In 1986, Jeanrenaud was back in France and living in Paris. ‘The guy was like Bob Marley to us,’ Manu recalls. ‘A professor of the blues. He was having problems with his band, especially his guitar player, who was the worst musician of the lot, and one day he told me that he was doing an international tour with the Kingsnakes, starting in fifteen days and due to visit Belgium, California and maybe London. ‘We want you to be the guitar player,’ he said to me. ‘I almost called my mum then and there and told her she didn’t have to worry now because I was in a big band.’ Manu was invited to a rehearsal for a tryout.
‘I would have given my life to be in that band,’ Manu continues. ‘I was dressed my best, carrying my favourite guitar and I went to the bass player’s house, who was a Portuguese guy called José Moita, an incredible player. Like most Portuguese, he died driving his car. I arrived and José asked me to wait while they had a couple of beers. We waited an hour and then they stopped off to buy a bottle of strong Portuguese spirit on the way to the rehearsal. By the time we got there, we were drunk, and José says to me “Son, the rehearsal is finished. You can go home now.” I didn’t play a note. Two days before the tour, Daniel came to me and said I wasn’t going to go. It was the first really big disappointment in my career.’
This rejection triggered another Manu crisis. How many big opportunities does one musician get in his career? How many chances does anyone get? Manu felt that the Kingsnakes were his big break and he’d blown it. Jeanrenaud was the closest he would get to a Wilko Johnson figure, a Gallic Chuck Berry. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to study after all, become a journalist like his father, or even go into medicine. To make matters worse, Santi had also auditioned for the Kingsnakes as drummer and had been accepted for the South American tour. Manu’s cousin had been the backbone of Hot Pants as well as all Manu’s other bands. He seemed more determined and ambitious than Manu, and perhaps more realistic. With his departure, Manu felt in danger of losing his musical backbone and his closest creative ally.
‘In the end,’ says Manu, ‘the whole episode made me strong. I was sorry, but it made me more determined.’ Indeed, far from calling curtains on his musical career, the setback was one of the catalysts for the creation of Mano Negra. Manu decided that his next band would be utterly free of compromise. It would be world-beating, all or nothing, a band as good as The Clash, or any other of his musical heroes. Its kernel would be comprised of his brother Antoine and his cousin Santi – in other words, the family ‘firm’ that gave Manu much of his self-assurance and mental stability.
Antoine had been exploring Latin and jazz music with his band Chihuahua, and Manu felt that these genres should be essential elements in his grand new scheme. In fact, at the very core of this new dream pulsed the idea that all of Manu’s favourite styles could be mashed up to make something entirely new; rock, Latin, punk, ska, r’n’b, reggae – a kaleidoscope of different sounds and rhythms. It would be an integrated and yet hybrid sound that faithfully reflected his own musical and cultural heritage, with a political edge that drew fire and purpose not only from his personal and family history, but also the increasingly polarised world of Paris in the 1980s. Manu spoke to Santi about his idea and tried to dissuade him from leaving for South America, but his cousin was determined to go.
As it turned out, Jeanrenaud had multiple problems to deal with in the ranks of the Kingsnakes, including bassist José Moita’s penchant for strong spirits and then his death behind the wheel just after the group’s return from the South American tour. Santi persuaded Jeanrenaud to hire Manu and then Pascal Borne and Jean-Marc Despeignes from the Hot Pants, effectively engineering a reverse takeover of the Kingsnakes by Hot Pants.
‘Eventually, I won my battle,’ says Manu, but just as he was installing himself in the Kingsnakes, his new vision took complete control and consumed him entirely. ‘We became the “super” backing band of this guy, but I already knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to mix everything and the Kingsnakes didn’t want to mix anything. So I got out and formed Mano Negra.’ Out of the new Kingsnakes/Hot Pants union, only Santi followed Manu, although he later played drums on a self-titled Kingsnakes album, which came out in 1988.
