CLANDESTINO IN SEARCH OF MANU CHAO
‘Correr es mi destino’
Manu Chao, “Clandestino”
To Dad and Michelle
and kudos to Andy Morgan
PUBLISHING DETAILS
Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao © 2013 by Peter Culshaw
First published in 2013 by
Serpent’s Tail, 3A Exmouth House
Pine Street, Exmouth Market
London, EC1R OJH
www.serpentstail.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk.
Typeset in Lino Letter and Sun Light to a design by Henry Iles.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
352pp
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1846681950
The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061
CLANDESTINO IN SEARCH OF MANU CHAO
by
Peter Culshaw
CONTENTS
INTRO: CASA BABYLON
PART ONE / LA VIDA TÓMBOLA – THE LIVES OF MANU
1: A Double Life
2: The Rock’n’Roll Flame
3: Hot Pants
4: The Rise of the Black Hand
5: Going South
6: The Fall of the Black Hand
7: Próxima Estación – Violencia
8: The Loco Mosquito
9: Clandestino
10: Dakar, Barca … Insh’allah
11: Shot by Both Sides
PART TWO / OTROS MUNDOS – IN SEARCH OF MANU
12: Barcelona – The Neighbourhood Guy
13: New York – Into the Heart of the Beast
14: Buenos Aires – Tangos and Delirium
15: Sahara Libre! Dakhla, Algeria
16: Mexico – Machetes, Mariachi, Meths
17: Paris–Siberia
18: Brixton Babylon
19: Brazil – An Encounter with the Goddess
OUTRO: FINISTERRE
Discography
Bibliography
Photo credits
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRO: CASA BABYLON
‘When they look for me I’m not there, When they find me I’m elsewhere’
From ‘Desaparecido’
The Casa Babylon in Córdoba could actually be the perfect venue to catch Manu Chao. I’ve come here with the band, on a twelve-hour bus ride across the pampas from Buenos Aires to a boliche – a club that has a cartoonish ambience somewhere between a large village hall and a bar from the Wild West, complete with buxom bar-girls and security guys frisking for guns. The sun’s going down but it’s still over 100 degrees and sweat is pouring from the crowd. ‘¡Que Calor!’ is the first thing anyone says to you.
Manu is performing with a street band called Roots Radio, whom he first played with three days ago in Buenos Aires. ‘I like the challenge of putting a new band together fast,’ he says in the tiny furnace of a dressing room. Roots Radio’s members include a percussionist called Kichi, who Manu met busking in Barcelona. Kichi was an economic refugee from the Argentine economic collapse of 2001 but he has now returned to his homeland and is living in the barrio of San Telmo.
The show has only been announced earlier in the day, but it’s rammed with a thousand or more fans. It’s so hot that the guitars drift out of tune mid-number. Manu shouts, ‘Apocalyptic!’ The music whirs again and one of the bar-girls with particularly vertiginous curves and a low-cut T-shirt dances on the bar, rivalling the action onstage.
Everyone knows the words to the old numbers like “Clan-destino” and “Welcome To Tijuana”. What’s surprising is that everyone knows the newer numbers, too. Manu’s latest album La Radiolina is only just out, but the audience sing along to “Me Llaman Calle”, about the prostitutes in Madrid who’ll rent out their bodies even if their hearts aren’t for sale, and “La Vida Tómbola”, a song about the damaged Argentine demigod Diego Maradona.
Manu is properly famous in Argentina. He can’t walk a block without being stopped, although he says his fame is nothing compared to Maradona. But even in the case of Manu, who could have filled a stadium tonight, there’s a certain craziness in the way people react when they meet him. Manu’s last-minute, improvised gigs, like this benefit, are one way to keep things scaled down and real. ‘It’s normal when you are …’ Manu tries to explain, struggling for the word, ‘… famous … You’re maybe too much like a god, or maybe too much like an asshole.’
