The Englishman who became an unlikely Brazilian pop star

Born into an English military family in the 1950s, Richard Court had an elite education and was being primed for the corporate life. But then a chance encounter with a group of Brazilian rock stars on a Welsh mountain convinced him to make a spur-of-the-moment decision to move to Brazil. He’d always dabbled in music, and so while working as an English teacher in Rio de Janeiro he experimented with writing and recording a few songs in his free time. Record companies didn’t quite know what to make of this Englishman singing in Portuguese but one label decided to give him a shot. When his first song was accidentally played out on the radio in 1983, it became a surprise phenomenon, selling hundreds of thousands of copies within weeks and making Richard – now reinvented as Ritchie – one of the biggest names in Brazilian pop. To this day, many Brazilians still don’t know that Ritchie is in fact English. Outlook’s Tom Raine met the unlikely star at his studio in Rio de Janeiro.

Reporter: Tom Raine
Producer: Andrea Kennedy
Presenter: Jo Fidgen

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(Photo: Black and white photograph of Ritchie in 1983 looking moodily at the camera, wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a flower pinned to his label. Credit: Milton Montenegro)