Manu was now on a Blues Brothers-style mission from God to round up his dream team of musicians. He had already come up with a perfect name for the band, which he had discovered in an ancient, underground comic book by the artist Dominique Rousseau. Mano Negra (The Black Hand), a secretive group of anarchists who operated in AndaLucía in the 1880s, was also the name, as Manu later discovered, of a group of Hispanic New Mexicans who were fighting for land and water rights in the 1960s and 1970s. (Only much later did Manu learn that a right-wing paramilitary group of vigilantes in Colombia were also known as La Mano Negra.) There’s also a Spanish expression ‘Aquí hubo mano negra’ (There was a black hand in this), which means that something has been made illegally or lacks moral integrity.
The imprint of the Black Hand had an aura of clandestine radicalism that made it a perfect band logo. Manu stencilled it at home, adding a red star to make sure that people understood that the allegiances of this particular Black Hand were firmly to the left of the political spectrum.
The name was a statement in itself, implying a political subversion absent from either Los Carayos or Hot Pants. Manu had been on first-name terms with left-wing writers and intellectuals since childhood, and had been brought up in a politically active family. He’d actively rejected this part of his background in his music up until now, but it was an accommodation with this heritage, combined with the polarising atmosphere of rebellion and anti-fascism in Paris, that made Manu determined to imbue his new group with uncompromising and politically rebellious energy.
In 1987, Manu happened upon a trio of musicians – ‘Jo’ Dahan, Daniel Jamet and Philippe Teboul – busking down in the metro. They were collectively known as Les Casse Pieds (something equivalent to ‘The Pain in the Necks’) and he already knew them vaguely. Not only was Daniel Jamet that luckless guitarist from Cain and Abel that Manu had welcomed so ungraciously to his suburban southwestern stomping grounds back in the early 1980s, but Les Casse Pieds were also regulars at the Studio Campus rehearsal studios in rue Bréguet Sabin, where Hot Pants and Los Carayos also rehearsed. But seeing them down in the dingy and malodorous confines of the metro was a revelation.
Not long afterwards, Bernard Batzen, a leading French concert agent who was soon to become Mano Negra’s first manager, remembers Manu Chao blurting: ‘I’ve just seen the best band in the world, and they were playing down in the metro!’ With indecent speed, Manu became a guest member of the band and for six months or so they spent their days playing underground, moving from carriage to carriage to avoid the beefy-looking TDP (Transports de Paris) security guys with their muzzled Alsatian dogs, banging out songs designed to last a single stop and leave time for one of the team to walk round the carriage with a plastic cup collecting the francs and centimes.
‘The metro was the best school,’ Manu recalls. ‘When you play in a venue, people have paid to see you and the battle is already won. If you don’t do a shitty thing, it’s OK. If you play on the subway, the reaction of your audience is usually, “Oh, hell, here’s someone else coming for money.” So you don’t have an hour, you only have three minutes to change their minds and make them happy to give you some money.’
‘If a wagon was full of French, we’d have a special songs for them,’ Manu remembers. ‘If it was more North African, we would just play “Sidi H’Bibi” straight off.’ This song was eventually released as a Mano Negra single, sung in Algerian Arabic. It was adapted from a wedding song traditionally sung at both Jewish and Muslim weddings in Algeria, like an ancestral bridge between two communities, and it still features in Manu’s live repertoire.
A bizarre episode from these metro busking days gave Manu and his friends from Les Casse Pieds their first major magazine coverage. Another band member, singer and pianist Manu Layotte, who, according to Manu Chao, wa
s a brilliant liar, concocted a fable about an Australian filmmaker by the name of Philip Maudson who intended to make a Hollywood film about a band who busked in the metro, starring Tom Waits and Willy DeVille.
The band took this story round to several magazines, all of whom rejected it as the fantasy it clearly was. Eventually, however, Elle magazine ran a small piece with a tiny picture, calling the story a modern fairy tale. The day after Elle appeared, all the newspapers picked it up. Elle’s credibility had turned it into an irresistible story that, in true tabloid tradition, was too good to check. A spread in the prestigious Nouvel Observateur, France’s equivalent to Newsweek, followed and then various Japanese magazines and French TV stations picked it up on it, too.
Les Casse Pieds down in the metro, left to right: Daniel Jamet, Philippe Teboul, Jo Dahan, Laurent (Lolo) and Tomás.