Here in Córdoba, as far as the lottery of life is concerned – the ‘tombola’ of Manu’s song – many of the local kids seem to have drawn the short straw, born and raised in tough neighbourhoods, the villa miserias or shanty towns where there are few jobs and little welfare. But plenty of them get in free tonight thanks to La Luciérnaga (‘The Firefly’), a street kids’ charity. The rest of the audience pay 15 pesos (about $5) with all the proceeds of the concert going to La Luciérnaga.
Many of the crowd are hard-core Manuistas. Even the name of the club, Casa Babylon, is derived from the title of Manu’s last album with Mano Negra, his previous band, who became legendary in these parts after a TV host asked them the meaning of anarchy and they proceeded to trash the studio, live on air. Mano Negra’s logo of a black hand over a red star is tattooed on a few shoulders and arms. I make a new friend of a huge security guy, nearly seven feet tall and built like a walk-in fridge. He’s covered in tattoos and introduces a sweet, delicate, petite girl as his novia.
The audience are ecstatic that their hero has beamed down for a night. The moment Manu steps out to face the audience, the reaction is so intense it’s like standing next to a jet as it’s taking off. Later, when local street rapper Negro Chetto (‘Black Snob’) leaps onstage and improvises over a Manu track, the place goes delirious.
We’d met Negro Chetto earlier, over lunch at the headquarters of La Luciérnaga. The association was set-up by a man called Oscar Arias, who explains that when he started his project, around sixty percent of the under-20s in Córdoba were living in poverty, many of them selling things like candies and flowers in the street, washing car windows at traffic lights, or drifting in and out of crime or prostitution. The organisation is funded like the UK’s Big Issue, from sales of a magazine, so Manu gives it an interview, ignoring all the other local media requests. Why help La Luciérnaga rather than anyone else? ‘I don’t really choose the projects, they choose me,’ Manu answers. ‘We met them touring in 2000 and the idea of the newspaper was good. You look into someone like Oscar’s eyes and you think you can trust him. Sometimes you are wrong. But now we have a strong relation.’
Negro Chetto was a squeegee merchant at traffic lights for years before coming into contact with Oscar and his organisation. At the time they were setting up a company called Luci Vid, who now have contracts to wash windows at places like Córdoba’s business park. As well as holding down a job, Negro Chetto has been recording an album. He doesn’t have enough money to press up any CDs, but Pocho, Manu’s record company guy in Argentina, says he’ll try and sort something out for him. ‘Music and Jesus saved me,’ sighs Chetto, crossing himself.
Tonight at Casa Babylon, everything is chaotic, last-minute and und
er the mainstream media radar. ‘We raised some money, but the best thing was the energy,’ Manu says after the show, sopping with sweat and elation. ‘Regenerating energy! The kids went back out of there with strong energy – and so did I.’ He mentions the guy who was following us on his motorbike from La Luciérnaga earlier. ‘That was Pedro; he was a street kid in 2000, now he’s a father.’
I sleep like a baby on the tour bus that night, full of music and alcohol, and wake up to find that we’re already half way back to Buenos Aires. ‘The bus rocks you like your mother,’ Manu says. A metal cup with straw full of the pungent local herb tea known as maté is being passed around, as the white light of the sun bleaches the landscape and the bus speeds along the flat plains.
What happened in Córdoba was a Manu Chao moment; an unscripted happening, a spontaneous fiesta that somehow managed to change someone’s life. It was 2007 and I’d met Manu a few times before, starting with an interview on the release of his second solo album Próxima Estación: Esperanza in 2001. But some time after that trip to Córdoba I resolved to find out more about him, to attempt to answer the question ‘Who the hell was this guy?’ … to write this book.
