Most people in Goa remember him as Joe Rocha or Joseph Manuel Rocha, the dreamy Slow Joe who couldn’t move fast enough. Not so in France, where Slow Joe and the band The Ginger Accident are making waves.
Slow Joe’s discovery by a French musician on a lazy day at a beach shack in Goa and his eventual metamorphosis into a soulful singer is a story on its own.
Very much a part of the lost generation of the 60s and 70s, Joe Rocha of Chorao, did everything from drugs to alcohol and living on the streets of Colaba in his early Bombay days. Chucked out of his home at age 15, he survived several mind-numbing odd-jobs for years, till he could take it no more. He was back in Goa in 1999.
With nothing much to do, the beach life and hanging out in shacks pretty much sums up what Slow Joe was up to in Goa. But the wasted days did have an upshot. One hot sultry evening, Slow Joe’s soulful singing in a shack caught the ear of French artist Cedric de la Chapella.
“His voice has the soul soaked in the American musical culture which is what I found very interesting,” says Chapella who was at that point also struggling to find inspiration for his band.
Chapella convinced Rocha to record a song which he took back to France and mixed it with music in 2007. The outcome was a rendition of KT Tunstall’s Black Horse And A Cherry Tree. Rocha says he couldn’t believe the end result. He was blown away by how he sounded.
But getting to France to team up with the band for a live show proved to be quite another challenge. Slow Joe had a passport. But it had expired. The ration card had never been renewed. Worse yet, he had never bothered to open a bank account in Goa, and therefore proof that he was a resident here eluded him. Till the tangle was being sorted out, the new life that beckoned him in France had to be put on hold.
And it took not a few months, but two years of endless searches in the registrar offices and numerous trips to Delhi. Once the documents were in place, Slow Joe was ready to fly. In 2009, he travelled to Paris where he performed at the Transmuicales Rennes tour. Soon after he signed his first ever record deal with French label Tôt Ou Tard at the age of 71. Their debut album Sunny Side Up received rave reviews from French music magazine The Inrockuptibles which compared him to the likes of Elvis Presley.
Rocha, now 75, lives currently in France where he is touring with the band after the release of their second album, Lost for Love. The group is currently on a concert tour of France with 150 shows chalked up.
For Rocha, music has been his life, always with him ever since he can remember. “I started singing ever since I learnt to talk. At first I would sing Sinatra and Presley and then I started composing my own songs,” he says.
He was 12 when he wrote his first song on a crush he had in school. “Life has taught me important lessons and I bring out my experiences in my songs,” says Rocha.
But why Slow Joe? “They called me that because I was very zen-like. I spoke slowly, and people always found it cool.” The cool has worked for him. It works for us too.
Review Bureau
