Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Romance 85 caught the attention of Rico Maldorer, who had set-up a label called Gougnaf Mouvement. It was the home of French punk acts like Les Rats, Manu’s friend Schultz’s band Parabellum, and Les Thugs from the western city of Angers. In accordance with the spirit of the times, there were endless discussions about equality between all the acts. Each artist had to have the same amount of time in the studio and an equal level of label support. ‘If there is a hierarchy, it is among the public, not with us,’ declared Maldorer.

  The French rock scene was still dogged by its old inferiority complexes and a depressing sense that no one outside the country would ever take them seriously. ‘If Les Thugs were American, everybody would be on their knees before them,’ complained Maldorer. (Les Thugs were later to forge a reasonably successful international career and sign to Sub Pop, the Seattle label who launched Nirvana.) The numbers were still small. Gougnaf Mouvement’s top band Parabellum sold around 6,000. But Romance 85 was a step up for Manu.

  Hot Pants’ first single was released on Gougnaf in 1985, and it featured a Manu Chao original, “So Many Nites”, on the A-side and another, “Lover Alone”, on the flip side. It sold about 3,500, nothing earth-shattering, but enough, along with their raucous live show, to establish Hot Pants as contenders on the Paris scene, which was then entering a rollercoaster phase of intense alternative creativity.

  Manu’s first song to be released: the “So Many Nites” single on Gougnaf

  There was another reason why Manu began writing his own material. The particular blend of rock’n’roll, soul, punk and gypsy rumba that was bubbling up in his imagination just didn’t exist. It needed to be created from scratch. But, in rising to that particular challenge, Manu was starting to ride the zeitgeist. Paris was fast becoming the capital of what was then called La Sono Mondiale, and later came to be known internationally as ‘world music’.

  The immigrants who came to France in the 1970s to man the country’s declining industrial base had, at first, kept a low cultural profile, quietly earning their pay and going back home every summer to be with their families. In the early 1980s, however, a new generation of kids born of North and West African parents began to consider France their home and assert their cultural identity. Arabic, Berber and African music styles emerged to play their part in the Paris mix, and a whole new generation of media outlets was created on the back of these changes, including the polyglot Radio Nova, whose founder Jean-François Bizot also ran the magazine Actuel, the unofficial bible of the new Paris. With this growing trend of breaking free from overarching Anglo-Saxon models and prospecting for new sounds and rhythms far from rock’s mainstream, it was perhaps inevitable that the French would also begin to rediscover their own oft-maligned musical past.

  A key and physically imposing figure in this process was François Hadji-Lazaro, also known as ‘Gros François’ (Fat Frank), who, once he had shaved off his hippy locks at the end of the 1970s, looked like the French brother of Buster Bloodvessel from the British ska outfit Bad Manners. Hadji-Lazaro grew up in a working-class Parisian family and discovered Bob Dylan and folk music in the early 1970s. He taught himself guitar and a whole gamut of other folk instruments, like the accordion, bagpipes, banjo, violin, ukulele and jew’s harp. After giving up his job as a teacher, he began to busk in the metro, and earn a few spare francs as a bouncer and sound engineer at early squat gigs. Eventually he founded the group Pigalle, named after the seedy red light district of Paris at the foothills of Montmartre. His next band, Les Garçons Bouchers (The Butcher Boys), came close to being stars in a scene that was suspicious of the very idea of stardom.

  What Hadji-Lazaro pioneered was a roughneck revival of chanson réaliste and musette, the proudly Parisian working-class musical styles of the 1920s and 1930s, which were forged in the riotous sleaze of the Moulin Rouge and the cabarets of Montmartre, the bals musettes of the Val de Marne and the brothels of the rue de Lappe. With their absinthe-soaked melodies, impenetrable slang and switchblade balladry, the old chanson réaliste songs drew inspiration from the lives of the pimps, prostitutes, hard men and orphans who called the slums of Montmartre and Belleville home. It was a style popularised in the 1930s by singers like Fréhel, Edith Piaf and Yvonne George.

