Camera, Loosh, Action

Continued from blog 18 - Going back to our roots...

Loosh, the English pronunciation of Luz, which means light in Portuguese, also our surname, well, Paulo and mine, is our current musical venture. Loosh still carries the same core proposition as Kaddish did, the one Tayo mentioned in his interview - We make Brazilian Rock, not rock sang in Portuguese.

Loosh differs from Kaddish however in a great number of aspects, we are older (some say too old :oP), more mature and have been exposed to different styles of both Brazilian and Indie Music that we hadn't been at Kaddish times. Although Tayo's lyrics were surprisingly mature for a teenager in Colonia Penal Times it was really while leaving in Europe that he developed into a writing machine, writing in English with the same power as in his native Portuguese. Between Paulo and Tayo they have so many songs/lyrics it could fill enough singles that lined up would circle the globe.

At first, when Tayo started to write in English, he invented that his lyrics were donated to us by a Welsh Poet who wished to stay anonymous, which we nicknamed James Eliot. Surprisingly, since no one knew Tayo was writing the lyrics we never received any criticism of any "mistakes" or misspellings. It's amazing how people will find nothing to criticize about when they are not looking for mistakes. We also noticed when we just presented people our music amongst other people's music nobody noticed any difference in relation to my voice, but tell them I am Brazilian and they will instantly look for an accent to comment on. If Goldfrapp's singer were foreign everybody would criticize the way she doesn't pronounce words very well or how the lyrics are unintelligible, the same goes for Liz Frazer who would be accused of making up words because she forgot the lyrics, or something of the sort, but since they are British it's all artistic and beautiful. For some reason I do not know, maybe I was English in another reincarnation and have some left over nationalist pride in my subconscious, who knows, but if you want to infuriate me, tell me my accent is strong, I think I would get less cross if you said I sang out of tune!

Although we've written many songs under the Loosh title we also decided to revisit songs from our career since Colonia Penal times, rescuing them from obscurity and giving them new clothing. Some of them assumed a completely new format such as the song Procissão, while some others were mashed up together like Rio Sightseeing and King's Road to become From King's Road to Rio and we also made up a few cover versions all following our must be rule for cover making:
There's no point in making a cover exactly the same as the original. We always made sure we put our stamp on a song, in some cases, as the cover of Welcome to the Machine from Pink Floyd, our stamp is a freak Brazilian voiced beat box for drums, sounds crazy but sounds good.


Welcome to the Machine (Pink Floyd cover) by Loosh

Other covers include Bed of Nails from Husker Du, Leave Me Alone from New Order in Bossa Nova style, Lady Stardust from David Bowie and That's the Way from Led Zeppelin in Forro style.

We went back to our Brazilian Roots because since I listened to a lot of Brazilian Jazz at home because of my DJ Husband I couldn't help singing in that style, but it so happens that at the moment he is really into Folk, California Soul artists like Alzo, Alicia May or modern ones like Jonathan Jeremiah and Jon Allan so you never know we might just become Seven Miles High again!

It has been a great journey to write, almost every day in 19 days what took 25 years of my life. I hope you have laughed, cried and enjoyed our story, but stay put as for the next 6 blogs until our anniversary on Friday the 13th August we will discuss all the songs from our first and second albums, our new songs, our videos, there will be a photo gallery and finally an anniversary surprise. Thank you for listening, we apologize for any inconvenience caused (I've learnt to say this at the end of every statement since living in Britain), we can guarantee no animals were harmed during the production of this blog, although the squirrel in the garden did go nuts a couple of days without nuts, and this blog does contain Brazil nuts.

...To be continued in real life, real time

Pictures: 1 - Nuria Sanchez, 2 - Unknown, 3 - Katia Haider, 4 - Simone Taylor