Manu kindly agreed – or at least tolerated the idea – and allowed me to follow him through four continents over the next few years. But this was no rockstar-authorised biography. Manu was often reluctant to talk about himself. His story only slowly came into focus as he lived up to his own lyrical self-portrait as el desaparecido, ‘the disappearing one’. What he did want to do, though – and this, I realised, was the root of his involvement – was to broadcast the causes and people he associates himself with: water rights in Bolivia, indigneous revolution in Mexico, mental patients in Buenos Aires, prostitutes’ rights in Spain, refugees in the Western Sahara. He was the guy siding with the dispossessed of this world, Don Quixote tilting at all the mad windmills. I was to be his Sancho Panza, getting to see the realities firsthand, in the slipstream of Manu and his band, Radio Bemba.
When I first set out to meet Manu Chao in 2001 I had been told the man I was looking for had a small pied à terre in Barcelona with no outside space, because the ‘street is my courtyard’. He could, when in town, be found busking in his local bar. He owned bees but no mobile phone or watch. He was always on the move, addicted to travel, never able to spend more than a few weeks in the same place, never planning more than three months ahead. He was – as the line goes in “Desaparecido” – ‘the disappearing one … hurry[ing] down the lost highway … When they look for me I’m not there, When they find me, I’m elsewhere.’
I couldn’t complain I hadn’t been warned. But nor could I resist the impulse. Like so many others, I had sensed on Clandestino, Manu’s first solo album, a passion and directness in those pared-down tunes that I hadn’t come across since Bob Marley. Sometimes, music makes you rethink the world. Clandestino seemed to look both backwards to a time when songs meant something, when people thought music could change the world, and forwards to a new globalised pop. At the cross-fade of the millennium, it sounded perfect – a creation that united, irresistibly, a European and South American perspective, a radical pop masterpiece that just happened to sell millions.
If I’d been more up to speed on French rock music, I would have been less surprised. Manu Chao’s previous outfit, Mano Negra, had been the biggest band in the history of French rock, with legions of followers in Europe and in South America, where they still have a mythic status. Plenty of people agree with their manager Bernard Batzen when he claims that, had the band actually promoted their albums properly, instead of going off on quixotic missions like a four-month boat trip around Latin America, or a rail trip through the guerrilla chaos of Colombia, had they not broken up before their bestselling album, Casa Babylon, was released, they would have been as big as U2 or Coldplay. But if they had, would Manu Chao’s story have been so compelling?
Manu’s reputation was one of fierce honesty and integrity. The word was that, unlike most other activist rock stars with their jet-set compassion and five-star lives, he actually walked his talk, lived with scarcely any possessions, a musical nomad. But surely no one could have that kind of purity his fans ascribed to him?
His musical style – a mix of punk, latin, ska and reggae – was an inventive global cross-pollination and the more he found his own voice, the more his audience grew. For legions of misfits who don’t accept the world as it is, and for the marginalised he supports, Manu represents a beacon of hope. Beyond that lay a string of barely tenable contradictions: a self-confessed ‘shy guy’ who sung to crowds of 100,000 in places like Mexico City, a worldwide star who fights against globalisation, a man-of-the-people backpacker who has made millions, a propagandist who turns down most interviews. Even his name and his origins – French? Spanish? Basque? – seemed peculiarly opaque.
The lives of Manu Chao, from his teenage years as a Parisian rock’n’roller, through assorted underground French bands, to explosive global success, followed by some kind of mental breakdown and then rebirth with Clandestino, seemed a story worth telling. So here, five years on from that memorable hot night in Casa Babylon in Córdoba, is the result. It’s a book in two parts, which begins with the Manu Chao story – the early years in Paris, the rise and fall of Mano Negra, and his spectacular reinvention with a string of multi-million-selling albums. And then I meet Manu in Barcelona and we’re off on the road for Part Two, blazing a trail through New York, Buenos Aires, Western Sahara, Mexico, Paris, Barcelona, Brixton and Brazil …
PART ONE
LA VIDA TOMBOLA
The lives of Manu
CHAPTER 1:
A DOUBLE LIFE
‘He was a pain in the neck aged four – and he still is!’