The writer Keith Barrett confirms the veracity of this farfetched tale in his book Truth Jihadi, in which he relates that he was approached by ‘four ragamuffins who looked like an early version of the Ramónes’, asking him to act the part of a fictional Australian film director and come to a café near the Bastille. Barrett thinks that it was Manu Chao who approached him, but it was more likely Manu Layotte, the ‘brilliant liar’ whom he describes as hyper, skinny and nervous.
Since he looked similar, Layotte and crew asked Barrett if he would pretend to be the fictional Philip Maudson. Barrett went along with the ruse, giving interviews to assorted French media and telling them ‘in a bogus Australian accent’ how he was a friend of Francis Ford Coppola, how he had screen-tested the band in a chateau in the French countryside and how the film Le Paris d’Amérique, whose fictitious title he actually forgot in the heat of a very awkward moment, was due out in June.
Another filmmaker called Yves Boisset got involved in the hoax and filmed a clip of Barrett pretending to be the Australian film director directing Les Casse Pieds on the metro, which was then broadcast continuously on TV monitors throughout the metro system. Barrett was very amused by the people who were moved to compliment the producers of the film on the skill and attention to detail with which they had recreated the Paris metro in a Hollywood studio lot. Several weeks later, just as the story was about to be exposed as a hoax, the band went to the left-wing media and declared that the aim of the whole stunt was to show how easily the media could be fooled and manipulated.
Keith Barrett later converted to Islam and became one of the world’s leading 9/11 conspiracy theorists. In his book, he wrote that the Casse Pieds hoax ‘aroused my metaphysical curiosity of what was real and what is fake.’ For him, the Paris metro episode was a formative demonstration that you can’t believe what you read in the papers. Equally, for Manu, it confirmed what he had always thought: that the media is distorted and unreliable, and that journalists are easily manipulated and seldom to be trusted.
Hoax or no hoax, what is certain is that the most successful alternative ‘underground’ band in the history of French rock was born literally down under the ground, on the metro. There’s no doubt in Manu’s mind: ‘The tunes of Mano Negra started in the subways.’
CHAPTER 4:
THE RISE OF THE BLACK HAND
‘It was half improvised … sometimes it was a real mess – a bordel.’
Philippe ‘Garbancito’ Teboul
The opening riff of “Mano Negra”, the first track on the first Mano Negra album, Patchanka, has an apocalyptic, cowboy swagger. It leads into a one-minute-forty-four-second fanfare of intent, turbocharged by Antoine Chao’s trumpet and mixed, cheekily, over what sounds like a stadium full of 50,000 fans wildly cheering their heroes. Considering the fact that, when it was recorded, Mano Negra had only played to minuscule gatherings in the greater Paris area, this demonstrated not only chutzpah but also a kind of magical thinking. In just a few years, the band did indeed summon up those crowds, roaring for real.
What was the source of this magic that launched music from a garage in the outskirts of Paris into the hearts of millions across the world and inspired a new generation of bands halfway across the planet in South America? Occultists, from Paracelsus onwards, tell us that magic, or the realisation of the apparently impossible, can be achieved by the correct combination of will and imagination. Manu certainly had a rich imagination and an unusually focused will. The blend of these two essential ingredients created the alchemy that propelled Mano Negra to the four corners of the globe. As their manager Bernard Batzen said, ‘Manu had a really developed intuition, and he was really sharp. He worked hard. The band was a hard-working band.’
The magic also stemmed partly from Manu’s genius at cooking up different elements of Latin, punk, reggae and rock in a new, palatable way. It also lay in the band’s strong interlocking personalities, assembled by Manu. ‘A great band isn’t about wonderful musicians,’ he asserts. ‘The Clash weren’t that good as musicians. But as a band they were great. It was the people, the attitude, the energy.’ And one final, indeed crucial, element was that Manu had caught the mercurial spirit of the time – the late 1980s. His bands had always been defiantly retro but now, at last, he was surfing the newest waves. Within a couple of years, Mano Negra would become the biggest rock band in France, much of Europe and most of South America. Even the Japanese went nuts for them, and there were strong outposts of fanatics from Russia to the UK.
