B-boy culture, peeled-off G-strings and 1970s Communism: a night with one of the UK’s most unusual exports
B-boy culture, peeled-off G-strings and 1970s Communism might seem unlikely bedfellows, but when a small band of Scotsmen find global fame by pretending to be Cuban, ‘unlikely’ takes on a whole new meaning. The Cuban Brothers – not one of whom is actually Cuban – perform a bizarre breakdancing, stripping, stand-up comedy and singing medley in what is quite possibly one of the UK’s most unusual exports of all time.
And if the reception is anything to go by, Unusual is the new Black: Elton John flew The Cuban Brothers to France in a private jet; Robbie Williams stage-invaded their act at his own end-of-tour party; artist Damien Hirst hired them for his Christmas bash; British TV presenters Vernon Kay and Tess Daly booked them for their wedding, and their debut album, Yo Bonita!, features ‘a crack outfit of some of the finest funk players on the planet’, including the band that once backed the late Amy Winehouse.
But how did several lads – from a permafrozen place synonymous with men who wear skirts but no knickers – take the quantum leap from 21st century Scotland to 1970s Havana? Miguel Montavani, Cuban Brothers’ front man and founder, wasn’t always so. As the rather more modestly named Mike Keat, he hopped the English Channel almost a decade ago to take up residence in a hotel in Palma, Mallorca. It was there, among Latin entertainers from a bygone era, that inspiration first hit.
“I’ve always had a fascination with sub-standard cabaret performers,” he told The Guardian in what the reporter describes as ‘a disarmingly Scottish accent’, “and there was this amazing guy working in the hotel I was living in who did the kids’ discos. He was in his early 50s, about five feet two and had a fuck-off, big Tom Selleck ‘tache. He’d run out from behind this little console and be like [adopts Spanish accent]: ‘Hokay keeds! Eess my fabourite, I sure eess your fabourite ass-well! Less go… Whigfield, Sadurday Night!’ It was the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen in my life and I just thought: ‘This guy’s a genius’ and fell in love with him.” Mike, enchanted by the entertainer he describes as “so awful he was fantastic”, added his own touches – including stripping off “just for the wrongness factor” – and the lascivious lothario Miguel Mantovani was given life.
Back home in Edinburgh, Miguel took control of a Tuesday club night in a basement bar and within three weeks takings had rocketed from $500 a night to $9,000. Outings to hip-hop clubs in the city soon turned up Archie Easton, a former dancer
with The Prodigy (now known as Archerio on stage), and conspicuously Oriental-looking One Motion breakdance champion Kengo Oshimo, whose alter-ego is Kengo San, ‘a dancer and fever man who can make you come without touching you’ (Miguel’s Japanese lovechild was sired inadvertently on his national service with the Cubano Merchant Navy in 1978, so the story goes). Miguel’s dance floor encounter with Archerio, a Glaswegian Buddhist and ex-welder, was a formative moment in The Cuban Brothers conception. “I battled him,” says Miguel. “He wiped the floor with me.”
Thus far, The Cuban Brothers have supported James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fatboy Slim, De La Soul and Talib Kweli, performing along the way with everyone from The Prodigy and Q-Tip to Roy Ayers and Jocelyn Brown. An appearance at last year’s Big Wig Festival in Singapore sowed the seeds in Southeast Asia and this week they’re bringing their bizarre blend of comedy, breakdancing, stripping and spectacular music to Code Red.
The show isn’t for the faint of heart or humour, but as the boys have proven, even a Communist state such as Cuba can take the joke. “I was a little bit worried the first time we performed in Cuba,” says Miguel. “I was like, fuck man, they could be thinking: ‘Our culture’s being bastardised by these jocks,’ but surprisingly enough they recognised we’re not taking the piss out of their culture, that the joke’s on us. They love it.”
