - some of their best material are love songs like "A Minha Menina" or Caetano Veloso's "Baby "(even if the lyrics are often surreal: "You need to learn of swimming pools, of margarine, of gasoline").

For many Os Mutantes fans, the absence of the original singer of some of these songs Rita Lee, dampened their excitement at the reunion. When asked about her fellow mutants, she says, "I have no idea how to find them... what they look like now... if they still make music." She thinks the current interest in the band is down to "curious, unsatisfied musicians who take their jobs as a very serious pleasure and mess around with hidden pirate's treasures from all over the world".  Another singer, Zelia Duncan, was drafted in, but has retired (or been retired by Sergio) and a new singer, Bia Mendes, has been playing with them. Arnaldo has also recently gone back to "solo work and painting". The band has now reverted to being Sergio and whoever else, but last year did release a surprisingly interesting new album, if not quite up to their classic-era level of visionary pop strangeness, called Haih Or Amortecedor.



The title of Byrne's compilation Everything Is Possible! (almost their entire back catalogue has also been re-issued, as well) catches the openness and optimism of the period. To borrow from Wordsworth, bliss was it to be alive, but to be drug-addled Brazilian hippies was very heaven. There was a moment in the Sixties in Brazil, even more than Europe, when large numbers of people genuinely believed the birth of a new society was imminent. And Os Mutantes was going to be the soundtrack of the revolution.

The fact that its main protagonists are still headlining this year in London, 45 years on, shows what a vital a force Tropicalia was in Sixties pop, and most of its protagonists like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Ze (who has cancelled his show tomorrow on the same bill as Os Mutantes) and Gal Costa are still producing inventive music. Sergio is critical of Gil’s tenure as Minister of Culture. "I can't believe he didn't do more to reform things like the corrupt radio stations, which still operate on a payola basis and restrict the possibilities of new artists getting exposure". Fifteen years ago, none of these names meant much outside Brazil - but their contemporary success seems inexorable. Out of all of them Os Mutantes were the most out-there, the most irreverent, the most dangerous and perhaps the most beautiful.

For Sergio (pictured left, on right of image, at the time of their reformation in 2006), "Tropicalia was a vortex of energy, with everyone encouraging each other. There was amazing optimism against the backdrop of riots in the streets against the dictatorship." The political situation provided a corrective astringency to the hippy vagueness and the utopian dreams. "My father was arrested and put in prison, and people were being tortured. But just for a time we thought we were heralding a new dawn." And why does he think the Tropicalistas and the Os Mutantes are increasingly heard and liked in Europe and America? "Maybe we were ahead of our time. But also in some ways it's like the Sixties again. The Iraq War and Afghanistan is like Vietnam. And people are thirsty for pop music that is open and experimental." For Arnaldo, there is no doubt that "it is time to expand our minds and move to the next level of evolution".

• Find Os Mutantes records on Amazon
• For Os Mutantes tickets and for information on the South Bank's Festival Brazil, click here.