Clubs

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Every year since 1994 DJ Cliffy has been in Brazil for carnival. He’s watched it, DJ’d at it, bought hundreds of samba records and often danced all night in the enormous samba school battles. ‘Those costumes can weigh a ton if it rains,’ says Cliffy, ‘but you’ve literally got to grin and bear it. You’re in competition and you must keep smiling.’ He even proposed to his Brazilian partner during a carnival party; he was being filmed live on national television so it’s just as well that Kuka said yes.

This year, though, he’ll be in London, DJing at the opening night of a six-day carnival fiesta at Covent Garden’s Guanabara bar/restaurant. It will be amazing. The London School of Samba will perform in a street parade around Covent Garden and later dance inside with 28 musicians and drummers to fire up a Brazilian and cosmopolitan crowd who are only too eager to go loco. ‘It was absolutely bonkers, much better than any New Year’s Eve,’ recalls DJ Russ Jones, who played the opening night in 2007. The self-styled Hackney Globe Trotter will play at the Carnaval de Salão event on February 5, but last year he borrowed Cliffy’s best samba tunes from recent years, ‘really mad music which is much faster than house, and I ended up playing it all night long.’
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But hold on. Such Latino exuberance is all very well in the summer heat of Rio, Salvador or Recife, where up to 10 million people celebrate carnival on the streets (and nobody would begrudge Catholics a last blast of partying before the 40 days of abstinence in Lent). But a street parade in London in February? Surely that’s just foolhardy. It’ll be dark and cold and it may be freezing…

But second-guessing the weather, or expecting samba fans to stop dancing because it’s a bit frosty around the tail feathers, is foolishness. When I called Cliffy in Brazil last week, Rio wasn’t basking. ‘It’s bizarre,’ he said. ‘It’s only about 20 degrees and it’s been raining all week. If things continue as they are it’ll be hotter inside London’s Guanabara bar than in Rio.’ Brazilians won’t stop carnival preparations as a result, and the 150,000 Brazilian expats in the UK surely feel the same. There are huge numbers of other Latin Americans in London for whom carnival is also a fundamental part of their culture and identity, so Guanabara’s whole-hearted embrace of carnival makes a lot of sense. After the parade on February 1 there’s a Carnaval Bal Masqué (no guesses) on February 2, a forrónaval session (forró is sensual dance and music originating in north-eastern Brazil) on February 3, a dancehall carnival (Carnival de Salão) on February 4, a Queens of Carnival event featuring the eight-piece all-female band Samba de Rainha on February 5 and the fancy-dressy finale, Baile a Fantasia, on February 6.

It will also make a lot of money. Guanabara, which has a maximum capacity of 500, claims to be the largest customer of Sagatiba (the leading brand of cachaca, the liquor used to make caipirinhas) in the world, selling more than 2,500 caipirinhas in a normal week, as well as in excess of 5,000 bottles of Brahma beer, making the bar Brahma’s biggest customer outside Brazil. All that dancing clearly works up a thirst, so it’s a wonder that there aren’t more big parties celebrating carnival this weekend.

‘We have adapted our customs to England so we have carnivals in summer here,’ says DJ and event promoter Jose Luis. He co-promotes the Carnival del Pueblo in Burgess Park (it attracted more than 130,000 last August) and Carnival de Cuba in Southwark Park in June, as well as running the reggaeton.co.uk website which majors on the thriving urban Latin music scene. He won’t be hosting a carnival party this weekend, but his night La Bomba will be the biggest Latino party in London at the Ministry of Sound on Friday. ‘Fifty to 60 per cent of the crowd are Latinos, but everyone is welcome,’ says Luis, who’s proud of the multicultural mix that the club attracts. Crossing over to the mainstream was the plan when Luis teamed up with James Horrocks, who formerly co-ran dance label React (later Resist) Records. Horrocks was a fan of the reggaeton sound that Luis had been pushing for years. They saw reggaeton as ‘the break we were waiting for’ to galvanise the Latin club scene, which had become ‘static’ after the popularity of salsa peaked around the millennium.

‘Now, more than reggaeton alone it’s Latin hip hop and the whole urban Latin thing that people are responding to in the main room,’ says Luis, mentioning hip hop from Miami, merengue mixed with reggaeton from the Dominican Republic and baile funk from Brazil. And as the DJs and Spanish-speaking MCs rewind the tracks and big up the atmosphere, the crowd really does go for it: Luis reckons the scene is more euphoric in London than in Puerto Rico, and certainly the micro-skirts and skimpy tops worn by the girls won’t make any concessions to winter either.

‘It’s an urban atmosphere, but it’s not aggressive,’ he says. ‘In fact, staff at the Ministry say it’s their favourite party because people are so polite.’ Perhaps that’s because the Latino crowd really love the Ministry, where La Bomba goes monthly from Friday. ‘They’re proud to have their party at a famous club with that amazing sound system.’ It’ll be hot, sweaty and very loud as Puerto Rican reggaeton star Andy Boy performs in the main room, but there’s salsa, merengue and bachata in the bar, and Luis adds that one of the rooms, the Caliente Lounge, has ‘a very Brazilian vibe’. La Bomba may not be strictly carnival, but it most certainly will be a lively fiesta.

Carnival 2008 is at Guanabara from Feb 1-6. La Bomba is at the Ministry of Sound on Feb 1. See all carnival events