Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Possibly the first Mano Negra gig, in a line-up that also included Les Wampas, Kingsnakes, Los Carayos and Parabellum.

  The album itself is a ragged, multicoloured quilt of disparate styles and flavours, including the passionate flamenco soul of “Salga La Luna”, a nod to Aerosmith and Run DMC on “Killin’ Rats”, a borrowing from Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” on “Ronde De Nuit”, the wacky ska track “Lonesome Bop” and dashes of rockabilly, salsa and punk scattered liberally here and there. The whole thing kicked off with that killer cowboy punk-salsa fanfare.

  This established the template for all Manu Chao’s future albums: short, sharp songs in different languages with eclectic styles that make their point and don’t hang around. Only one number, the last, makes it beyond the three-minute mark. The lyrics are in French, Spanish and English and are non-specific in their anti-establishment attitude, although Hitler gets mentioned as a ‘rat’. Elsewhere there are songs of doomed love and dreams of escape. The languages are mashed together with little regard for grammar. The result is a globalised lingo, a backpacker’s argot, used the world over by travellers who don’t have English as a first language.

  Patchanka also marks the first use of distinctive semi-comic sound effects, like the speeded-up, chipmunk-style backing vocals on “La Ventura” or the cartoon fairground organ played on a cheap Casio keyboard that bring the curtains down at the end of the album. These were scraps of silliness that were lobbed into the mix perhaps as a kind of inoculation against that rockeur desire to be cool at all costs. Humour was mixed in with the politics and angst.

  Even if the hotchpotch of influences behind Patchanka are only partially digested, the whole was something new. More important was the sheer attitude and sharpness on display, anchored by Santi’s rock-solid, muscular drumming. As well as studying for a business degree, he’d also been doing karate lessons and was ninja fit.

  Jean Labbé, the lanky, long-haired sound engineer at Mix’It studios, who has the pallor of a lifetime spent in basements twiddling knobs, felt he’d struck gold. He remembered there was a ‘magical quality that doesn’t happen very often’ about the sessions. ‘On one track that wasn’t working, Manu took a Spanish guitar and, boom, he got it. It was explosive. Then we put the vocals on and mixed it in two hours and mastered it that morning. I wasn’t sure they’d keep the track, but it sounded incredible to me.’

  One of the first people to hear the tapes was Manu’s old friend from Sèvres, Tom Darnal. He was a keyboard player and a graphic artist, who designed Patchanka’s front cover, with its patchwork of visual scraps from the Chao universe. Driving in Tom’s car one day, Manu slipped a cassette into the machine. He recalled what blared from the car’s tinny speakers as an amazing, almost shocking, leap forward: ‘Immediately I thought that here finally was a French band who were making music that crossed borders and could go global.’ Tom was the man who had lent Manu early hiphop and electro discs by artists like Grandmaster Flash and Run-DMC, and he was determinedly modernist in his listening habits. ‘Manu’s other bands had been old-style,’ he says. ‘To me, even the Kingsnakes, good as they were, were four or five years too late. But with this new band, the way the music combined French elements, Spanish music and punk was really clever.’

  Darnal also began to feel that Manu had the potential to become some kind of cult hero. ‘And I was happy to be part of the creation of such a legend,’ he says. He put a passport picture of Manu on the album cover, with his nom-de-rock Oscar Tramor and the byline, in English: ‘Wanted by the CIA – for subversive lyrics, corrupting songs, outrageous guitar-playing & sexually explicit voice committed in this album.’

  ‘Hot Pants and Los Carayos were imitating, but you have to go through that,’ Manu reminisced, sitting in a Colombian café in Brixton, London, twenty years later. ‘It’s like, before you make modern art, you should have some technical skill and learn how to draw like Picasso did before he invented his own method. I had already been through the school of rock’n’roll. For the first time the songs were mature and, little by little, we invented our own style.’ At the time, his own description of Patchanka was ‘modern musette supported by Apache lyrics and a “chorizo” mentality.’

  Tom Darnal started angling for a place in the band. At Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Mano Negra were booked to support Les Satellites, Manu finally agreed with Tom that the band was sounding great but the keyboard parts on the album, played by Geo from Dirty District, were missing. Tom arrived at the Sèvres garage with ‘a shitty little keyboard’. ‘We were a bunch of friends, technically not so great,’ he says with unforced modesty. ‘I slept in the garage for a least a month.’

