Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  In the pre-punk France of the 1970s, you were either a sad conformist lover of French chanson and variété, or you were a rocker. To rock‘n’roll purists like Manu and Joint de Culasse, nothing good ever came out of France, musically at least. When rock‘n’roll appeared with the arrival of Bill Haley and Elvis in the 1950s, it was packaged by the French music business as Music hall des jeunes. Rock’n’roll numbers were translated and the backing tracks watered down to suit French tastes, often to the great frustration of the artists themselves. Consequently, as far as the purists were concerned, French rock idols like Johnny Hallyday were a pathetic joke, as were popular groups like Les Chats Sauvages and Les Chaussettes Noires. A bare handful of figures – Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Dutronc, Françoise Hardy, Alain Bashung – had any real sense of rock spirit.

  In the early 1970s, there were a few French bands – Gong, Magma, Heldon – who tried to do something original and interesting. But the dreadful and all-pervasive feeling that no great rock music could be sung in any language other than English put a severe dragnet on the creative potential of the local French music scene. Magma actually went as far as inventing their own language, which they called Kobaïan. ‘French just didn’t sound suitable for our music,’ said Magma’s leader, Christian Vander. When punk arrived, there were a couple of French hits, by Telephone and Plastic Bertrand (who was actually from Belgium), but they were treated as novelties rather than anything else. “God Save The Queen” or “Ça Plane Pour Moi”, anybody?

  ‘Singing rock in French seemed like singing Flamenco in German! It just didn’t make sense,’ quips Jean-Yves Prieur, aka Kid Bravo or Kid Loco, founder of the seminal French alternative label Bondage. ‘It wasn’t visceral and rock is by nature visceral and dangerous. Take Chuck Berry, or the Sex Pistols or the Rolling Stones … they trailed real revolution in their wake. Telephone was kids’ music. They weren’t a threat to anyone. In the late 1970s our eyes were riveted on what was happening in London.’

  For Manu and la caillera, salvation came from over the channel, across the Atlantic, or nowhere at all. ‘I think the first globalisation that happened on this planet was English music,’ Manu says. ‘The Stones and the Beatles conquered the world. We were French kids and we didn’t have the opportunity to listen to anything except English music. The only music which could reach young people was in English, not French, not Spanish, nothing else.’

  The required playlist of the suburban rockeur usually depended on skin colour and background. Manu and his white mates shared their tastes with hundreds and thousands of leather-jacketed wannabe rock’n’roll rebels across the land: Elvis before the draft, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, The Rolling Stones, The Who and Otis Redding. The Arab kids in the neighbourhood preferred Earth, Wind and Fire or Maze, a tribal distinction that led to plenty of arguments. It was only Bob Marley and James Brown that offered common ground.

  Rock’n’roll gave Manu a licence to think for himself. ‘I thank music for being my school,’ he says with gratitude. Was he a rebel? ‘Personally I never had any rebellion with my parents,’ Manu asserts. ‘I’ve been lucky with them.’ Nonetheless, conflict loomed, both internally, and with his family.

  At the age of sixteen Manu underwent a crisis, almost a breakdown. ‘I would think of death all the time and get this strange feeling like vertigo,’ he remembers. ‘I’d be completely paralysed.’ As a student, Manu said he was quiet, to the point of being almost mute. ‘All year I only spoke two words.’ That summer, Manu went on holiday in Greece with some friends, but this failed to shake him from his taciturn terror. ‘I didn’t talk for one month. It wasn’t their fault.’

  Ramón and Felisa were already well aware of Manu and Antoine’s musical ambitions, and they went to see Joint de Culasse play a few times. Ramón was fairly relaxed about it all, insisting only that both his boys finish their baccalaureate exams. But Felisa wasn’t so sure. ‘I can understand why,’ says Manu. ‘She came from nowhere. Her grandfather was imprisoned and the family was left with nothing. So for my mother, studying was essential.’

