An Album for the road…Last year I relished curating a playlist each month, which was even enjoyed together at the department parties, however this term I intend on choosing an album to promote a slower and more immersive kind of listening. This also gives me time to give deserved context to the tracks. This month I have chosen Caetano Veloso’s 1972 album Transa. Comprised of seven tracks which flow between Brazilian and English seamlessly, the album was recorded in the two years that Velsoso was exiled to London. It is a portrait of exile and of London as a crossroads: 'Feel so lonely/The world is spinning around slowly,', ‘Walk down Portobello road to the sound of reggae / I’m alive’. Veloso was arrested and later exiled to London alongside Gilberto Gil, a fellow stalwart of the revolutionary Tropicália movement which encompassed music, poetry, theatre and film, by the Brazilian military dictatorship. The two have shared a thirty year friendship, having lived in West London with both their families for the two year exile, and recording albums together once they negotiated their return. This is is a story of enduring male friendship, of resistance and of displacement.
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