  Manu realised that the album was hot and going places. But it needed promotion and it would take some time to fashion the band from Manu Chao’s rag-tag army of friends and get it up to speed. With Dirty District touring, Manu talked three members of Les Casse Pieds into joining the team permanently. That’s how drummer Philippe Teboul and guitarists Daniel Jamet and Jo Dahan joined Manu, Antoine and Santi to form the first immovable line-up of Mano Negra.

  At last Manu had found the right personalities, but he still wasn’t satisfied with the instruments that each of them played. Like a football manager constructing his perfect team, Manu went about the task of assigning positions to his players. ‘We couldn’t have three guitarists, so Jo switched to bass. Philippe, who was nicknamed “Garbancito”, wanted to play drums, but we already had Santi, so I suggested he try percussion. He liked it and it worked. Tomásin wanted to play bass, but I told him he was gonna be the sound man. He became a great sound engineer.’

  Tom Darnal’s cover design for the Patchanka album – a patchwork of Mano Negra icons and miscellanea.

  Initially, Philippe wasn’t keen on his shift from drums to percussion. ‘I had no idea what timbales were at the time and there was no way I wanted to be a tambourine player in a rock band. I’d look like an ass. I just didn’t get it.’ According to Manu, Philippe eventually realised that freedom from the drummer’s seat enabled him to develop as a musician. ‘The fact that he couldn’t play his favourite instrument made him more interested in the form of the songs,’ Manu says. As it turned out, Philippe’s Latin-style percussion was one of the key musical elements in the band’s sound.

  ‘Mano Negra started like a good Ford Mustang but came out as a Ferrari, perfectly chromed, the whole bit,’ Philippe recalls. ‘The Casse Pieds had the gift of improvisation, so the work plus the improv gradually created that particular Mano sound. It was half improvised, but it was beautiful! Santi, though, wasn’t too happy about it. Sometimes it was a real mess – a bordel.’

  Unlike most of the others, Santi, with his drive and a degree in business studies, had alternatives to life as a rock’n’roll hopeful. Well-paid jobs were open to him. And at the time, the Kingsnakes, his other band, were better known and technically more advanced than Mano Negra. So Manu was aware that Mano Negra would have to amount to something fairly rapidly to avoid losing him. Tom Darnal recalls a few late-night conversations with a concerned Manu about whether Santi or Les Casse Pieds would stick around. In the end, with the momentum building, everyone stayed on board.

  Like some kind of provisional revolutionary government, some of the band were given ‘portfolios’. Tom became the Minister of Propaganda, in charge of image, Santi became the Minister of Finance (of course) and Philippe became Minister of Jams. He had to organise jam sessions – everywhere and anywhere – something that kept the group energy focused when they weren’t onstage.

  One of the first people outside of the band’s circle to hear the album was Bernard Batzen, who was to become Mano Negra’s manager. He was booking acts for the Printemps de Bourges, a hugely influential French music festival with a reputation for spotting hot new talent. Hot Pants had played the festival a few years before. For the April 1988 edition, Batzen contacted Manu and secured an agreement for Mano Negra to play. The band were due to share the bill with the likes of Bar
ry White, Frank Zappa and Serge Gainsbourg. At the last minute, Manu told Batzen that the band ‘wasn’t ready’ but turned up anyway and played a busker’s set with Les Casse Pieds.

  Not long afterwards, however, Manu decided it was time to unleash the new Mano Negra line-up on the world. Charles Guilleaux, a promoter who had known Manu for years, had opened a club called the Demi Lune and was putting on the cream of the alternative scene there – bands like Parabellum, OTH and the Rats. Guilleaux booked the new-look Mano Negra for two nights and the bar was packed to overflowing on both. The pharmacist opposite woke next morning to find two punks from the town of Lorient sleeping in his BMW.

  The word on Patchanka was out. With the release of the single “Mala Vida”, a song that had previously been released by Hot Pants, there was a feeling that things were about to explode. It was the first record by Manu to actually hit the charts in France, although admittedly only the lower reaches of the top 50. But the burgeoning alternative network of radio stations that had been encouraged by Mitterrand’s culture minister Jack Lang at the beginning of the decade picked up on the song and played it into the ground. Francis Bergeron filmed a video clip to accompany the single, a piece of speeded-up slapstick in the spirt of Buster Keaton spiked with alternative Parisian squat culture humour.

