What better to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon than to play junk at a street festival in our own nieghbourhood suburb? There were stalls, workshops and bands playing all around the New Crossways community centre, all adding energy to this friendly, eco-focused festival.

After our half hour stage performance, we did a short workshop on Caroline Street to share a couple of basic rhythms with the public.

Instrument-making in the KidZone

You can get started at any age

New instruments for the kids, created out of discard household junk

Thanks to Trash Palace, Mana Community Enterprises and Pacific Wallcoverings who donated the materials.

It was a fun and educational weekend for both the young and the young-at-heart!

“Funky Junk are going to be playing at the opening. They are my favourite band in Wellington, and Wellingtonians, you are in for a treat!”  

– Leandro Cavalcanti, Director, Reel Brazil Film Festival 2009

 The afternoon sun shone brightly as we positioned ourselves outside Te Papa to open the Reel Brazil Film Festival. Thankfully, we were partially positioned under cover which meant that our rhythm and beat were not lost in the big open space before us.

With support from friends and fans in the audience, and 14 strong, we opened the festival with a confident rendition of our funk rhythms, followed by samba reggae and a Brazilian rap number with invited guest artist Gabriel Dias. We finished off with an energetic merengue, weaving our way through the suprisingly large 200+ crowd that had gathered in front of us.

Of course, our number 1 fan could not keep stop his feet from dancing, either.

Congratulations on a fantastic festival, Leandro!

Funky Junk recycle band had the honour of being invited by the Brazilian Embassy to provide some entertainment at the Festival of Football, a lead-up event to the FIFA World Cup qualifying match between the (successful!) All Whites and Bahrain that took place just a few hours later at Wellington’s WestpacTrust stadium.

On this same day, Street Football Aotearoa launched their “Road to Rio” campaign to help fund a NZ team to participate in the international Homeless World Cup next year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The organisers wanted to end the Football Festival with a Brazilian Carnival feel – there was music, capoeira, football and some words of encouragement from the Brazilian ambassador of NZ. Funky Junk gave another energetic performance, with a good dose of axé from Capoeira Resistência too! See the action on our video page.

Saturday 17th October 2009

Wow – what a day, and what an absolute privilege! As we played our funky rhythms up Cuba Street in the rain, we were joined by the percussionists of the band Tambolelê, direct from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, who supported us by playing their own household item instruments (spades and the like) for the entire parade and well into our performance at The Cross. Tambolelê were due to perform straight after us, so it was very cool that they lent us some of their time to play and sing with Funky Junk.

The show was awesome fun! We walked into Southern Cross playing Funk (the crowd went crazy); rocked it with a fabulous rendition of Obvious Child on ukeleles and percussion; did a samba reggae version of No Woman No Cry (with Sergio Pererê from Tambolelê deciding to get on stage and sing); sang a short round of Rosa with Isabella again; performed a funky version of Marcelo D2′s 1967 with our local up-and-coming Brazilian rapper, Gabriel; and had everybody shaking their fine boo-tays to infectious beats of merengue!

Here we are at the Cross, with Tambolelê member Sassá (at the back in the funny hat) helping us out playing cowbell and singing on stage…

Zé and Andrea’s axé songs got the crowd jumping…

An energetic audience gave us lots of enthusiasm… Thanks, we love you guys!

Things always get a little wild in the merengue…

Dancing around the cachaça “hot seat”. Too bad we only had one shot to give away!

Limboooooooooo!!!

Thanks to Paul Taylor and Jax for the cool pics.

Watch the action and hear the sounds Funky Junk on the video page.

Saturday 9th May 2009

Funky Junk made a great contribution towards the launch of the inititive to make Wellington the first Fair Trade City in New Zealand. Joined by guests Isabella Rovo on vocals and Simon Garisch on electric guitar, the Trade Aid store on Victoria Street came alive with the sounds of Bahian beats.

This was our first gig without José/Zé/Júnior, who was in Brazil at the time. In the absence of our “percussion guru”, Melissa had just two weeks to figure out how to direct the group and prepare our performance set! On the day, we were nervous but full of energy. Everyone really got behind the cause and we all played and sang our hearts out (in Portuguese no less!).

Photos by Rogerio Dias