Printed in both Portuguese and English, this is the perfect Christmas gift for the welltravelled psych fan whose knowledge of the Tropicalia movement and beyond starts and stops with Os Mutantes, Brazil’s answer to late-period Beatles. Alongside classic albums by the likes of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso (musicians exiled by Brazil’s military dictatorship who ended up in London, jammed with Hawkwind, and actually headlined the second day of the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival), you’ll find biographies and often hallucinatory cover art from lesser-known acts such as Brazilian Octopus, Blow Up and, uhm, Liverpool.
It’s fascinating stuff, but it would be remiss to examine such a book without snarkily drawing attention to an omission. So you have to wonder about the exclusion of Novos Baianos’s revolutionary 1972 album Acabou Chorare, an astonishing mix of psychedelia and bossa nova that Rolling Stone once voted the best Brazilian rock album of all time.