  Everyone loved the video – everyone except for Manu, who felt that the treatment was too burlesque for his agonised love song. He’d argued that the punky “Ronde De Nuit” should be released instead. Its chorus of ‘Paris va crever d’ennui’ (‘Paris will die of boredom’) was pure gallic Clash and its lament that ‘all the Apaches are in jail’, its subversion of the Marseillaise – ‘Allons enfants de la patrie / contre nous de la tyrannie’ (Come on, children of the fatherland / Tyranny is against us’) aimed at ‘the clown’ in City Hall, in other words the conservative mayor Jacques Chirac, who was floundering in multiple corruption scandals at the time – all appealed to Manu’s desire to make a radical impact.

  With the three Casse Pieds on board, and Tom on keyboards, the band was almost fully formed. Then, at a concert of the emerging nouvelle chanson rockers Les Têtes Raides, Manu was captivated by the manic antics of trombonist Pierre Gauthé. He thought that his technique and stage presence would be perfect for Mano Negra, doubling up with Antoine on trumpet to form a brass section with power and balls. After all the musical chairs, the group lined up, ready for liftoff, as follows (with nicknames in brackets):

  Manu Chao (Oscar Tramor) – lead vocals, guitar

  Antoine Chao (Tonio Del Borño) – trumpets, vocals

  Santiago Casariego (Santi El Águila) – drums, vocals

  Philippe Teboul (Garbancito) – percussion, vocals

  Daniel Jamet (Roger Cageot) – lead guitar, vocals

  Joséph Dahan (Jo) – bass, vocals

  Thomas Darnal (Helmut Krumar) – keyboards, vocals

  Pierre Gauthé (Krøpöl) – trombone, vocals

  Tomás Arroyos (Tomásin) – sound man

  Mano Negra’s first key gig was promoted by Bernard Batzen at the New Morning in October 1988. The venue was a celebrated proving ground for new French talent. ‘It was clear something was really happening,’ remembers Batzen. ‘The band was happy with how I had organised the gig. A few days later Manu came to see me and asked if I wanted to manage the band.’ Batzen, who had just started a new booking agency called Azimuth, had been totally bowled over by the band’s performance and accepted Manu’s proposal gladly.

  His first job as manager was to help the band to set-up their own company, Patchanka SARL. Soon afterwards he opened a dialogue with Fabrice Natal at Virgin France. ‘I saw a video tape they had done of “Mala Vida”, live, out in the suburbs somewhere,’ says Natal. ‘I thought it was incredible. The energy was amazing. It was a real joy. I told them I’d love to work with them. I asked Manu and Thomas if they had a demo of new material and they said, “We don’t do demos.” Instead they suggested we come to see them at Les Trans Musicales in Rennes in December 88.’ Like The New Morning, Les Rencontres Trans Musicales de Rennes, or just Les Trans for short, is still considered an essential rite of passage for any aspiring French rock band. Natal adored the live show and offered Mano Negra a contract.

  For a band born in the Parisian squat scene of the early 1980s and steeped in the radical philosophy of the French alternative rock scene, the very idea of signing a contract with a major record label was seen as a sell-out by the purists, a turncoat betrayal of the worst order.

  Patchanka SARL had been set-up as a collective with strict majority voting. It was understood that Manu had the lead on artistic matters, but on other questions, like where and when to play or how to deal with finance and business, the group would function as a democracy and would meet regularly to thrash out major decisions. It was also understood that Santi, fresh from business college, was the best person to take charge of the band’s finances. In a spirit of equality, not just the eight members of the band, but Frank the lighting guy, Thomas the sound man and Jako the roadie would also get a vote and participate in meetings. It was a set-up that would cause Manu plenty of grief in the coming years.

