Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Although the mainstream left were wholeheartedly behind Mitterrand in 1981, a radical fringe of anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites and nonaligned free thinkers dismissed Mitterrand as irredeemably tainted by his association with Vichy France during the Second World War and his dubious role as Minister of the Interior during the Algerian War of Independence. These ultras were known collectively as Les Autonomes (The Autonomous Ones), or Les Totos for short, and it was they who supplied the philosophical direction for the alternative squat culture that was about to shake the French music scene to the core.

  In the early 1980s, Paris was a dilapidated, divided and sometimes dangerous place. The old central working-class districts of Ménilmontant, Belleville, Barbès, Montparnasse, Stalingrad and Nation were strewn with crumbling sub-standard housing stock and deserted factories and workshops. This situation was a tragedy for the working-class people who had lived in these areas for generations and who were about to be swept away by the brutal redevelopment and urban cleansing of their beloved neighbourhoods. But it was also an opportunity for Les Totos and their younger and rather less ideological punk allies.

  A young Manu with his Gretsch semi-acoustic.

  The time had come for direct action. As in England, an alliance of young rudderless punks and older ideological hippies and activists began to construct their own alternative network of squats, bars, free festivals, cultural spaces, labels and record shops. The most famous early squats were in the rue Vilin and rue des Cascades in Belleville, but soon tottering old apartment blocks and factories had been converted into experiments in open rebellion, all over the capital and in most major French cities, too. A whole new generation of bands were born of the learn-three-chords-then-form-a-band philosophy of punk. Their names were soon grafittied all over the shabbiest walls of the French capital: Guernica, Les Wampas, Para-bellum, Orchestre Rouge and the darkest, loudest, most brilliantly radical of them all, Bérurier Noir, known as ‘Les Bérus’.

  These bands found a sympathetic creative home in squats that matured into alternative rehearsal and performance spaces, notably Art-Cloche in Montparnasse, Usine Pali-Kao and La Miroiterie in Ménilmontant, Electron Libre on the rue de Rivoli, and l’Hôpital Ephemère near Place de Clichy. The almost complete disinterest shown by mainstream record labels in this spiky youth movement was overcome by a flood of self-produced releases, usually consisting of a grubby cassette in a plastic bag accompanied with a dense Xeroxed booklet screaming dire images of injustice, morbid cartoons and southpaw slogans.

  The closed doors and ears of the mainstream media, including such venerable organs of French rock as Rock‘n’Folk, were circumvented by a samizdat flood of alternative fanzines. These combustible cultural artefacts were available mainly at gigs but also in a small but dedicated network of independent record shops. Pre-eminent among these hubs of underground culture was New Rose on the Left Bank and Open Market near Les Halles.

  Although Manu Chao was still living with his parents in Sèvres, his eventual seduction by the prevailing post-punk zeitgeist was inevitable. Together with his brother Tonio, his cousin Santi and a bunch of mates, Manu squatted an old rubber factory in Sèvres and rechristened it Issue de Secours (Emergency Exit). The aim was to create a space where the youth of the suburb could get together, play music as loud as possible, smoke spliff, mend bikes, drink liquor and be themselves. The Chao brothers and their friends dedicated hours to redecorating and soundproofing the old place, installing a bar and a little sound system.

  Issue de Secours soon became extremely popular. Joint de Culasse and many other bands would rehearse and there were gigs every Saturday night. Of course, the battles with the forces of law and order began almost immediately. For them, Issue de Secours was little more than a den of depravity, illegal drugs and drinking, and noise pollution.

  At the time, the Mairie (town hall) of Sèvres was ruled by the Communist Party and although the anarchist DIY credo of punk never sat comfortably with the communists, the Issue de Secours crew did manage to come to an acceptable accommodation with the mayor. For a while at least, the squat survived and even thrived. But all that changed with the election of the right-wing Mayor Caillonneau in 1983. Caillonneau’s primary cultural ambition seemed to be the elimination of Issue de Secours, though, thanks to the fighting spirit of la caillera, it took him several years to get his way. First, the electricity and water were cut off. Then a mass eviction involving several vanloads of police took place.

