Music Arcades: Tom Z: The Best of Tom Z (Massive Hits)

I think it was in the pages of The Wire that I first properly came across Tom Zé, when he was included in their end-of-year World Music charts.

Then I spotted this CD going cheap somewhere. I didn't take to it for many years. It wasn't until last year when I fell in love with Zé's Jimmy Renda-Se on Tropicália and saw him at the Barbican that the pieces began to slot into place.

… that performance especially. It started with Zé, a very short man, and one of his band donning hard construction-site helmets and then doing percussion for the first track by beating each other over the head with mallets. And Zé had a copy of The Guardian from which he read a few words before he started to rip it to shreds in front of the microphone. Or something like that. In hindsight it all seems a bit of a blur. I think a stepladder was involved at some point. The guy was 70 years old, and jumping round like a junk-food-fuelled adolescent.

Somehow your defences come down and the music takes over your spinal cord and then your cortex. The rhythms start to sound more logical. I especially like Toc with its typewriter percussion (something shared with Brian Eno's China My China but precious few other tracks that I can think of).

I believe the subtitle of the album to be a joke. David Byrne compiled the album and released it on his label.