Back in 1987, all that success was nothing more than a wild dream. But as Manu started to rehearse the band intensively at the garage in Sèvres, and play gigs supporting better-known groups like Les Satellites, he became more and more convinced of his new vision. An initial stumbling block was that of commitment – it would be almost impossible to create a world-beating outfit with part-timers, and in the alternative scene it was de rigueur to be in several bands at once.
The initial idea was to gather musicians around the core trio of the two Chao brothers, Manu and Antoine, and cousin Santi, who would be the trusted foundation of a molten, fluid band. Collaborators would then be roped in as and when necessary. Initially at least, Manu always expected bands like Los Carayos and Les Casse Pieds to run in tandem with Mano Negra. ‘All the groups mixed together at the time,’ remembers Antoine. ‘It was part of the movement, but also a desire and a survival instinct. You had to play in several groups to get by. If there was a problem, we’d all play on the same bill. It was music as combat sport.’
‘I was also playing in three or four bands,’ confirms Manu. ‘One band you like for one thing, another for something else.’ This ability to jump around happened to fit both the habit of the alternative scene of the day and Manu’s loco mosquito character. Being unswervingly faithful to a band full-time would be a leap into the unknown for a commitment-phobe (or lover of freedom) like Manu.
But, with Mano Negra, Manu finally found the faith to take that leap. Manu talks about it in terms of a guy who’s been playing the field for years and then suddenly thinks of getting married. ‘One day you find a band and musically that’s what you want to be doing. What’s more, everyone in it is a friend and you want to be with them all day. You’re going to stop looking elsewhere, aren’t you?’
That commitment, however, took about a year from the formation of the band. To begin with there was just a single, “Takin’ It Up”, released, naturally, through Francis Hadji-Lazaro’s Boucherie Productions. It was little different from the rockabilly-meets-Clash sound of the Hot Pants and wasn’t a hit, though it did get Mano Negro their first TV slot. The core trio were augmented on the single and on the TV show by a band called Dirty District, a local Sèvres crew and fellow travellers of the Chaos, who shared Manu’s love of reggae, Stiff Little Fingers and singing in English.
When Mano Negra and Dirty District appeared on TV to perform the single, the announcer was confused. ‘So there are two bands together here?’ ‘Right.’ ‘And are you on the way to be being famous?’ ‘Nah, we’re just filler,’ said Manu, to the accompanying sniggers of his fellow musicians.
The first gig this com
bination performed under the name of Mano Negra, as far as anyone can remember, was at a bar called Fahrenheit, though they had done other, sporadic, experimental live shows with shifting personnel at various underground dens, including a party on a barge called La Péniche de Santa (Santa’s Barge) which was moored alongside the Quai d’Ivry, where they billed themselves as Les Boules de King Kong (King Kong’s Balls).
This intermittent street-level activity managed to stoke up enough interest to persuade Boucherie to sign up Mano Negra for an album. Rehearsals took place in the garage of the Chaos in Sèvres. Felisa and Ramón get a prominent thankyou on the album credits, which, considering the sound of half-formed Latino punkabilly that ricocheted around the house and no doubt wrecked their tranquillity during those formative months, they no doubt richly deserved.
On several tracks, the trio were joined by Dirty District: K’shoo and Gilles on guitar, Geo on keyboards and Fred on bass. Others featured the trio and Les Casse Pieds, notably on a metro favourite called “Darling Darling”, or by Jean-Marc, the bass player from Hot Pants, Mamek from the Chihuahuas and Alain from The Wampas. The rushed result, after four days and four nights of intense work, has the raw urgency of a heat-seeking missile.
The album’s title ‘Patchanka’ was a punked-up version of the word pachanga, a Cuban dance music pioneered by Los Papuines in the mid-1950s. It’s a happy-go-lucky style that mixes violin-based charanga and the trumpet-led sound of the Cuban conjuntos. But, as Santi explained, ‘the title also meant “patchwork”, both of music and musicians.’ It was also a call to arms, a catchy brand name for a new sound that Manu hoped might fly as a kind of manifesto. ‘Patchanka is a wild sound for proud souls and lonely hounds’, sings Manu on “Indios De Barcelona”, one of the album’s highlights, which became an electrifying mainstay of Mano Negra’s live show.
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