Saturday: Patife speaks...
After a storming set in the Dance tent, Patife took time out from his busy schedule to chat to us. How busy is his schedule? Check this out: Sunday night in Prague, onto Paris on Monday, London Wednesday, Scotland last night (Friday) and here today, bang on time for a 3.30 set. Which left no room for sleep whatsoever. Patife assures me it's pure energy keeping him going, and watching him on the decks and seeing the reaction from the crowd you can kinda understand it… More than just awake for our chat, he is positively full of beans, a more affable and smiley Brazilian you're unlikely to find till they win tomorrow... He comments to a passing member of his crew - "Economy's fucked! Politics is fucked! If we win the World Cup, it'll just mean so much."
	He's been playing records to people since the early 90s - the early days involved a lot of home-made parties playing from a garage or out the back of a car, and a mixture of mostly hip-hop bits and pieces. Now he's playing all over the world, filling proper clubs with uplifting and entirely body-moving Brazilian drum'n'bass. Although he is loved at home as he is over here, he says the music scene in Brazil is "quite strange to be honest. I'm serious! You turn on the radio, you won't like what you hear!...
"It will be some sort of cheesy, poppy thing…" (pauses to find a suitable word to illustrate his clear distaste with that sort of thing.) The drum 'n' bass thing has taken off in a big way, but it's like anywhere else, there's the commercial stuff, the pop music, and the "booty" scene (seemingly not much more than an excuse for young things to get frisky with each other) alongside the new, dance-orientated music and those essential live Latin beats.
As for his experience of the British industry, he's not too fazed by the "You saved drum'n'bass!" glory heaped upon him, Marky and their various partners in crime. "The press always need to have something to grab on to and write about, you know, last year I was here and it was all Garage, garage, garage! But you turn on the radio now and it's more like, R'n'B, or something different…" He adheres to the "true junglist's" view that drum'n'bass never died, it just went underground for a while. "Nah, nah, nah, it never went away! I don't see what we do as particularly anything different, it's part of the same thing." Nor is he troubled by the other element of that - the possibility that it'll all be over for the Brazilian crew come the end of the summer. They're happy as can be with the reception their tracks have been getting, but are positive about the future. "We want to get it to sound better, you know, experiment more… From my point of view, it's all about the mixture. There's lots of musical influences in our styles, that's what makes it interesting." Is there anyone he's dying to work with? "Aaah! I have lots of dreams. I would love to work with Alicia Keys… Bebel Gilberto… Such a lovely voice… Suv, he's an excellent guy…" He goes into a reverie for a while, recounting a few more likely suspects for the next Patife collaborations, before pulling up and saying with a wry smile, "No, no, you mustn't get me started on that! You'll have to make a massive print-out list or something to see it all!"
Drawing to a close as he's clearly in need of a proper sit down and recovery (he's off somewhere else in an hour), I ask what's been the best moment of Glastonbury? Patife breaks into another massive grin, recalling the point in the set when he played his best-known track, the remix of Latin diva Fernanda Porto's "Sambassim". "I tell you what! That was the best, the BEST Sambassim reaction, EVER!" Words & Pictures: Marilyn Kahan