Gabriel Camargo Nogueira: Elegant Chords

"At that time, I was living in London and studying for the diplomatic career exams in Brazil, which is my country. I flew back and forth until one day they wouldn't let me board because my suitcase was overweight. That overweight was precisely due to the books I was carrying with me to study. It was then that I took the heavy books out of the suitcase, left them on the check-in counter, and boarded without looking back. I wasn't going to be a diplomat." Gabriel Camargo Nogueira explains it with a smile, beer in hand, a slender body despite his love for hops, thanks to his tireless passion for high-altitude cycling. Under his arm, the mock-up of what will soon be the debut LP of his new band, Les Rencards, with an unyielding sixties and Francophone imprint.

Outside, dusk is falling, and a streetlamp illuminates his perfect Vespa 160. Inside, My little red book by his beloved Burt Bacharach plays, and the laurel on his Fred Perry polo shirt gleams against the immaculate blackness of the fabric. "At that moment, I was already fed up with London. I had been there for four years and needed a change." That's how, shortly after, he ended up coming to Barcelona with the woman who would become his wife, Rosa.

That was thirteen years and a good number of bands ago. "Everything I write and play refers to blues and rhythm and blues. To Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Everything else, whether more pop, more punk, more rock and roll, or more soulful, derives from the same root."

With this approach, Gabriel has been a member of bands like The Grandaddies, The 54321s, and, very especially, Los Sinciders ---a band destined to fill the void left by the veterans of Barcelona punk rock, The Meows---, as well as, of course, Les Rencards. "All these bands were born around a bar table or among the audience at a concert. I believe in groups of friends who get together to play. For example, Los Sinciders were born watching Iggy Pop and the Stooges when they played at Cruïlla in Barcelona."

--- Speaking of Los Sinciders, with how strong they are, I don't understand how you could leave them.

--- I couldn't take on all the time and energy that such a project demands. With my work as a translator, with my daughter, Ágata, and other obligations, I couldn't give everything a band of these characteristics needs and deserves.

With Les Rencards, the times are more controlled. "I have a great time with them. Each one has a very distinct personality. Going out on a gig or tour with them is like living in a comic book."

Internationalist soul

A cultivated reader, an enthusiastic music devourer, an excellent conversationalist in several languages, and always with a smile and a kind word on his lips, Gabriel was born and raised in Curitiba, "a city in Brazil where foreigners who visit, thinking they will be in a warm and tropical place, feel ripped off because the weather is terrible, it always rains!"

There Gabriel studied with the Jesuits. "They were from the progressive branch, of Liberation Theology. Think that the word 'Satan' I heard pronounced, for the first time in my life, at the baptism of the son of some friends of mine, here in Spain."

In that school, young Gabriel cemented many of the convictions that have accompanied him throughout his life, in terms of pacifism and anti-racism. "One day I asked the director of that school if he was racist and his answer was 'I try not to be.' It seemed to me the most dignified answer a white man could give in a country as horribly racist as Brazil."

--- Is it really a racist country? From the outside, it gives the opposite impression, of being mixed-race and integrated.

--- That's the image they sell to the outside world. But, for example, the presence that immigrant people have in the media here in Spain, in Brazilian media is unthinkable.

The parishioner sips the last drop of his beer and orders another, after which he adds: "Anyway, look, behind racism and so many other conflicts there is always and only one struggle, which is that of classes. It is a question of classism, of hatred towards the poor, which underlies so many phobias."

A city forever

"They're going to have to bury me here in Barcelona, because I'm not planning on leaving," laughs the musician, already attacking the second or third beer he's had while chatting at the bar. And he adds: "Perhaps those who were born here cannot say they live in the best city in the world, but I, who have lived in several, can say it. This is the best city in the world!"

Without wanting to return to his native Curitiba, where as a teenager he had earned a place of honor in the local underground thanks to his musical activism and the mod band Tarja Preta, the regular continues: "Of course there are things I don't like, but I don't understand those people who complain that nothing happens in Barcelona. I have lived and live in a musically very effervescent city. I have seen incredible concerts in venues like Razzmatazz, Apolo or Upload, to whom they should build a statue. I have played with my bands and spun my records. I can't even count the quantity and quality of artists I saw in the Awamba Buluba sessions, at Marula on Escudellers street or the international lineup of DJs of all types and conditions with whom I have danced."

--- What you can count, due to its extreme quality, is our culinary offer. We have everything, pinchos, tapas, sandwiches, combo plates and, of course, a delicious menu.

At the prospect of continuing with the beers and the conversation, as Bacharach's Walk on by notes glide through the air, Gabriel Camargo Nogueira smiles emphatically:

--- Well, a menu, like a gentleman… but please, not too sweet, I don't want to end up diabetic, like my family in Brazil!