  Hadji-Lazaro, though, was never one to wallow in mournful nostalgia. He mixed musette and chanson réaliste with ska, punk and rockabilly to create a riotous burlesque hymn to the dirty Parisian streets of the mid-1980s, full of immortal lines like ‘La bière ça me rends amoureux, la bière ça me reveille la queue’ (Beer makes me randy, beer wakes up my dick) or ‘Avec mémé au supermarché / dans le rayon fromages / Et je l’ai baisée dans la chambre froide / aux crocs de boucher’ (With my chick in the supermarket / at the cheese counter / And I screwed her in the cold store / amongst the meat snacks). It was a very localised breed of urban ‘folk’ that painted Paris in stark, yet affectionate, satirical colours, just as the songs of Madness and Ian Dury did for London. Hadji-Lazaro almost single-handedly made the accordion hip in punk rock circles.

  The harder-core members of the alternative Parisian scene, like Jean-Yves Prieur, manager of the Bondage label, which was home to dark and radical bands like the uncompromising Bérurier Noir, dismissed Pigalle and Les Garçons Bouchers as backward, cliché-driven gavroche rock – ‘gavroche’ meaning an impish Parisian street urchin. But one man’s insult is another man’s compliment, and Hadji-Lazaro knew that his music had one enormous advantage over that of bands like Les Satellites, Les Dogs, Dirty District, Guernica, OTH, and Parabellum, in that it couldn’t have been concocted anywhere else in the world except Paris.

  Hadji-Lazaro had managed to pull off a feat that had seemed almost impossible just a few years before; the creation of a modern style of rock that was unmistakably and unrepentantly French. Thanks to him, musicians started weaving accordions into pile-driving beats and trying to look like Jean Gabin in a black and white 1930s cop thriller; all berets or trilbies, grimy scruffy suits, Doc Martens and braces, with rakish neckerchiefs and tabs behind the ear.

  Pigalle and Les Garçons Bouchers, however, could never be accused of peddling some kind of disconnected sepiatinted fantasy of life in modern France. After all, Fat Frank was a skinhead, albeit a left-wing and progressive one, and in the mid 1980s skinheads were boot boys on the front lines of French social conflict. The majority of them had drifted towards the racist philosophies of Le Pen and his Front National, a party that was inexorably gaining ground in national and local elections at the time. A minority became ‘red skins’, a sub-species who still loved the music and believed in the brute urban cool of the skinhead identity but had no truck with any racist or neo-fascist philosophy. Some of these red skins formed vigilante forces like the Red Warriors.

  Bérurier Noir, with their rallying cry of ‘la jeunesse enmerde Le Front National!’ (The youth shits on the National Front!) would often use the Red Warriors as their security detail. As it did in England, the fight against neo-Nazism and the Front National in France galvanised the alternative music scene. ‘Everything started mixing because the problem became the skinheads, the racists and the fascists,’ remembers Manu Chao. ‘So the community started to join together to fight them. The reggae guys, the punk guys, the rockabilly guys came together to be in a majority and fight the fascists. That was the start of the alternative music scene in Paris, when the community started mixing together.’

  Paris had, of course, been under the control of the Nazis less than forty years earlier and Manu’s grandparents had had to flee the fascists in Spain, where Franco had been in power until his death in 1975. With such a background, the fight against fascism wasn’t a politically fashionable pose, as it sometimes appeared to be in England, but something utterly serious, a clear and present danger.

  Manu Chao met Hadji-Lazaro in 1984, and soon found he had plenty in common with the charismatic musical innovator. They started jamming together in the bars of the Paris Barrocks association, an influential network of sympa
thetic local venues founded by Pascal ‘Rascal’ Suquet, Ronan Omnes and their friends at the bar Chez Jimmy in Ménilmontant. The association was formed to fight against old laws dating to Vichy times that forbade a musical performance after a ten o’clock curfew, which made it almost impossible for a rock group to play legitimately in a small bar or club in Paris. Paris Barrocks offered a place for bands like Les Wampas, Parabellum, Hot Pants, Chihuahua and, later, the whole so-called punkabilly wave of Les Météors, Les Cannibals and Les Stingrays, to play their first ‘official’ gigs in public.

  One night at Chez Jimmy, Manu and his mate Schultz from Parabellum were asked to give an impromptu performance of their busking repertoire to fill a gap in the programme left by a support act that had failed to show up. It went down well, and so they were asked to come back, and slowly the act evolved into a band called Los Carayos. The name was a bastardised fusion of the Spanish expletive carajo, as in ‘Ay carajo!’ which means something like ‘Oh fuck!’ or ‘What the hell!’, and carallo, which is Galician slang for ‘penis’ and an affectionate insult for guys in Galicia.

