As the Sixties drew to a close music began to evolve. Out went cheery pop songs with clapalong beats and in came psychedelic weirdness. Perhaps it was something in the water – probably LSD.
I’m sure there is some sort of mind-altering substance involved in this performance – more of a Sixties ‘happening’ than a gig – in Paris in 1969.
Only yesterday I was admiring one of the great exponents of precisely that – Art Ensemble Of Chicago – doing it in the same city the following year. That was pretty bonkers and so is this; the maelstrom of distortion whipped up by an electric guitar is a notable feature.
Os Mutantes – The Mutants – blend their native Tropicália sound a psychedelic palette of distortion, feedback, found sounds and avant-garde experimentalism.
It was not universally popular in Brazil. They had famously been pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables by anti-Tropicalist students at one festival appearance alongside Caetano Veloso. I’m sure that in today’s world they would simply have been cancelled and their records removed from playlists on the radio.
Bat Macumba, probably their best known tune, was written by the two Tropicália greats Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and appeared on Os Mutantes’s debut album in 1968.
The band was formed in Sao Paolo by brothers Arnaldo and Sergio Baptista – the sons of a famous pianist and a poet – and the singer is Rita Lee, with a third brother, Claudio, helping out on electronics.
Os Mutantes reunited (without Lee) for a show in London in 2006, which I very much wish I’d seen, and made an album in 2013. If anyone cares to explore Tropicália further, they should begin with the excellent compilation Tropicália ou Panis est Circenses.