  As the baccalaureate loomed, Manu became more and more withdrawn at school. There was only one person who could pierce his gloom and engage his mind, and that was a young philosophy teacher by the name of Henri Peña-Ruiz. Manu felt that Peña-Ruiz respected him and his talent. Thirty years later, France’s Philosophie magazine organised a reunion between them. The young philosophy teacher had become a renowned thinker, writer and authoritative defender of secularism in education and public life. ‘I remember philosophy classes,’ Manu says in the interview. ‘They were a breath of fresh air for me, and I swallowed them like pink milk. But, in truth, at that time, it was as if I was no longer at school. I’d met other people, who weren’t in education, and I hung out with them at night. I was also half autistic. I had no friends in my class and I spoke very little, maybe a few words the whole year. That’s why those philosophy classes were a real discovery for me. They showed me that it could be interesting to talk and that words could have meaning.’

  Henri Peña-Ruiz remembered a shy student with shining eyes and all the talent necessary to pursue a career in philosophy or teaching. He enrolled Manu into the Hypokâghne, a two-year preparatory course for entry into one of les grandes écoles, France’s elite higher learning institutions. But Manu was already elsewhere in mind and spirit. His baccalaureate results were terrible. His instinct was calling him to music.

  Manu’s mother was horrified by his career choice. She went to the school to talk to Peña-Ruiz, who, true to his vocation, had taken a philosophical view of the crisis. ‘He wants to make music? But that’s great,’ he reassured Felisa. ‘Your son is an artist. You must on no account contradict his vocation.’ Felisa remained unconvinced.

  As the end of school approached, the turmoil created by Manu’s choice only grew deeper, and more emotional. But he stuck to his guns with a stubborn conviction that was to re-emerge at almost every pivotal moment of his life. ‘The choice was hard,’ he told Philosophie magazine. ‘And my mother suffered because of it for the next ten years. But when you have a passion, you can’t share it with anything else. I love philosophy and it wouldn’t have bothered me to devote myself to it. On the other hand, my street mates were also a wonderful and fascinating education for me. So I threw myself into a career as a singer.’

  The decision felt right, and that was the most important thing about it. Patient, diligent study in order to achieve betterment and intellectual peers had lost out to risk, uncertainty, the street and rock’n’roll. ‘One thing you don’t learn at school is to trust your instincts,’ says Manu. ‘In class we must be rational and think with our heads and not our guts. For me, when I mentally map out my plans, things always go wrong. But when I trust my instinct, I score much better.’ And his instinct was music, nothing else.

  Manu made one concession to his distraught mother. He promised her that if he wasn’t earning a decent living from music by the age of twenty-five, then he would give it all up and live a ‘normal’ life. ‘When you’re eighteen, twenty-five seems old,’ he says. ‘But twenty-five arrived and I had nothing … not a dime.’

  CHAPTER 2:

  THE ROCK’N’ROLL FLAME

  ‘Some people had Mecca; we had Canvey island!’

  Manu Chao

  Aged eighteen, living with his parents on the margins of Paris, musical success was for Manu a dream and a decade away. He was still a quiffedup rocker and Joint de Culasse true keepers of the rock’n’roll flame. Every rehearsal, every gig, was a ritual offering to the gods of shake, rattle‘n’roll. Manu and his pals were so in thrall to Chuck Berry and others in the rock’n’roll pantheon that they saw no need to write their own songs. There were so many classics to cover. Cousin Santi, the drummer, puts another more prosaic spin on their music repertoire; ‘We would have quite liked to play like Santana as well, but we weren’t good enough.’ According to Manu, Joint de Culasse would occasiona
lly throw in a couple of Stooges numbers, but they never went down too well.

  Sèvres was rocker territory. Punks who floated into the suburb were either given the rockabilly psycho stare or welcomed with the blunt fist of some sauced-up member of la caillera. Inter-tribal music warfare had recently been imported to Paris from London, along with other more constructive aspects of the punk revolution. The punks, les keupons in Parisian slang, went about their business in fear not only of les rockeurs but, even worse, les skins. Manu Chao spent most of the late 1970s and early-1980s in the relatively safe confines of Sèvres, hanging out with his rocker crew. But he wasn’t always just the innocent mascot of the gang. He well remembers being in the audience when a punk band called Cain and Abel came to play in nearby Issy-les-Moulineaux and got thumped for their pains. Years later, when he started busking in the Metro with Daniel Jamet, Cain and Abel’s guitarist, who eventually joined Mano Negra, Manu had a little explaining to do. Jamet remembers being genuinely frightened for his life.

