opposite occurred - Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian Secretary of State for Culture, packed the Royal Festival Hall where he played a set of folk songs, Bob Marley covers and his own pop-rock compositions.

        For Gil, the concert had a sweet irony. He first came to Britain in the early 1970s as an exile from the military regime. This time he returned as a high-profile member of the government.

        It is shaping up to be quite a month for Brazilian culture in Britain. Tonight Caetano Veloso - Gil's fellow former exile and collaborator from his time in London - is the subject of a South Bank Show. Next week the politician who is acquiring more pop-star status than Gil or Veloso - President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - arrives for a two-day trip. One of his engagements will be to visit the new pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery designed by his old friend Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia.

        Usually the world takes note of Brazil every four years, for the World Cup. This time there is no football story in sight - except if Ronaldinho signs for Manchester United. And it's not just the old guard (Niemeyer is a quasi-immortal 96). There is a younger generation proving there is more to Latin music than Cuban salsa; highlights include DJ Marky, São Paulo drum-and-bass singer Fernanda Porto and the bossa-meets-chill of artists Bebel Gilberto and Joyce.

        In the cinema world, the excitement created by City of God continues with Hector Babenco's forthcoming prison drama Carandiru which is based on a real-life incident in a notorious São Paulo jail and broke domestic box-office records. In May it competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. In the aftermath of City of God's success, politicians and community leaders have been forced to take notice of the cultural resources of the favelas (slums) depicted in the film.

        'I'm a great believer in Zeitgeist. And there really is something in the air about Brazil,' says Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine. 'The world has shrunk. People are looking further afield.'

        What is responsible for this buzz? Brazil, in terms of raw materials, has a lot going for it. It is Latin America's largest country, with a population in excess of 170 million. It is one of the most racially diverse countries in the world, with the most blacks outside Africa, the most Japanese outside Japan and large communities of Europeans too. It is larger than the continental US, with thousands of miles of beaches, savannah and the Amazon rainforest.

        Brazil, now, also has Lula. When the 'bearded frog' took office on 1 January he became the first working-class president in the country's history. The symbolic importance cannot be understated. Brazil has one of the most unfair distributions of wealth in the world. Lula has brought Brazil a new hope to confront its immense social problems.

        As a democratically elected former union militant in the US's backyard, he has been heralded as the saviour of the international Left - which has increased an interest in what is happening and what has happened culturally in Brazil.

        'The world is discovering Brazil as a place that has constructed a "parallel" modernity,' says Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist and one of Gil's advisors. 'It is of interest to other countries for the reason that Brazil has lived all this time on the periphery.'

        Beyond the clichés of exoticism and body culture, Brazilians have a way of looking at the world that is attractive to northern Europeans. 'We are happy, we are dignified and we feel good about it,' Caetano Veloso tells The South Bank Show seductively, 'because we are poor.'

        Gil's appointment as Culture Minister was not merely political opportunism. In the Sixties, Gil and Veloso were part of a musical movement called Tropicalia, which mixed and matched Brazilian and Anglo-American styles. It was considered so radical they ended up in jail. Unlike in Europe, where the swinging Sixties led to liberalisation, in Brazil it was followed by the most austere period of the dictatorship. It was only in 1985 that the military regime ended, and in 1989 that a president was democratically elected. The cultural freedoms that ensued have only been felt in the past few years.

        Gil's position in the government personifies the arrival of the 1960s counterculture as the establishment. Early in tonight's programme Gil and Veloso are seen singing together at this year's Salvador carnival, dressed in red and white smocks, standing on a float and surrounded by a crowd of tens of thousands. It is moving to see two 61-year-olds dancing together, but what is most surprising is that they are still as popular and relevant as ever.

        Unlike any British pop stars, both men have constantly reinvented themselves - Gil as a political agitator, Veloso as thinker and iconoclast - so they have maintained, if not strengthened their cultural importance. Veloso has been described as Brazil's Bob Dylan or John Lennon. Neither is quite right. He has a unique voice, soft and sensitive, and is as happy singing Michael Jackson covers as he is samba. He is erudite, popular, political and artistic. 'He is one of the biggest thinkers in Brazilian culture of all time, who chose music as his mode of expression, and became a pop idol,' says Hermano Vianna.