  There was a considerable amount of agonising among the members of Mano Negra about the Virgin contract. Batzen recalls spending one night at the Chao flat in Sèvres as the debate raged on for hours and Felisa cooked spaghetti for everyone in the kitchen. Despite the band’s affection for Fat Frank, there was a growing sense that Boucherie Productions really didn’t have the clout, the organisation or a distribution network powerful enough to cope with the success that now seemed, at last, within reach. Neither the new single nor the album were being pressed fast enough to keep up with demand. Mano Negra needed the infrastructure of a major, if they had dreams of succeeding internationally.

  Mano Negra take on their classic line-up, from left: Santi Casariego, Philippe Teboul, Jo Dahan, Manu Chao, Tom Darnal, Pierre Gauthé (sitting up), Daniel Jamet, Antoine Chao.

  Santi’s appraisal of the whole dilemma is blunt and honest: ‘We had been outside the system because the system didn’t want us. Once they did, we wanted to be part of it.’ At the time, Santi and Manu were most keen to sign with Virgin. Jo and Antoine were most opposed. In the end, the vote was carried in favour of signing by a margin of just one.

  Reflecting on this crucial if painful episode over twenty years later, Tom Darnal reckons that the intense atmosphere of heart-searching was exaggerated, in part at least, to make a good impression with the band’s alternative fans. All the members of the band had been struggling for years and La Mano looked like being the best chance that they were ever going to get. What swung the debate in the end was the extent to which Virgin were willing to compromise in order to secure the contract: total artistic freedom, and autonomy for Tom and the band to design their own covers and control their own image.

  The band were also perfectly aware that the Sex Pistols and the The Clash, their most influential punk predecessors, had also emerged from an alternative scene and had signed to major labels – Virgin and CBS respectively. Of the three French bands with global potential who emerged out of the alternative squat scene, Les Négresses Vertes also signed to a publishing deal with Virgin Music within a week of Mano Negra. The third, Bérurier Noir (‘Les Bérus’), whose album covers featured mock police uniforms, pigs’ heads and clowns, took the hard line and decided that self-immolation was preferable to selling out.

  ‘If La Mano and Les Satellites [who were on the Bondage label and also signed to Virgin] had gone on being independent for another year,’ Loran, the singer of Bérurier Noir, later declared, ‘the indie movement could have brought the majors to their knees. But we realised it was impossible to wage a cultural revolution in France. So we got the hell out of it all.’ A Les Bérus video of a clown being enticed away from the circus with drink was seen by many, including Manu, as a parable for Mano Negra’s perceived treachery.

  Fat Francis Hadji-Lazaro’s band Pigalle did a song called “Chez Ras
cal and Ronan”, a romantic elegy to the glory days of the alternative scene, which featured the lyric ‘Comment donc ils fait pour vous convertir / Vous qui étiez si incorruptibles?’ (‘So how do they convert you? / You who seemed so incorruptible?’) In the end, Fat Frank, who stood to lose more than most from Mano Negra’s momentous decision, did manage to secure a cut of the action in return for ceding control of Mano Negra’s master tapes, which floated his label for another couple of years.

  ‘The alt scene was a whole period of our lives,’ Manu Chao later commented. ‘All those bands had been hanging out together for a long time. They were strugglers who more often than not got a sandwich and a kick up the arse after three hours onstage in some bar. It was one hell of a movement; spontaneous, marvellous. But everything was spoiled in the end by petty little fucked-up arguments. The alternatives have only themselves to blame for the end of the alternative movement. We just had to get out of there, because everyone began mistaking their friends for their enemies, whereas the real enemies were elsewhere entirely.’

  The Bondage label and their stable of purist punks were intensifying their war of words against what they saw as the quaint gavroche nonsense of the bands on Fat Frank’s Boucherie Productions, including Hot Pants and Los Carayos. Bands were forbidden to appear onstage with acts from the rival label.

  Manu’s attitude to these internecine spats was unequivocal. As he later told French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles: ‘Both Les Bérus and Gros François were pretty much responsible for this sense of strife and panic. They lost so much energy fighting against each other, and trying to prove who was the godfather of the scene and who wasn’t. I was completely wary of these different factions. The alternative movement had become like a uniform, not in the provinces, but here in Paris. It was like, “We’re genuine and they’re not.” I don’t like that kind of discourse.’ The atmosphere was becoming suffocating and unbearable. Manu Chao was being upbraided for his arrogance and control-freak tendencies. It was time to bow out, to move on up.