Far Out Recordings

A trip to the pub after a Sunday afternoon spent ice skating in suburban southwest London isn’t a setting where one expects to encounter a seismic musical discovery. But it’s against this backdrop that the origin story of an unlikely figure whose influence has loomed large over the U.K.’s music scene for three decades essentially begins.

The year was 1984, and the pub was the Belvedere Arms, an obscure spot in Richmond where crowds congregated—somewhat incongruously—to dance to the likes of Sergio Mendes, Cal Tjader, and Jon Lucien, unaware that they may have been at the forefront of a burgeoning global scene. It was here that a fifteen-year old Joe Davis first heard Marcos Valle’s “Crickets Sing for Anamaria.” 

“I heard about this pub and went there one night with my skating friends,” Davis recalls. “They weren’t into it but I was really digging it, and the first thing I heard was Marcos Valle.” The propulsive, percussive samba rhythms of Valle’s 1968 hit sparked an obsession with Brazilian music that would go on to shape Joe’s trailblazing career. His passion for the sounds of Brazil would eventually lead him to form Far Out Recordings, which this year celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. The label, which has recently released new projects from a now eighty-one-year-old Valle (his twenty-third album, Túnel Acustico) and young Brazilian songwriter Bruno Berle (April’s No Reino Dos Afetos 2), alongside reissues of lost ’70s LPs from Opa and Augustin Pereyra Lucena, has been the most influential disseminator of Brazilian music in the U.K. for three decades.

Between that early visit to the Belvedere Arms and the 1996 founding of Far Out, Joe set out on a voracious musical quest, which led to his becoming a purveyor of sought-after Brazilian rarities. If you’ve heard a DJ play a samba, MPB [Musica Populara Brasiliera], or Brazilian fusion record in the U.K., there’s a strong possibility that, “it passed through my hands first,” Joe says. By the early 1990s, still in his early twenties, he was travelling to Brazil, sometimes monthly, discovering unheard gems and bringing them back to London to rapturous reception. 

As a label head and music producer, Davis would eventually find himself working directly with Brazilian icons like Azymuth, Joyce, Milton Nascimento, and Marcus Valle. It was all a dream come true for a boy from Greenford who first heard Azymuth in the early 1980s on Robbie Vincent’s Saturday soul show on BBC Radio 1. “He had a wicked little jazz feature …some of it a bit cheesy but then he’d throw in an Azymuth or some rare Japanese jazz,” Davis recalls of Vincent. “I used to run back from football, record over it from the week before, write down the songs that I loved, then slowly start buying them. He played an Azymuth track from Telecommunications…that freaked me out.”

This was a heady period of musical discovery for Joe, and radio was instrumental. “A lot of pirate stations were emerging like [Radio] Invicta, later JFM, Horizon, Solar, Kiss…the Black music scene was massive but there weren’t easy outlets to hear this stuff,” he says. It was Joe’s older brother who first pricked his ears to the sounds of soul, funk, jazz, and disco. “He used to collect soul music, all the ’70s stuff – my earliest memory is throwing all these seven-inch singles around.” His first time hearing these sorts of records outside his suburban home was at local dances, where they would play Bobby Byrd, James Brown and Lyn Collins.

Soon he was a DJ and collector himself, playing alongside a young Gilles Peterson at the aforementioned Belvedere Arms. While he also harbored love for jazz, soul, and disco, Joe’s passion for Brazilian music became his motivating force. “I really had this thing about it, I think, because I felt a bit isolated, because my parents were Indian, and they liked their own music,” he explains. “They were first-generation [immigrants who] came over in the ’50s. I didn’t really like what I had access to as a kid, which was Indian music or British pop.” 

Another cultural avenue seemed to promise a world of greater possibility: football. “I was a huge football fan, and I liked the way the Brazilian team worked, and I noticed their multiculturalism—Black and brown and blonde players,” Joe says. This fed into a subconscious link with Brazil, he explains. “When I saw the Brazilian football crowds, they looked so happy and colourful, whereas the English football fans were all shouting and swearing,” Joe says. “There was a real distinction then between what was Black and what was white, and I was seriously into Black music.” During this time, an expanding Indian diaspora population were viewed as a threat by white suburbanites. “There were so many of us, the local English population got confused,” he explains. “It was a reaction.” 

These formative experiences resulted in a greater connection to Black culture, just as his peripheral status fed into his fascination and identification with the distant, and seemingly exotic, Brazil. “I always had this anger in me going on in the background, but I affiliated myself with Brazil,” he says. “When I did eventually get there, I felt at home straight away, like I already knew the place.” He first travelled to São Paulo in 1986, at age seventeen. The opportunity arose from a chance meeting, at a record fair in Croydon, with the owner of a record shop in São Paulo, who invited him to visit. 

