Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil performs a special show at the Royal Albert Hall to bid his musical farewell to London.

The event is a celebration of Gil’s sixty-year career with a repertoire chosen from down the decades.

Gil’s early songs explored a folk-country sound. In the late 1950s he started to be influenced by bossa nova with its southern coastal beach sound, so different from his early years in Bahia. With other musicians, including Caetano Veloso, he was a founder of the Tropicália movement, which merged Brazilian and African rhythms with British and American psychedelia and pop rock. Tropicália became a focus of dissatisfaction with the Brazilian dictatorship, and in the 1970s Gil became a political exile in London beginning a fifty-year association with the City.
Upon returning to Brazil, Gil continued his rich musical career which led to the recording of over sixty albums, millions of sales and nine Grammys. In 2002, as Minister of Culture, he began his involvement in representing Brazil around the world, particularly on cultural development and diversity and the importance of Latin American countries in a globalised world.
In 2015 and 2016, he celebrated his 50-year career with Caetano Veloso in a historic show Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música. In 2018, he released the album Ok Ok Ok, about his family and the illness he was going through. The album won the Best Brazilian Music Album Latin Grammy in November 2019.
In 2022 Gil toured Europe, celebrating his 80th birthday with the entire family on stage and backstage. The tour was filmed for the second season of the Amazon Prime series which will air in 2023 Travelling with The Gils.