It's October 1996 and I’ve just bumped into 808 State’s Graham Massey in Manchester City centre.
“Do you fancy coming to Brazil with us and Bjork?” he says. “All you need to do is find a magazine to write about it for.”
I’ve known Graham since the late 1980s while I was working in the city’s acid house music mecca Eastern Bloc Records. One of the original owners of Eastern Bloc was a fascinating and imposing figure called Martin Price who also happened to be a member of 808 State so there are a few connections in place.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Eastern Bloc Records as a cultural flashpoint at that time. If you care about music that is. Otherwise, it’s just a shop. Most of the music played in era-defining Manchester clubs came out of Eastern Bloc which was populated by a motley bunch of music lovers, ne’er-do-wells, creatives and a sprinkling of career criminals.
Martin and his ramshackle crew came from an anarchist collective in Bolton and helped set up a housing project called Newbuild there - thus the name of the debut 808 album. He was political, an agitator. I had him down as a brawler but he liked me, even though I was a soft ex-student Southerner, so it was fine.
While everyone was heading to the Haçienda to see the big-name DJs the club attracted, Martin would take me to The Thunderdome in Collyhurst, North Manchester where the harder sounds of the city were being played to a room full of working-class kids — the sort of kids The Face magazine would run a mile from. Or try and buy E from and get robbed. The fashion was Joe Bloggs flares and baggy terrace wear. Darren Partington and Andy Barker, also in 808 State by this point, were resident DJs there under the name The Spinmasters. I was terrified the first time I went which isn’t conducive to a good night out. It was mayhem. Martin later vanished when the original Eastern Bloc went bump and remains a genuine acid house mystery. I liked him.
Anyway, back to Graham Massey, who’s an altogether more relaxed proposition of a friend.
“We had someone from NME coming,” he explains, “but they pulled out last minute. The only slight issue is that the flight is in two days.”
A quick ring round to various music magazines, a commission from the Manchester-based Jockey Slut, and I’m on a flight to Rio De Janeiro with the band.
Rio De Janeiro is crazily glamorous and crazily scary. All bikini beauty on the surface with an undercurrent of poverty and violence beneath. The hotel we stay at on Copacabana Beach is a huge Brutalist beast like only the Brazilians know how to build. It’s about thirty storeys high and all the rooms face inwards above the foyer far down below. The day we arrive a ‘Free Market’ convention is taking place at the hotel. This means that a giant picture of Margaret Thatcher is hanging eight stories high from the ninth floor down to just above the tops of our heads. It must be 20 metres wide. It’s a welcome of sorts.
808 State are playing at a festival called Free Jazz taking place across Rio and the more industrial São Paulo. Free Jazz is a brand of cigarettes, not the musical genre. Which is a shame. We’ve palled up with Bjork and her gang - her and Graham Massey are close friends and fellow music obsessives - as she’s also performing on the same day on the festival dates.
She has her young son with her who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe having read every spin-off novel and comic available. He’s not interested so much in the toys but the whole imagined world. Bjork is lovely but more than a little on edge. She’s really famous by now and Homogenic is due to be released soon.
A few months prior to the Brazil tour some deranged ‘fan' called Lopez had mailed a letter bomb to her house in London and later taped himself blowing his head off with a shotgun in his Florida home. All because she was dating Goldie apparently which seems a little extreme. Weirdly and entirely coincidentally 808 State had recently released a single called ‘Lopez’. The atmosphere was therefore unusual around her and her highly protective entourage.
The festival hotel quickly fills with musical legends and we ‘accidentally’ conspire to meet heroes left, right and centre including Herbie Hancock, George Clinton and Isaac Hayes just to take pictures and chat with the gods. Graham is in his element as a jazz nut. One morning I get in the lift heading down to breakfast only to be surrounded by members of Funkadelic who, being big units, have set off the lift’s overload buzzer. There are only three of them in an eight-person lift.
808 State’s road crew are old-school Mancs; veterans of touring with The Stone Roses and other Manchester bands. Rough diamonds you might say. When night falls and mischief beckons they think nothing of heading off to party in the city’s legendarily lively Favelas to sample the local cultural delights. Which, quite frankly, is fucking insane.
