‘It’s been a pretty weird adventure’: Ritchie, the unlikely British pop star beloved by Brazil

Richard Court’s father was a military man, and when his teenage son announced he was ditching his degree at Oxford and moving to Brazil to pursue a career in music the lieutenant colonel took a distinctly dim view.

“Take it from me, you’re going to one of the grimmest dictatorships in the world,” the son remembered being told over the Christmas of 1972.

Court ignored the warning and, incredibly, just over a decade later, had become one of the South American country’s most successful pop stars, outdoing Michael Jackson, The Police and Marvin Gaye in the Brazilian charts – not to mention local greats including Roberto Carlos, Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso.

“It’s been a pretty weird adventure, to put it mildly,” the British singer-songwriter reflected over tea and biscuits at the lakefront penthouse in Rio where he has lived since not long after his first single sold half a million copies, in 1983.

Forty years later Court – or Ritchie as Brazilian fans know him – is a national celebrity gearing up for a tour celebrating what must rank as one of the most unlikely international musical careers of all time.

Born in Beckenham in 1952, Court spent his early years globe-trotting with his infantryman father, living in Kenya, Denmark and Germany. At the age of 13, he was sent to Sherborne, a boarding school in Dorset, where he sang Vaughan Williams and acted with his fellow pupil Jeremy Irons, before accepting a place to study English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford.

But just months into his degree, Court’s life took a peculiar turn when he fell in with a crowd of Brazilian musicians who had travelled to London to buy instruments on Shaftesbury Avenue. They included the future Queen of Brazilian rock, Rita Lee, who was then a member of the cult psychedelic rock group Os Mutantes.

The group took a holiday in the Brecon Beacons mountain range in Wales and, up one of those chilly peaks, Court was invited to visit his new friends in a rather warmer Brazil. To his father’s despair, he said yes, and swapped the cobbled lanes of Oxford for an uncertain future in a country suffering one of the most repressive moments in its two-decade military regime.

“I don’t want to have to get a plane and come over and get you in one of those football stadiums or something with your long hair,” Court said his father told him as he departed.

“I’m not interested in politics. I’m only interested in music – and I’ll be back in three months,” Court remembered assuring his parents, adding: “It didn’t go down at all well.”

Stardom didn’t come immediately for the British artist. As he fought to become a pop star during the 1970s, he found work as an English teacher to help make ends meet.

But even teaching English, the budding rocker found himself immersed in the sounds of his new home. His students included three Brazilian music legends: the virtuoso composer Egberto Gismonti, the saxophonist Paulo Moura and the singer Gal Costa. After hearing Ritchie’s demo, Costa urged him to record his songs himself – in Portuguese, a language Court was still struggling to speak, let alone sing.

This time, Court took the advice and landed a record deal with CBS, the international arm of Columbia Records. Astonishingly, his first single, a 33RPM seven-inch called Menina Veneno (Venom Girl), shot to the top of Brazil’s pop charts as the 1964-85 dictatorship faded and a new, rock-fuelled era of optimism took hold.

“There was a lot of euphoria in the air. People were excited about freedom of speech, being able to say what you thought, less repression. It was a magical moment. We felt like the doors had been opened and we could do what we wanted, really,” Court remembered.

Four decades later, millions of Brazilians know the lyrics to Ritchie’s smash hit by heart and some aren’t even aware the 71-year-old is English.

He has recorded eight solo albums, nearly all in Portuguese, including 1983’s Vôo de Coração, which some consider one of the decade’s top-10 rock LPs.

These days, Ritchie watches his homeland from afar. The last time the singer visited England was in 1996, at the peak of Britpop: pre-Blair, pre-Boris and pre-Brexit.

“What a rat’s arse they made of that. I mean, God, what a situation … and it was so foreseeable,” Ritchie groaned of the 2016 EU referendum.

During his half-century in Brazil, Ritchie has watched his adopted home make political blunders of its own, perhaps none greater than the 2018 election of far-right radical Jair Bolsonaro, which the singer called “crazy, crazy, crazy stuff”.

“That made me really sit up and think, ‘Now I’m really screwed because I don’t want to go back to England because look at England – and I can’t stay here because they’re going to be crucifying artists in a couple of weeks.’

“It never really got that far,” Ritchie acknowledged, despite Bolsonaro’s antagonism towards musicians and writers who he berated as contemptible leftist scroungers. “But it was really scary initially. I thought we were going to be all carted off to the ponta da praia,” he said, referring to the beachside execution site where enemies of the dictatorship were shot.

As he prepared to start his tour, Ritchie voiced relief that a new dawn had arrived with Bolsonaro’s defeat by the septuagenarian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was a 26-year-old unionist when the British singer first landed in Brazil.

“I’m very optimistic now about Brazil,” he said over a mug of Lady Grey tea. “I like to think we’re on the right track.”

The silver-bearded songster’s face lit up as he spoke of his love for the country and tongue in which he so unexpectedly made his name.

“It’s a very musical language, it’s got some lovely vowel sounds, you know? ‘Ão’ is fantastic. We don’t have that in English. We don’t have that rush of air that goes up your throat and down your nose,” said the singer, who has retained his English accent but slips effortlessly in and out of Portuguese.

On a table beside Ritchie sat a framed postcard of the 19th-century Surrey village church where he married his Brazilian wife in 1980. Behind him, Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue towered over his home in a city nearly 6,000 miles from the place of his birth.

“It’s just really bizarre the way things have gone,” Ritchie mused. “But I can’t think of it any other way.”