  As their name suggests, the main priority at the beginning was just having a laugh and keeping things simple. It was a chance for Manu, Schultz and Manu’s brother Antoine to throw all kinds of musical curiosities into the blender, from country, bluegrass and western swing, via rockabilly, punk and ska to espagnolades and cajuneries, and see what kind of joyous mess might result. Los Carayos were augmented by Alain Wampas from Les Wampas on double bass and François Hadji-Lazaro on violin and braces. A highlight of their shows was their performance of “Rawhide”, which was pumped out with high-octane cowboy flair whilst Hadji-Lazaro plucked away on his mandolin and Manu Chao indulged his love of the Link Wray twang. The predominant vibe was one of sweaty rockabilly, with some dumb-ass yodeling thrown in. Nonetheless, the band ended up recording three albums. The first was a live album called Ils Ont Osé (They Dared), recorded at Le Cithéa and mixed in a couple of days. It was followed by Persistent et Signent (the French equivalent of the saying ‘They stuck to their guns’) in 1987.

  These two albums were released on Hadji-Lazaro’s brandnew label, Boucherie Productions, which, alongside Bondage, became the definitive imprint of the alternative Paris scene of the 1980s, responsible for albums by Hot Pants, Happy Drivers, Les Garçons Bouchers and Mano Negra amongst others. Necessity drove Hadji-Lazaro to invention, but it’s doubtful that anyone with fewer broad and varied talents, who lacked the respect and faith shown to Hadji-Lazaro, could have pulled off such a multi-tasking minor miracle.

  Los Carayos, 1987, featuring ‘Fat Frank’ Hadji-Lazaro (in the dungaree shorts); Manu is far left in the polka-dot shirt.

  Persistent et Signent featured a song by Manu Chao called “Oscar Tramor”, a mangling of another song title, “Busca Otra Amor” (Looking for Another Love), by the Mexican singer Irma Serrano, which appeared on the soundtrack of a kitsch and sexy film called Noches de Cabaret in 1978. Manu rearranged the original into a story about an alcoholic toreador who prayed to God for protection from the bull’s gouging horns every night before going to sleep. ‘Oscar Tramor’ eventually became Manu’s pseudonym and alter ego. On Mano Negra’s debut album Patchanka, you can see a faked police picture of Manu above the name ‘Oscar Tramor’, which led numerous journalists to suppose that this was his real name.

  Songs by Los Carayos appeared on couple of compilations; Hot Chicas, which also featured Hot Pants and Chihuahua, and Mon Grand Frère Est Un Rocker (My Elder Brother Is A Rocker), an overview of the combustible French underground scene, which was then fast reaching its apotheosis. A final album Au Prix Ou Sont Les Courges, (a surrealist title which means something like “The price of marrows being what it is”), came out in 1990, by which time Mano Negra was taking up all of Manu’s time.

  Everybody in Los Carayos was playing with at least two bands, and months were often divided equally, fifteen days with one and fifteen days with the other. It was a loose arrangement that suited everyone for a time. But in the end, when Manu Chao’s next band Mano Negra began to devour all his available time, he announced that enough was enough. ‘We wondered if we could carry on without Manu,’ Alain Wampas remembers. ‘We thought about it for two seconds before deciding that Los Carayos was the five of us.’ ‘Los Carayos were popular with everyone,’ according to Manu. ‘With the punks, with my neighbours, with the elderly.’ They were referred to, ironically, in the Anglophone tradition of bands like Blind Faith (a quartet of already famous stars), as the ‘supergroup’ of the Paris alternative scene.

  Meanwhile, Hot Pants had accelerated out of the squats and bistros, and the band was even getting the odd mention in the mainstream media. In February 1985, La Dépêche du Midi wrote that they were an ‘ensemble immanquablement joussif’ (an unmissably joyful group) and in April 1986 L’Express noted the band’s assurance and a standing ovation that followed a memorable show in front of 1,500 people at the prestigious annual Printemps de Bourges, a festival with a reputation for breaking new talent. The other band on the bill that night were the Kingsnakes, a group whose story was to be intertwined with that of Manu Chao and Hot Pants over the next few years.