Gabriel García Márquez
José-Manuel Thomas Arthur Chao was born in Paris on 21 June 1961. He attributes his love of the sun to this midsummer’s day arrival. His birthday also coincides with the annual Fête de la Musique, the day on which the whole of France surrenders itself to music in all its miraculous forms. So, the Manu Chao story begins with sun and music.
Manu’s parents were both Spaniards – and first generation Parisians. His mother Felisa’s family was from Bilbao in the Basque country, his father Ramón’s from Vilalba, in the northwest province of Galicia. Both places are on the edges of Spain. The Basque character is supposedly stubborn, proud and fundamentally self-respecting, while Spaniards regard Galicians as melancholic and inscrutable. Or, as Ramón tells it, ‘They say that if you meet us Galicians on the stairs, you never know if we’re going up or down. We are quite subtle in our movements.’
Felisa’s father, Tomás Ortega, was a champion at pelota – one of the Basques’ odd, insular sports – and became a communications expert for the Repúblicans in the civil war against Franco. His speciality was blowing up the telephone systems of towns that were about to fall to Franco’s forces. One day, not long into the civil war, Tomás happened to hear a radio broadcast from Seville in which a leading Françoist general vowed to kill him. Choosing life and exile over death and homeland, he fled on the last boat out of Valencia to Algeria, where the authorities sent him to an internment camp.
The Spanish refugee camps in Algeria were often situated in the arid fringes of the Sahara desert and, after the Vichy government took over, they were essentially forced labour camps. Inmates regularly died of thirst, disease, overwork and torture. Tomás came from tough Basque stock, the kind that sailed wooden tubs across the Atlantic to fish for cod off the Grand Banks before Columbus was even born. He survived. Meanwhile, his wife, daughter Felisa and her sister were sent to a camp for refugees in the Roussillon region of southern France. The family were eventually reunited in Algeria, before settling, a decade later, in Paris.
Tomás was an important figure for Manu: ‘When I was young my grandfather use to tell me all about his adventures in great detail: the civil war, his exile from Spain, Algeria. He never wanted to go back to Spain, even after Franco died. I
was greatly influenced by him, the fighter against injustice who defended his ideals to the end of his days. He was a great person, very rude but very honest.‘
Baby Manu with his Basque-exile grandparents, Tomás and Felisa.
Manu’s paternal grandfather, José, ran the Gran Hotel Chao in Vilalba, a small Galician town set in the fertile valleys of the province of Lugo, with a medieval tower and a rich tradition of independent newspapers. Galicia is full of people with the Chao family name, and their ancestral seat is in the town of Ribadavia, about 170 km south of Vilalba. José came back to his motherland from Cuba, the country of his birth, at the age of twenty. He had six children. One, José Chao Rego, became a well-known author and theologian. Another, Ramón, became an internationally renowned journalist – and the father of Manu Chao.
Journalism, however, was not part of the map that José, a patriarch of the old school, had drawn out for Ramón. Back in Cuba, José had developed a passion for the opera and when his young son began to demonstrate sparkling musical gifts, José indulged the idea that his offspring could be a Galician Chopin. Ramón excelled at the piano from an early age, and used to perform on demand for the Hotel Chao’s many distinguished guests, including the artist Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, who gave the boy an original drawing dedicated ‘to the precocious artist’. At the age of ten, Ramón gave his first public concert at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Lugo and, shortly afterward, the mayor of Vilalba awarded him a bursary to study piano, harmony and composition in Madrid. There he managed to win a prestigious national music prize but also spent much of his time playing truant and bunking off to the National Library or the Prado to follow other passions.
In 1956, at the age of twenty-one, Ramón was favoured by a fellow native of Vilalba, the eminent Spanish politician Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who persuaded the Françoist Commissariat of Popular Education to send this rising star of Spanish classical music to study in Paris. It’s an irony that Ramón, who holds stalwart left-wing views, has often reflected upon; how he arrived in the French capital thanks to a man who became Franco’s last, heavy-handed interior minister.
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