        John Ryle, who translates Veloso's lyrics into English, says: 'He tells you more about Brazil than anyone writing in prose. He covers it all. He is relevant because he is innovative, but he knows about history. He has the subtlest take on Brazil's mixed cultural heritage. Slavery has produced a peculiar sweetness in Brazil as well as the bitterness. He is deep in the well of Afro-Brazilian culture.'

        Veloso has always had a solid base of fans, but only recently has begun to reach a wider audience. Which makes the documentary well-timed. He had a cameo in the Pedro Almodóvar film Talk to Her - Almodóvar is a great friend - and he performed a song from the Frida soundtrack at this year's Oscars ceremony. Gerry Fox, director of the South Bank Show film, says: 'Also, it is very rare to have someone of that age who has never had a proper documentary made about him. Quite apart from his abilities as a musician, his life is a great story.'

        A new edition of Veloso's book Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil will be published tomorrow. A mixture of biography, polemic and cultural analysis - at times brilliant, at others infuriatingly obtuse - it provides the intellectual meat to tonight's programme.

        Brazilian culture does not instil clashes between generations, and as Gil and Veloso have aged, their audiences have got younger. The average age at the Royal Festival Hall gig was about 30. Tickets had sold out a fortnight before.

        DJ Marky, possibly the most influential drum-and-bass DJ in the world and certainly the most technically gifted, frequently uses samples from Brazilian 1960s and 1970s music. 'I like to give my records that 30-years-old vibe, and bring it over to England,' he says.

        A growing number of DJs are travelling to Brazil to gain inspiration, but interest in Brazil is not just about popular culture. Next month, publisher Liz Calder will inaugurate the first annual Literary Festival of Parati, a small town between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The guests include Michael Ondaatje, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes and Eric Hobsbawm.

        It is Veloso, Gil and Niemeyer's breadth of experience that gives their work an edge. Julia Peyton-Jones suggests it contributes to a 'Brazilian' style. 'Either it is more difficult here or we don't have a culture that seems to allow that plurality.'

        In Brazil, the cultural centres are divided between three major cities: Salvador - where Veloso and Gil came from - is a predominately black area, São Paulo, the financial heart of the country and Rio de Janeiro, the home of samba which, traditionally, is the artistic capital.

        Another reason for Brazilian culture's popularity in the UK is that more Brazilians are living here than ever before. London is now the favourite destination for illegal workers and middle-class language students. Estimates of the Brazilian population in London range from 30,000 to 100,000. There are four Portuguese-language magazines and one newspaper for the Brazilian community.

        Music producer Joe Boyd says that the community is so large that audiences at Brazilian gigs are made up almost exclusively of expats. 'The Brazilian community keeps captive their own artists. It has meant the audience doesn't really grow.' The music has tended to be inaccessible because of the language, but the success of salsa has shown that this need not be the case.

        And as the music industry looks for the next big thing, Brazil is in its sights. Gil recently announced plans to set up a Brazilian music platform on the internet, creating a vast database of contemporary Brazilian music.

        John Ryle believes the current interest in Brazilian culture is a reflection of the 'anti-globalisation' mood. Because of its size, economic importance and new leader, Brazil is the one country in the Americas than can stand up to the US.

        He adds: 'Generation after generation wake up to this huge country with a profusion of culture. Brazil is the constant "other".'

        In 1914, the expatriate German thinker Stefan Zweig published his book Brazil: Land of the Future. It coined a phrase that seems to have done little but remind the country of its failure to achieve it. Were Zweig to have visited Britain last week, however, I imagine he would be secretly pleased that the country is on its way there.

        Alex Bellos is author of Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, published by Bloomsbury. The South Bank Show: Brazil by Caetano Veloso is on ITV1 tonight at 10.45pm.

        by Alex Bellos
        Sunday July 6, 2003
        The Observer

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