808 themselves have armed security after the recent spate of kidnappings of Europeans and are forbidden from doing such things. We don’t take much persuasion to stay in. Graham would rather shop for vintage musical instruments anyway.
After the madness of 808’s Rio show (you can see some of the footage HERE, I recommend its insanity), I watch Bjork perform from the side of the stage. She’s magnificent and so magnetic and at the time I’d never seen fans of an artist crying at their mere presence. Particularly teenage boys. She really moves people just by existing and making her art. It’s quite something.
The next day we move onto Sãu Paulo where the second leg of the festival is taking place in what used to be an industrial chicken shack. Sepultura are playing up the road in the Estádio do Morumbi (Morumbi Stadium) to something in the region of 145,000 people. Metal is massive in Brazil. Sepultura even more so. I go down with Graham and his lovely partner Emma to the soundcheck where we watch Isaac Hayes on stage for half an hour. Just him, us and a piano. It’s quite a moment. He might have played his version of The Beatles’ ‘Something’ for us. I might have made that up. I think it happened. Time makes things a little misty.
A little later Emma and I decide to head off for something to eat at one of the local restaurants while 808 set up their kit and run through the tech before the evening’s show. After a meal and a few glasses of afternoon wine, we decide to wander back down to the venue detouring to see the metal fans gathering outside the stadium for the gig that night. The place is insane. Tens of thousands of kids in denim jackets and the somewhat alarming presence of civil and military police cruising around on the backs of Jeeps, their weapons on display. There had been a riot in the city’s notorious Carandiru Penitentiary that week so things were a little edgier than usual.
We’re ambling down the main road outside the stadium minding our own business when out of the far corner of my eye I can sense that one of the Jeeps is slowing down to circle round back towards where we’re walking. Things don’t feel normal anymore and the metal fans around us start to peel away. I remember my vision going really weird in a moment like fractals — my brain anticipating that something serious is evolving fast.
A second Jeep circles around and before we know it there’s Emma, I and two Jeeps full of Polícia Militar (Military Police) in a stand-off five metres apart with nothing but a tall concrete wall behind us. They have us in their sights. They look like they’re dressed for urban warfare. All police are scary in Brazil but the Polícia Militar are the ones to worry about. A shakedown should be the least of your concerns.
Two Polícia Militar step down off their Jeeps and walk towards us with shotguns pointed at us both. They have jackboots on. No one is speaking. Emma and I are split up, motioned to turn around and face the lovely Brutalist wall behind us with legs spread apart and arms held high. Suddenly everyone is shouting at us in Portuguese and I have no idea what’s going on. I remember seeing Emma to my right as they went through our pockets looking for contraband. One of the police officers pulls a film canister out of my jacket pocket, volume and chaos increase all around us, and before I know it two loaded shotguns are being pushed into my lower back, one for each kidney.
They open up the canister and find nothing but film. Shotgun pressure on my back eases. Then one of the policemen turns me around and grabs my hand, squeezes my fingers so they gather together to a point and takes a big sniff of my hand. Looking to check if I’ve been skinning up weed, I’m later told by a local.
Next, they all take a step back, shotguns still pointed at us both. It’s a choreographed manoeuvre, you can tell. The Jeeps hum behind them. The main officer, the one who grabbed my hand, then smiles and speaks for the first and only time.
He says, “Thank you” in disarmingly perfect English as they climb onto their Jeeps, shotguns raised to the sky, and circle round off and up the hill.
I have no idea what Emma and I did immediately after. I imagine it involved trying to laugh it all out of our systems.
We continue our strange journey back to the giant chicken shack venue to tell everyone what’s happened and no doubt drink like absolute bastards. And probably smoke Free Jazz cigarettes.
A little later that evening we’re sitting at the side of the stage watching Herbie Hancock perform with his six-piece band including jazz titans Dave Holland and John Abercrombie.
“I bet you after the third song ends,” says Graham, “Herbie will get up from his piano, hold up his new CD and hawk it to the crowd. He's pretty shameless.”
The third songs end. Herbie stands up. And as if by magic…
15th July 2024
If you’re interested the original 808 State article can be found HERE
Nice story, well written!
Fabulous.