Miguel’s vocal skills have since made it to the big screen in Sunshine On Leith, the film version of a British musical which follows two men relearning how to live life in Edinburgh after returning home from the front line in Afghanistan. The soundtrack features songs by Scottish pop-folk peddlers The Proclaimers, of whom Miguel is a life-long fan. “I met [director] Dexter Fletcher at Jamie Oliver’s Feastival where we were playing,” he says. “We hit it off and he told me he was doing the Proclaimers film. I was into it right away. I’m the Proclaimers’ biggest fan. I grew up sat behind them at Easter Road when I first started going to the football with my grandad. So Dex and I ended up sitting having a drink, arms round each other singing Proclaimers songs and he’s telling me I have to read for the film. It was real serendipity.
“He told me there was a film with Proclaimers music set in Edinburgh, that there’s the role of a guy running the bar that might suit me, with Peter Mullan in it too. He wasn’t going anywhere until I had a shot. The producers asked if I could shoot something but I was on the road, so I got Archie to set up a camera in my kitchen. I filmed the audition there and they loved it. They want to put it on the DVD – they said it is the best audition they have ever seen. When I learned I got it, we were off doing Holly Valance’s wedding to Nick Candy in Hollywood at Universal Studios. So I’m walking up Rodeo Drive dashing back for a soundcheck when I got the call from Dex saying I got the part. You can imagine it was one of those moments – I was in the blazing hot sun, on my way to a film set to a glam showbiz wedding to perform, punching the air. At the Edinburgh premiere, The Proclaimers made a beeline for me as I came through with my parents and said I have an amazing voice and it was their favourite bit of the film. My mum was amazed. She loves them too.”
And Sunshine On Leith isn’t Miguel’s only brush with the big screen: he’s also to be spotted in Cuban Fury, the new film from British comedy stalwarts Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. But music remains The Cuban Brothers’ mainstay: Yo Bonita! was declared album of the week by the UK’s Sunday Mirror and Mail on Sunday when it was released. Highlights include So Sweet, featuring soul chanteuse Mica Paris, which blends Philly soul with slick faux-Cuban vocals: “Won’t somebody take me back to the days in the hood, when it was good”, croons Miguel in this unashamedly retro summer track.
Instrumentation comes courtesy of The CBs, a band originally put together to back the mighty James Brown on one of his last-ever tours and which has since backed everyone from Tom Jones and Mick Jagger to Nick Cave and Prince Buster. “Yo Bonita! was the album started just after my firstborn Bonbon, I wanted to do an organic project not using any samples with the extraordinary live band I’d put together to support James Brown on one of his last tours out in Australia,” says Miguel. “The players comprise cats from Amy Winehouse’s outfit, Primal scream and so many more and they are the dopest musicians. The main idea was to do some great songs, dope beats and keep it free of gimmicks. With the exception of Kurtis Blow, who is just a legend of hip-hop culture and somebody I’ve always admired, the guests are some of my favourite British artists, all with their own true voice.” Keep your ears peeled for Motorhead’s Ace of Spades and Jermaine Stewart’s We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off rendered as they’ve never been rendered before.
But it’s on stage, in the unforgiving glare of the spotlight, that these not-so-Cuban, not-so-related ‘brothers’ come into their own in a gloriously testosterone-charged show hinged on slick slapstick banter. Not that that won them any friends at a party for the master distiller at Jack Daniel’s, who was so shocked he walked out. “He was this 80-odd-year-old southern Baptist,” Miguel recalls in The Guardian. “Apparently the ‘homoerotic nuances’ weren’t to his liking. Part of the show was to drag a guy from the audience on his chair and lap-dance around him. I finished by licking his bald forehead for about 10 seconds. I think that’s where it maybe went a bit wrong.”
WHO: The Cuban Brothers
WHAT: Crazed David Lynch/Chippendales hybrid
WHERE: Doors, Streets 84 & 47, and Code Red, opposite Naga World, near Koh Pich Bridge
WHEN: 9pm February 21 (Doors) & 1am February 22 (Code Red)
WHY: See ‘WHAT’