  But Manu Chao would never remain happy banging out cover versions of “Blues Suede Shoes” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” for the rest of his life. He had the kind of curiosity that needed to explore the musical zeitgeist. Punk was one strand, though he was on his own. ‘The gang in Sèvres listened to rockabilly and some black music,’ he remembers. ‘James Brown was acceptable. But nothing after 1962, really. All the guys were tough rockabillies, a lot of them immigrants from Portugal and Spain. They were kind of rebels who weren’t rebels. Punk started and the big guys sent us to fight the punks. When I bought the first punk album to the neighbourhood, I was risking my life. It was Inflammable Material, the first album by Stiff Little Fingers. But Dr Feelgood was OK for us, because they were still a little rock’n’roll.’

  Manu’s love of the English rhythm’n’blues scene, which emerged in the mid-1970s in Canvey Island and Southend, was intense. ‘Dr Feelgood is the only band I’ve ever really been a fan of, because I fell in love with them when I was a teenager.’ Wilko Johnson was Dr Feelgood’s guitarist, whose criminal fraternity suits, jerky duck walk and plugged-into-the-mains guitar style made him look like he was on speed on day release from an asylum; ‘He was a Martian, totally a Martian – I saw hundreds of shows of him.’ (Wilko, incidentally, was not the Canvey Island hard-drinking macho guy as you might imagine from songs like “Roxette”. He is a complex character – a medieval literature graduate, able to read Icelandic sagas in the original, and a keen astronomer, who installed a giant, possibly illegal telescope for star gazing on the roof of his house in Canvey Island.)

  When Manu was still in thrall to Dr Feelgood, Joint de Culasse was looking for a bassist. ‘So like stupids we went to Canvey Island to try and find one. We went to all the pubs asking if anybody knew of a bass player, and everybody said, “OK, little guys, go home.” We slept outside, on buses, in the subway. It was like a pèlerinage – a pilgrimage – for us to go to Canvey Island. Some people have Mecca; we had Canvey Island.’

  But Manu’s greatest hero of them all was Lew Lewis, an obscure but brilliant figure in the Essex r’n’b scene: ‘A crazy guy who played harmonica librio, crazy, crazy! I read in the papers that he’d made an assault of the post office opposite the place where he was living. He went to jail. When I got to know Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood, I asked him about Lew and he just said, “Oh my God!” and crossed himself looking up to heaven. He said that he was the best of all of them.’ Lew Lewis was the wild man of Southend who played harmonica with Eddie and the Hot Rods. Although they had a few minor hits like “Teenage Depression”, their records never really translated the energy of the band live, and they didn’t quite have the right attitude, haircut or trousers to surf the punk wave. Their timing was unlucky, too, hitting the headlines at five minutes before midnight on the eve of punk’s Year Zero.

  Big in Sèvres. The sound of 1970s Essex: Dr Feelgood (Wilko Johnson second right) and Lew Lewis of Eddie and the Hot Rods.

  If r’n’b from the Essex delta, east of London, was acceptable fare in Sèvres, other punk bands weren’t. Joint de Culasse virtually ignored the embryonic French punk movement that hit Paris in 1977 with bands like Métal Urbain, Stinky Toys and Guilty Razors. Nonetheless, Manu and his band’s gigs in and around Sèvres began to attract a greater and greater number of local rockers, who often left a trail of destruction in their wake. ‘We weren’t presentable,’ Manu recalls. ‘Everywhere we went, it was mayhem.’ In Sèvres there was a sizable Armenian community and it was often the Armenians who ‘protected’ Manu and his mates, controlling the bad business between the various gangs. And the protection went two ways: ‘When an Armenian was hurt,’ Manu remembers, ‘we’d fill an entire carriage on the metro.’

  In 1980, Manu met Marc Winandy for the first time. ‘He was the most anarchist guy I ever knew in my life,’ Manu asserts. Winandy had suffered a battered childhood in Belgium and had been sexually abused. He got embroiled in the cigarette smuggling racket and made large sums of money before being beaten blue by a Greek Mafioso. He’d also become a part-time porn star who claimed to have ‘the biggest dick in the business’.