  Marc Winandy organised a protest gig. ‘It was like a commando operation,’ recalls Tom Darnal, whose band GPS played alongside Joint de Culasse. ‘We had twenty minutes to bring the equipment and start to play. We were sure the police would try to stop the event. They charged in – I climbed on the wall of a warehouse and jumped from roof to roof and ended up, having dropped some pills, at Marc’s place.’

  Finally the building was bricked up and razed to the ground. This wasn’t an isolated incident. The forces of reaction had gained control of the capital and many of the city’s original art squats were closed down, often brutally.

  The demise of Issue de Secours was a rare failure on the Chao CV, although a valuable political lesson in direct action. Throughout this best and worst of times, Manu kept playing, kept listening, and kept searching for his musical voice. After Joint de Culasse recorded and released their first and only album, Super Boum Rock’n’Roll, on the Force label in 1982, his apprenticeship of the rock’n’roll masters was complete. The album was a straightforward delivery of the promise in its title; fourteen tracks of high-energy covers including “Great Balls Of Fire”, “Louie Louie”, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Oh! Carol”. There were four Chuck Berry numbers in all. It was recorded in the tiny Studio Darniens in Boulogne-Billancourt where sound engineer Xavier Escabasse captured a dynamic, live sound. The band, however, hated the cover, depicting a sheeny photo of a couple of jiving chicks and a black-drainpiped rocker, and spray-painted it when they sold it at their gigs.

  Super Boum Rock’n’Roll didn’t sell and wasn’t noticed. Serviceable and energetic as it was, it represented a superior kind of rock’n’roll karaoke, loved by a small coterie of suburban rockers. Manu had to broaden his horizons if he was going to contribute anything new, or make a living at his chosen profession. The next steps in Manu’s musical journey were suitably chaotic. It was as if his priority was to play with as many different musicians as possible in as many formations as possible. The boundaries between these various groups, both in terms of membership and time scale were often blurred and indistinct. While Joint de Culasse were still rocking down in Sèvres, Manu put a band called Les Flappers together, with the ever-present cousin Santi on drums, and two other mates called Pépé and Yann. There was also another band called Parachute, in which Manu played with Pascal Borne on guitar.

  There was a further project, too, that became the clear evolutionary link between Manu the textbook rock’n’roller and Manu the pied piper of globalised Latino punk. It began in the basement of the Chao home in Sèvres, and matured in the rehearsal rooms of Issue de Secours. It featured Manu on guitar and vocals, Pascal Borne on guitar, Jean-Marc Despiegnes on bass, and, of course, cousin Santi on drums. The band chose to call themselves after the title of a James Brown song, “Hot Pants”. It was, perhaps, a name that sounded hipper and more evocative to French ears back then than it does to Anglophone ones now, but it served well enough.

  The year was 1983, Manu Chao had just hit the age of twenty-two. There were three years to go before he had to honour that promise he had made to his mother.

  CHAPTER 3:

  HOT PANTS

  ‘If Hot Pants were a car it would be a 1950s Buick parked at the corner of a Chicano bar’

  Nancy Jazz Pulsations

  The Hot Pants sound was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. At its core there was still a rock’n’roll heart, with a wired and raucous Dr Feelgood edge, but there was more variety and melodic invention than before, with echoe
s of Otis Redding soul and The Clash were becoming distinct. However, Hot Pants’ groundbreaking innovation didn’t come from across the English Channel or the North Atlantic but from Spain. In truth, Manu had never completely lost touch with his Spanish heritage. Those old Spanish and Cuban songs that he had learned from his father, grandfather and uncles were still coursing through his veins, and every summer, in August, the Chao family would holiday in Spain, often in AndaLucía.

  There, for some years, the old flamenco of southern Spain had been reinventing itself, mixing with rock and jazz elements, and forging a new hybrid that came to be known as nuevo flamenco. Its torch-bearers were Lole y Manuel, Tomatito, Juan Carmona and Miguel Poveda, but above all the guitarist Paco de Lucía and the doomed romantic singer Camarón de la Isla, who died of a heroin overdose in 1992. But it wasn’t so much the dazzling guitar work of the new flamenco maestros, or the vertiginous heart-rending wail of the best singers that captivated Manu. It was the fact that nuevo flamenco reflected a new attitude, a new daring, a new sharpness in dress and look, a rebellion of the soul in a new post-Franco Spain.

