Not Tired Of Their Sexcess - CSS

It’s been a while since Gigwise last spent ‘‘sexy time’ the brightly coloured, Brazilian electro-pop act that is Cansei de Ser Sexy. They’ve been travelling round the world in celebration (with balloons and glittery jumpsuits and everything!) of the success of their international debut. Bored of playing the same songs in their ever-fun live sets, the band headed back into the studio at the beginning of 2008, and are now bringing us their latest effort, ‘Donkey’, with glitter and balloons in toe. Gigwise grabbed Adriana and Carolina from the band backstage at the iTunes festival, to hear just exactly how six party animals from Sao Paulo ended up being the biggest export from Brazil since caprihanas.

It all started one day, when hanging out in the same bars in Sao Paulo as everyone else, six friends got bored with talking about nothing and decided to do something; this riotous act of ‘doing something’ flourished into becoming a band. Adriana explains, “We only made the band because we wanted to meet during the weekdays so we’d have an excuse to drink. The thing about Sao Paulo is that it’s huge but it’s really small. There are about ten bars and clubs where everyone goes. At a certain point, you know everybody – it’s like going to school because you’ve known the same people since you were little, and you run out of things to talk about. So you say, ‘Let’s make a band!’ It’s like making an imaginary shopping list of what you’d do if you won a million pounds.” Carolina adds, “If you saw us at the beginning you’d never ever imagine that we could have been here!”

The story goes that Adriana rented a room in the industrial, but creative, part of town where some of his friends had their art spaces. The band would meet there instead of going to the bars and clubs they so often frequented. Adriana says, “We put all the equipment in the room so we could rehearse for free. That’s basically how the band got started. Unfortunately it was owned by some priests and they kicked us out because they said we made too much noise. At the time we said some really stupid and rude things in Portuguese. We were sure they couldn’t hear anything but our friends told us they could hear us two blocks away. Maybe that’s why they kicked us out!”

We talk about how CSS have become so big so quickly. Adriana says, “It was amazing and good because every time we came back to play in London, we were playing a bigger place. In one year we started playing in 93 Feet East and then we came back and played Brixton Academy and it was sold out. To this day, I don’t really know what that means! We were amazed and dazed and we would get drunk everyday. And then the next day we would have a terrible hangover and we’d have to play again.” Carolina adds, “Since then, we’ve never stopped to realise what was going on.”

Amongst the insanity of their world tours, which the band tells us have stretched from Europe and North America to Japan and Australia, they managed to pop back into the studio to record ‘Donkey’, the follow up to their 2005 debut. Carolina confides, “We were homesick to have a home because we didn’t have one for two years so we wanted to go back to Sao Paulo to record the album. We wanted to stop and be with our friends and family.” Adriana says, “We had all the songs because I’d already done all the pre-production on the road. It was just a matter of getting into the studio and really registering what was there.”