Guns, floods and 45s: Mr Bongo spill the beans on five of the label’s most important reissues

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lula1

Lula Cortes e Ze Ramalho
Paebiru

The Paebiru story is really good. Lula recorded the album in the jungle because it was the military dictatorship at the time so you weren’t allowed to record music that was unapproved. So he had to tape it all in the jungle and it’s all based around this stone with alien writing on it, and they’re all taking psychotropic drugs.

The Paebiru album which is like the holy grail of Brazilian music. I didn’t know anything about it. A German friend of mine came to me and said “we’re suing this company in Germany because they’ve bootlegged this album” and he said “do you want to release it?” but I’d never heard of it because it’s super rare, I think 6,000 bucks or something crazy.

lula2

What happened is when they made it they all got destroyed in a flood and only about 20 or 30 copies got out alive. The guys in Germany booted it and Frank lives in Germany and is pretty hot on the litigation and got rung up by a Lula in Brazil, and he sued them and got a lot of money. He had chemotherapy that needed doing and that paid for his chemotherapy so there’s kind of a nice story there.