  Carlos Saura vividly captures the essence of this rebellion in his film Deprisa, Deprisa (Hurry, Hurry), which came out in 1981. Its story follows the adventures of two young car thieves called Pablo and Meca who put together a gang and terrorise the suburbs of Madrid before being gunned down after a botched bank robbery. The film encapsulates the spirit of a country emerging from the cultural and social straitjacket of fascism and into a new dawn of liberal democracy, with its sweet and sometimes dangerous freedoms.

  Deprisa Deprisa and other Spanish films, like Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, made Manu realise that Spanish kids – or French kids, or even Latin American kids – could be punks in their own way; that they could also be cool and dangerous without denying their own culture. The music that serenaded the libertine adventures of Pablo and Meca in Saura’s film was a mix of nuevo flamenco and the heavier more rhythmic flamenco rumba of new Spanish groups like Los Chichos, Los Chinguitos and Los Marismeños. ‘The soundtrack of Deprisa, Deprisa was a bible for us,’ Manu remembers. ‘It was the rock’n’roll of Spain, listened to by the bad guys of the neighbourhood. And these guys hadn’t even listened to rock’n’roll.’ Manu still wears a tattoo of the words ‘Deprisa Deprisa’ on his arm and he would reference the film many years later when he recorded his first solo album.

  Connecting with their Hispanic roots was a way out of the derivative rock’n’roll cul-de-sac which Manu, Tonio and Santi had backed into with Joint de Culasse. Manu rearranged all his current obsessions into a new evolutionary formula: rockabilly, Canvey Island, The Clash, nuevo flamenco, gypsy rumba, a touch of James Brown and Otis Redding. A critic writing in Nancy Jazz Pulsations described this mix in automotive terms: ‘If Hot Pants were a car it would be a 50s Buick parked at the corner of a Chicano bar.’

  Photocopier days – a Hot Pants band shot, with aliases already in place. They are credited, from left, as: Jean-Marc ‘El Tiloul’ (bass), Santiago ‘Ignacio de Loyola’ Casariejo González (drums), Pascal Borne (guitar) and Manuel Chao (guitar, vocals).

  The few surviving videos and clips of Hot Pants show a small, wiry, baby-faced Manu dwarfed by his enormous Gretsch semi-acoustic guitar, mixing vocal passion with pogo leaps and duck walks, whilst bassist Jean-Marc Despeignes and drummer Santi pump out a steady backbeat and Pascal Borne looks blank and mean on the guitar.

  Hot Pants were the first Sèvres band to break out of the neighbourhood and their early life was spent playing gigs for a few francs in squats, bars and clubs, not only in Paris but further afield in Normandy, Brittany, the south and west of France. The band usually earned just enough for petrol and food. Manu was living hand to mouth and supporting himself with odd jobs as a bicycle courier, or pumping gas at a local petrol station, or as an assistant at RFI, the radio station where Ramón worked. He had the solace of a very close-knit and inspiring circle of friends, which included his brother and cousin, but also his first girlfriend, Anouk Khelifa, and a fellow local music fanatic called Tom Darnal.

  Anouk had an Algerian father and an Armenian mother and her dark sensitive looks captivated Manu when he met her at a concert. After a shaky beginning, their relationship gradually deepened and Manu fell in love. Anouk’s creativity, intelligence, tender attentiveness and beauty were a kind of refuge for his own ever-restless personality. Manu would spend many hours in the warm friendly embrace of the Khelifa family home, eating, talking, sleeping and getting away from it all. Anouk had dreams of becoming a singer herself and Manu opened up doors for her into the arcane world of music.

  Tom Darnal was a sharp, good-looking music nut, who had befriended Manu and Santi at the conservatoire in Sèvres. His record collection was massive and varied, corralling many styles that Manu hadn’t given much consideration to in the past, such as funk, electronica and early hip hop. Darnal was a founder member of Garage Psychiatrique Suburbain, or GPS for short, a hard-core psychedelic punk outfit, who became the sworn rivals of Joint de Culasse in the Sèvres and southwestern suburban music scene. Manu and Darnal became firm friends and avid fellow travellers in their lust for music and life.

