When Alceu Valença was six, his grandfather declared that the boy had no rhythm. The old man got it badly wrong. Valença, a singer-songwriter from Pernambuco in Brazil’s Northeast, has spent more than five decades writing songs for the region’s dance floors and carnival streets, and has become one of its best-loved voices. Now 80, he brings his birthday tour, 80 Sunflowers, to London’s Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 7th November.

Rhythm came at him from every corner, from the living room to the market square. On the family radiogram there was Luiz Gonzaga, the accordionist who took the baião and forró of the north-eastern backlands to the rest of Brazil. At the country fairs there were the repentistas, singer-poets who square up in pairs and trade improvised verses over a ten-string viola. By the early 1970s Valença was feeding both into psychedelic rock.

In 1972 he took “Papagaio do Futuro”, written in the quick, tongue-twisting style called embolada, to the Festival Internacional da Canção, the big televised song contest of the time. To sing it with him and his partner Geraldo Azevedo he invited the master of embolada, Jackson do Pandeiro, a star since the 1950s and known as the King of Rhythm. Jackson didn’t trust the two long-haired youngsters and almost pulled out. Then he heard Valença sing a coco, a traditional north-eastern dance song, and his doubts went. He burst out laughing and told the audience at home, “Esses dois cabeludos não são cabras safados, não” (“These two long-hairs are no rascals”). Three years later he brought “Vou Danado pra Catende” to TV Globo’s Festival Abertura. Built on verses by the Pernambuco poet Ascenso Ferreira, part rock and part north-eastern folk, it fitted none of the contest’s categories, so the judges invented a prize specifically for it and called it “research”.

For years, even after he was famous, he turned down every request to sing frevo, the fast brass music of Pernambuco’s carnival, because he didn’t see himself as a carnival artist. He gave in at last in 1979, and frevo went on to make him a fixture of carnival in Olinda, the old hilltop town next to Recife. In July the town showed how much he means to it. For his 80th birthday, the carnival troupe Pitombeira dos Quatro Cantos led hundreds of revellers and a giant puppet of him through the old streets to his window, and he came out on the balcony and sang to them for an hour.

It was in Olinda, walking up one of its steep streets with a flute, that he found the melody of “Anunciação”, one of his biggest hits. It came out in 1983, when Brazil had been under military rule for almost twenty years and the generals were starting to lose their grip to a growing campaign for free elections. So when the chorus sang to someone about to arrive, “tu vens, tu vens, eu já escuto os teus sinais” (“you’re coming, you’re coming, I can already hear your signs”), many listeners decided that someone was democracy. Valença has never said who he meant, but he has said who may not use it. Last month, when supporters of Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula’s rival in this year’s presidential election, put it in a video of one of their rallies in Recife without permission, his team publicly demanded it be taken down. Valença, who was briefly detained by the military regime back in his student days in Recife, had already declared his support for Lula.

The London show retells that life in sound and pictures. The set travels from his early-1970s songs through the hits to a carnival section of frevo, maracatu (Pernambuco’s Afro-Brazilian processional drumming) and ciranda (the circle dance of its coast). Behind the band, Rafael Todeschini’s projections use paintings and photographs kept by Valença’s mother and sister, the family archive of the “boy with no rhythm”.

The tour comes from Primeira Linha, the Portuguese agency that books his shows abroad and has now taken him round Europe four times.

 

London is the only UK stop on Alceu Valença's 80 Sunflowers tour
Tickets are available through Southbank Centre box office