The Name's Bonde, Bonde Do Role

Bonde do Role are far from your average outfit. The vibrant Brazilian three-piece pen hyper-eclectic songs about partying, fucking, partying, fucking, clandestine agents, post offices, office lackeys and fucking on the beach - well naturally. Throw into the blender some chaotic live shows that sample everything from Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ to Daft Punk amidst writhing aplenty from the excitable threesome, and it all makes for a spectacle not to be missed. A month before the release of their fantastic debut album ‘Bonde do Role With Lasers’, Gigwise caught up with beguiling MC Marina Vello to discuss all...

Bonde formed just two years ago when friends DJ Rodrigo Gorky and MC Pedro D'eyrot  drafted in Marina (whom everyone amusingly thought was a drug addict such were her whackey ways) in their native Curitiba, Brazil. Hailing from a country which has barely had any impact on the European mainstream charts until the meteoric rise of CSS, it’s obviously inescapable that Bonde are going to be compared to their fellow countrymen and pals. For the impossibly buoyant Marina, such lazy journalism doesn’t trouble her, “They're friends of ours. They're Brazilian, and they're getting huge, so, it's natural. I don’t mind.” Indeed, if Bonde have as much of an impact on this year as CSS have (they share the same manager, whom Marina describes as “THE MAN!”), it would be a good thing for the scene.

While CSS provide the effortless electro-imbued cool, it would be fair to say that Bonde provide the unhinged madness. From vocoder driven Europop (‘Quero Te Amar’) to saxophone fuelled madness (‘Marina Gasolina’) to bizarre chanting ditties (‘Solto O Frango’) to what Marina herself describes as “true metal” (‘Bondillica’), musically there’s not too much holding Bonde do Role back. No shock really when Marina divulges her seemingly erratic influences to us “I love Christina Aguilera, Motorhead, Sleater Kinney and Venga Boys at the same time!”

Surprisingly, CSS aside, Marina is not too full of compliments about the scene in her homeland – a country where surely the perceived carnival atmosphere would spawn many a gem? “Not really. Not in the underground scene at least. There are some bands doings good stuff, like Edu k, Comunidade Nin-Jitsu, Deize TTigrona, MC Catra, Turbo Trio, Caxabaxa, Hurtmold, Udr, but it's not a strong scene in Brazil. Brazil has a good crowd, but there's something wrong with the underground musicians I think,” comments Marina. 

Multi-lingual in their songs, and often just spouting pure verbal gibberish, we put it to Marina whether the three of them would completely ditch their native tongue in a bid to totally crack the English speaking world. Marina stands firm, “We don’t care about the language we sing, but when we started it was quite natural to us, to sing in our native language. We working on some stuff in English, but we're not going to leave our mother tongue, NEVER, I'm a Portuguese speaker and really proud of it!”