  Even when some recognition began to creep up on him, Manu never felt comfortable with the implicit membership of any hip Parisian scene. When he went to trendy discos in Paris, full of rock glitterati and intelligentsia, he felt like a peasant. ‘We weren’t part of that,’ he claims. ‘We didn’t like it and we weren’t welcome.’ This was an early manifestation of Manu’s aversion to musical aristocracy and the fawning cliques that surround them. Despite his relentless ambition, despite his desire to be the best and his reputation as a bosseur or hard grafter, the slightest whiff of exclusivity or one-upmanship made Manu uneasy. Paris is a very elitist town, where the most powerful and influential showbiz execs and producers broker the biggest deals and air-kiss the stars of stage, studio and screen. Manu preferred, if it was humanly possible, to bypass that whole modern showbiz court of Versailles and find success in his own way and on his own terms.

  Tom Darnal in Garage Psychiatrique Suburbain (GPS)

  Among his most precious memories of that era were his long summer holidays on the coast. Every July and August, Manu and friends would migrate to Brittany, particularly the old walled port city of St Malo, for sea, sand, busking and girls. ‘It was wonderful,’ he remembers with fondness. ‘One of the best times of my life. You had your food and drink and lots of English girls, very pretty girls, looking at the nice musicians and inviting them to their boats. There wasn’t much money in your pocket, but the parties were nice.’

  One summer, when Manu was busking in the cobbled streets of St Malo with Schultz, a musician friend from Parabellum, one of the leading alternative bands in Paris, the pair had a run-in with the local street mafia. There was an accordionist busker who, according to Manu, was faking blindness and playing traditional songs for middle-aged English ladies, who just lapped up the cliché like crème fraiche. The accordionist was making a fortune, maybe 3,000 francs (450 Euro) a day. But according to Manu, he was also working with the police, who let him hog his street pitch in return for information about the goings-on in the neighbourhood. Manu and Schultz set-up nearby and, despite only playing for a few hours a day, broke the informant’s business.

  Unsurprisingly, the accordionist wasn’t happy. He went to the Boxing Club of St-Malo and hired three heavies to pick a fight with Manu and Schultz in a bar, to scare them into leaving town. Most members of the boxing club were black but Manu and Schultz also had a black friend from the neighbourhood in their busking team. The next day, this friend was hanging out in St-Malo chatting up a girl when he met the three black guys from the gym, who said, ‘Why don’t you come with us? We need to scare these upstarts.’ So they went to the bar where Manu and Schultz were having a drink – but as soon as their friend saw them, he told the three heavies that he was on their team. So nothing happened. The next day the faux-blind accordionist was play
ing to a circle of admirers when the hard guy on Manu and Schultz’s team burst in and broke his glasses, much to the shock of the tourists. Happy days.

  Not long after Hot Pants came out of the basement, Manu Chao started to write his own songs. ‘For years and years I only played covers,’ Manu explains. ‘And when people told me I should write a song I said, “What for? There are so many wonderful songs already. I don’t have enough time in my life to sing all the songs already recorded that I want to sing.” Before doing your own stuff, I think it’s important to go to school, and for that you need professors. Chuck Berry was my professor, Lou Reed was my professor, The Clash were my professors, and much later Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf were my professors in French.’ Later, to that roll call of professors, Manu added Bob Marley.

  When Manu did start writing songs in 1984, he conjured up a winner on what he claims is his very first attempt: “Mala Vida”. It later became Mano Negra’s debut single, their first video clip, and one of their greatest successes. It’s still in Manu Chao’s set over twenty-five years later: ‘Tu me estas dando mala vida / yo pronto me voy a escapar / gitana mia por favor / ve y dejame respirar’ (You gave me such a bad life / I’m going to escape soon / Please my gypsy girl / let me breathe).

  The opening lines of the song evoke Manu’s perennial obsession with the notion of being trapped and his desire for escape. The song was demoed on a cassette with a couple of others and ended up on a compilation of French alternative rock called Romance 85. Its cover featured a demure girl in stockings, suspenders and high heels and, as well as Hot Pants, the record featured tracks by Bijou, a girl trio from Dijon singing ‘Tous Les Soirs” (Every Night), another track released by Manu under the Parachute name. Other songs by Hot Pants found their way on to two other compilations the very same year; Les Héros Du Peuple Sont Immortels and Hot Chicas. The latter also featured tracks by Manu’s brother Antoine Chao’s new band, Chihuahuas.