  Actor, TV star and journalist Jackie Berroyer ‘discovered’ Hot Pants at Bourges, his antennae alerted by Manu’s stage presence and his ‘measured, determined charisma.’ At the time, the two media worlds of mainstream and alternative were so distinct that it was seen as a bold move for Berroyer to interview Manu for Rapido, the fashionable TV show fronted by Antoine de Caunes. ‘So you like these unknown, under-the-radar artists?’ asked de Caunes on air. ‘Especially talented ones. You will be hearing a lot more from this guy,’ answered Berroyer. ‘Is that a threat?’ countered de Caunes. ‘It’s a prophecy,’ replied Berroyer.

  Berroyer still has the unedited rushes of what was Manu’s first TV interview buried under books, records and mementoes in his flat in Paris. It took place in Manu’s room at his family’s home in Sèvres. During the interview, Manu talked about his love for both flamenco and the songs of Hank Williams, how the new flamenco guys rock like Johnny Thunders of The New York Dolls, and declared that if he was Spanish that was the style he would play. What he plays instead is a bastard version, a ‘flamenco bâtarde’. Manu said he was learning English so he could write songs, mainly from the novels of Chester Himes, a black thriller writer from Brooklyn who lived in Paris. ‘He was unusually focused, and determined,’ recalls Berroyer, who became friends with the young flamenco fan. ‘He had a bright-eyed goodness, intelligence and sharpness that was very appealing.’

  In their own propaganda, Hot Pants declared that they were against megalos, or megalomaniac supergroups, against the blasé et morose public and against crooked show promoters. Each concert, they promised, would be like a bullfight. That Hispanic blood was boiling up again. Their album Loco Mosquito ended up on another independent label with the punk musketeer name of All Or Nothing. It was recorded in May 1986 at Studio Do in Bordeaux and produced by Didier Pasquier. At 29 minutes, it was a short and sharp evocation of Hot Pants’ scorching live set. The final track was “Ma Dear”, by the supreme master Chuck Berry. The Clash can be heard in the raw melody of “African Witch”, the spirit of Dr Feelgood with a Hispanic undertow is evident in “Rosamaria”, a punked-up version of the song “¡Ay! Que Dolor” by Los Chinguitos. “Ya Llego” is a Manu Chao original with lyrics in Spanish and English. “Junky Beat” is a nod to the beat writer William Burroughs.

  Manu called the album ‘rockabilly with soul’ and now claims that Loco Mosquito is his production that has best stood the test of time. The band was invited to perform abroad and did some fiery and memorable gigs in Granada and Barcelona. A few times they nearly made it to London, but didn’t get there in the end. ‘We’d never played there before and London was a mecca.’

  Loco Mosquito only sold in the low thousands. If the Joint de Culasse was 1957 revisited, the Hot Pants album was really only a leap forward to 1977, an album
worthy of influences like The Clash and Dr Feelgood, but still not really ahead of the curve, despite the innovative Hispanic elements.

  On 21 June 1986, Manu celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, although ‘celebrated’ might not be the most appropriate word, given the anxious context of the moment. All those years ago, aged eighteen, he’d promised that he would give up music if nothing happened when he got to this age. ‘I had nothing,’ he recalls. ‘Not a dime. It was interesting, but economically zero. My mother was worried, although my father not so much.’ Tom Darnal remembers that Manu kept his anxiety about his mother and the promise he had made to her very quiet. ‘After all, that’s not a very rock’n’roll thing to be concerned about,’ says Darnal.

  Manu carried on. It was all he could do. One potential break, which he saw as a major opportunity, was an offer to become part of the Kingsnakes. The band had a mythical aura in France, having been dubbed ‘the greatest rock band in the world’ by the French magazine Rock’n’Folk. The group was formed in 1980 by guitarist Daniel Jeanrenaud, the proverbial son of a preacher man, who was born in Marseilles and moved to the States. He teamed up with a couple of members of the flamboyant Flamin’ Groovies, the oblique heroes of the early punk scene who had an enormous reputation in the late 1970s. Even more talismanic, from Manu’s point of view, was the fact that Jeanrenaud’s guitar, a 1951 Gibson ES-300, had been baptised ‘Nadine’, ever since Chuck Berry himself borrowed it one night at Bill Graham’s club in downtown San Francisco.

  Hot Pants, pictured on the sleeve of Loco Mosquito. From left: Manu, Jean-Marc Despeignes, Pascal Borne and Santi.