  In the early 1980s, Winandy took it on himself to help all the little suburban bands in the southwest of Paris who had nowhere to play and, if they did find somewhere, were harassed mercilessly by the police. He programmed music at the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture (MJC) in Boulogne-Billancourt. There was a network of MJCs, youth clubs with performance spaces, all over the country and, especially in la ceinture rouge, the belt of communist- or socialist-run suburbs that girdled the centre of Paris. Often they were the only places where local rock bands could perform in public. Winandy also organised ‘suicidal’ gigs and tours for bands like Joint de Culasse wherever and whenever possible. His motto: a gig that doesn’t end in the local police commissariat isn’t worth the effort.

  Winandy became Joint de Culasse’s first manager and part-time drummer. Using his underworld sex contacts, he would find the band gigs at orgies, where they would have to warm up the revellers before the mass ensemble erotic action. ‘Because we were romantics, we didn’t care about that business,’ Manu claims. ‘We just went to play and after the show someone would say, “Here’s your money. Now, do you want to shag my wife?” And we’d say, “No thank you,” take the money and leave.’

  Winandy himself possessed an appendage of legendary proportions, more than 20cm in length according to local lore. At the conclusion of Joint de Culasse gigs his favourite party piece was to bang out a jungle rhythm on the bass drum with his astonishing member. After a while, word got out and people came from miles around to see the show. ‘His story is incredible,’ says Manu. ‘He was my professor, a very important guy in my life. He was always in jail. Everybody thought he was my father. Sometimes a police officer would call me and say, “Please Manu, get your dad out of here.” He was totally crazy.’

  With the Stiff Little Fingers album Inflammable Material already tucked away on rotation in the closet, Manu began to seek out new musical kicks. His horizons were ready to expand and 1981 was to prove a pivotal year. On 4 May, he went to see his first real punk gig, The Clash at the Palais des Sports, not far away in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Billed on the tickets as a concert metal hurlant (heavy metal concert), the band opened with “London Calling”, followed by “Safe European Home” and “The Leader”. A while later came “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” and “Guns of Brixton”.

  The effect of this encounter on Manu was decisive. The sight of all the punks pogoing and moshing down at the front, the mad energy, the guerrilla chic onstage, the barely apprehended words of no compromise spitting from Joe Strummer’s mouth, the echoes of ska, reggae, r’n’b, hip hop and jazz, and the notion that all these styles could all be mixed up into one big musical blast, it all jammed Manu’s ears and eyes wide open. ‘When I began to write songs, The Clash were my model,’ he told the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles many years later. ‘I’d never seen a gi
g like that. The place was like a sea with huge waves rippling through.’

  Marc Winandy struts his stuff in front of Manu’s first band, Joint de Culasse.

  1981 was a year of profound change in France. The country had been subject to the same petrol-shocks as the rest of western Europe in the early 1970s. Huge swathes of manufacturing industry had perished or been moved to countries where labour was cheaper. Working-class Paris was becoming a ghost of its former self. The radical generation of students, trade unionists and left-wing activists who had almost managed to pull off the second French Revolution in May 1968 were hungry for real power and an opportunity to reverse the policies of right-wing presidents Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had ruled France in the 1970s. The election of President François Mitterrand on 10 May 10 1981 brought a socialist incumbent to the Elysée Palace for the first time in twenty-three years. It felt like a new dawn for the French Left.

  At first, Mitterrand’s programme seemed a socialist’s dream come true: nationalisation, an increase in the minimum wage, the thirty-nine-hour week, abolition of the death penalty, a wealth tax, and the mutation of pirate radio stations into independent ‘free’ broadcasters. Anyone involved in the arts seemed to have their prayers answered by the appointment of the charismatic Jack Lang as Minister of Culture. Lang vowed to succour and champion creativity, both highbrow and popular, with the aim of making France a powerhouse of pluralist creative expression.

  But a familiar and depressing tale unfolded as the left-wing intellectuals and leaders of 1968 began to enjoy power and justify its endless compromises. In 1983, the socialists lost municipal elections and the right-wing Jacques Chirac became mayor of Paris. Three years later, Chirac became prime minster, in ‘cohabitation’ with the left-wing presidency, and the dreams of 1981 were diluted even further.