“He had a stockroom upstairs, there were so many records,” Joe reminisces. “I remember thinking: ‘Bloody hell.’ It was my paradise…I spent three weeks going through them, staying up until I couldn’t stay awake, drinking loads of beer, smoking fags, eating fantastic food…I loved it.” The experience was a heady thrill and a welcome release from a Britain that had started to feel constraining.

His connection to Brazil, at the time freshly released from the grip of a brutal and repressive military dictatorship, was “not just physical or visual, it was also spiritual,” he says. “It felt almost like India in some ways because Brazil was quite underdeveloped. I really liked it. It was rustic but modern at the same time.” Joe draws a connection between this distant haven and the sanctuary the music scene provided in the often fractious environment of ’70s and ’80s London. “Growing up in school, the racism and violence from English kids was a nightmare but, when I went out on the jazz scene and started going to record shops, it was a bit of an escape from the mainstream culture. It was more diverse, more welcoming,” he says. 

As well as being lots of fun, the São Paulo trip also proved to be a lucrative experience for Joe, who was already displaying a canny, entrepreneurial instinct that went hand-in-hand with his musical passion. As he continued to travel to Brazil, these trips naturally developed into a commercial enterprise, with DJ contemporaries asking Joe to bring back certain records that were impossible to locate in the U.K. “I would be buying twenty, fifty copies,” he says, bringing them back on a courier flight and shipping the rest. “There were other guys going to America, cornering the acid jazz or Latin scene, doing the same thing, getting loads of recognition. I didn’t think I was anything special, I just loved the music and the culture and the vibes out there. At first it was slow—I was going for myself and making just enough to cover travel costs. And then it exploded around ’89, ’90. Suddenly in that acid jazz scene, Brazilian was the next big thing.”

By 1994, Joe was visiting Brazil practically every month. “Gilles had started  [record label] Talkin’ Loud by this point, and there was a big demand for what I was doing,” he says. “It was totally my niche.” From this, Far Out Recordings came into being. “I was looking at these artists that I loved, thinking, apart from Milton, they’re not recording, so what are they doing? I saw both Marcos and Azymuth [live] around ’92 and I thought ‘These guys are killer, they’ll blow up in England.’” 

Joe’s connections got him funding to record and produce his first major project, the 1996 self-titled debut album by Friends From Rio, which brought some of his favourite Brazilian musicians, including Alex Malheiros, Hyldon, and Robertinho Silva, together in the studio. 

Espousing his love for Azymuth during the recording of the album triggered a serendipitous chain of events. “The guy in the studio said, ‘We’re all good friends, we come from the same town…’ and he put us in touch.” After an initial meeting in Brazil, the group came to London. Despite having intended to set up the label as a showcase for his own productions, Joe’s attention was soon redirected. 

And so Joe found himself making an indelible mark upon the history of the group he’d long admired, orchestrating their reunion. The resulting album, 1996’s Carnival, was followed by nine further Azymuth releases for the label. Eventually, Far Out went on to release music from Marcos Valle and Joyce, although, Joe says, “these relationships took a longer time to build.”

Joe readily admits that his experiences in the music industry haven’t always been harmonious, and have been by no means immune to the racism he’d hoped to escape growing up. “I had some nasty shit when I was growing up and within the industry as well, but I've never said anything,” he says. “I just want to get on with it.” Some experiences, however, have left their mark. “Somebody once said to me, ‘Oh, you’re Paki Joe.’ I said, ‘What are you on about?’ This is somebody in our scene. He said, ‘Everybody knows you as Paki Joe.’ I said, ‘Listen mate’—this is probably after ten years of being on the scene—‘Nobody’s ever said that to me, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I really disliked it.”  

After thirty years in business with Far Out, the legacy of his Brazilian discoveries continues to loom large. The label’s marriage of the old—the Brazilian jazz and fusion that first sparked Joe’s passion—and the new— collaborations with pioneering electronic musicians such as Theo Parrish, Mark Pritchard, and Dego—has been key to its appeal. Joe has continued to chase and capture the excitement he felt when he was first exposed to Azymuth’s pioneering sound, which sounded like the future then and, arguably, still does.

“I wish I knew then what I know now,” he reflects, “because I think my records would be even stronger.” The day-to-day business of running an independent record label in 2024 leaves little time to pursue the more creative aspects that drew him to music initially. “I don’t have time to produce records anymore, I’m too busy running the label,” he says. This can inevitably lead to a degree of frustration, as, Joe attests, “what’s in my head isn’t necessarily in someone else’s.” Still, he has done better than most at getting what’s in his head out into other people’s. 

Looking back on the ascendant 1990s, Joe shares a bit of nostalgia for simpler times, but little regret with how things have evolved. “It was a great time,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t take advantage of what I could have, [and] made [more of] my own records, got signed, made loads of commercial music.” The truth, Joe says, is that wasn’t his primary objective. “In the end, I loved the artists I worked with and I was very passionate about the music and thought it needed to be heard.”

To find out more about Far Out Recordings, visit their site here.