Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Manu himself got on reasonably well with Les Bérus, and when they told him they weren’t receiving royalties because they didn’t believe in copyrights, he pragmatically suggested to them that they should collect them and then give them away. As it turned out, several years later, Les Bérus did try to claim their royalties, but Bondage no longer had the money, and a resulting court case ended up, as Manu predicted, with ‘the worst solution’. The lawyers benefited more than either the band or any deserving causes.

  Most people in the know agree that the intense era of blood, sweat, tears and inspiring music that was the alternative French rock scene of the 1980s came to a climactic end on 11 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That night, Bérurier Noir, the undisputed Pied Pipers of the hard-core tendency, took to the stage of the famous Olympia music hall in Paris for the third in a series of three savage and incendiary concerts. They had never sounded better, and when they launched into the song “Porcherie”, and brought all the young punks to a feverish boil with the cry ‘We are white, we are black, we are yellow … WE ARE DYNAMITE!!’ it really seemed as if the Bastille was about to be stormed all over again. Then at the end of the show Les Bérus announced that this was to be their last ever gig. That was it. The end of an era …

  CHAPTER 5:

  GOING SOUTH

  ‘I understand the song … you’re describing our shitty lives.’

  A Mano Negra fan from Lima, Peru

  Mano Negra were in Peru when Les Bérus performed their act of self-immolation at the Olympia. It was Bernard Batzen who had the inspired idea of sending the band to South America. He, like others, was convinced that Mano Negra had the potential to cross borders and become huge all over the world, and he was not alone in his ambition. International success was an obsession for many ambitious managers and execs working in the French music industry at the time. They were fed up with having to narrow their ambitions for world domination to France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec and a few French-speaking islands lost in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.

  So Batzen lost no time in putting his conviction to the test. He started to work his contacts at the Alliance Française, a state organisation whose aim is to promote French culture in every corner of the globe. The band were becoming hotter and more together, and it was important to keep them on the road and performing. After laying down some new songs back at Studio Mix-It for their Virgin debut, the group headed off for a life-changing trip to Peru and Ecuador.

  The journey had an immediate and profound effect, particularly on Manu and Antoine. They had been brought up listening to the dissidents and poets of South America and now at last they were experiencing the oppressed and the benighted condition of the continent, as well as its dazzling beauty, at first hand. ‘We arrived in Lima, which seemed a ravaged place,’ recalled Antoine. ‘We were really seeing the “open veins” of South America.’ (The reference is to Eduardo Galeano’s celebrated book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama as a gift in 2009.) ‘The place seemed to be foundering like a sinking ship, with poor folk bailing out the wreckage.’ Jako, the roadie, remembered that the band were ‘overwhelmed by the slums’.

  The only tourists in Peru – Mano Negra arrive in Machu Picchu, from the Mano Negra scrapbook compiled by Tom Darnal and the band.

  They certainly weren’t in Kansas any more … or Paris, with its well run venues and experienced technicians. The South American gigs were often shambolic and occasionally dangerous. One in Cuzco almost ended in tragedy. ‘It was the first gig ever put on by foreigners there,’ Santi remembers. ‘They hadn’t even seen bands form Ecuador or Argentina. It was 3,700 feet up and there was a lack of oxygen. We were eating coca leaves to keep ourselves on our feet.’ The stage itself was a rickety structure, two stages in one, and the sound system consisted of rows of tiny amps and speakers which local technicians had somehow wired together. ‘I have absolutely no idea how it held,’ Santi says. Manu remembers negotiating all afternoon with the army about security.

  When the band finally made it onstage, Philippe collapsed during the second song. The organisers had thoughtfully provided oxygen cylinders and he sat by the side of the stage with an oxygen mask on. There was a police cordon about three metres from the stage, but a horde of local kids forced their way past it. Three quarters of the way through, the stage collapsed. Even the normally unflappable Santi was freaked. ‘Two Peruvian guys got hit by amps, Philippe had collapsed and I saw Tom under the stage, Manu fell and I thought this is the end, the ultimate. We were in serious shit.’

  The reaction of the fans in South America changed Mano Negra’s outlook. One of them came backstage after the show Lima and told them that “Mala Vida” was a description of his life, and that of most people he knew. To the band it had never been much more than a love song with a mildly bitter twist. ‘He said, “I understand the song. You’re describing our shitty lives.” So something intense was getting across. Suddenly I saw it as a responsibility,’ Antoine remembers. Both Tom and Manu recall the incident as a tipping point in the band’s perspective.

  This was a genuinely dangerous time to be in Peru, with much of the country under the sway of the brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas, a Maoist revolutionary movement with a personality cult around its leader Abimael Guzmán. They were infamous for their killings of those they saw as enemies of the struggle – and two foreign tourists were beheaded during the band’s stay. Their activities meant that even in the tourist areas like Cuzco, Mano Negra were practically the only foreigners.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, its dangers, the trip expanded the band’s political horizons significantly, but Mano Negra was also a hedonistic rock’n’roll band on its first ever serious outing. Initially, Manu resisted the easy drugs. Jackie Berroyer, who had been invited along to South America partly to say thanks for his Rapido TV clip and the impact it had had on Manu’s career, recalls seeing Manu in a bar that was ‘like some cartoon South America – guys with hats, guitars and vagabond drug-dealers with guns’ and Manu saying, ‘I don’t need drugs – I feel I’m already on Mars.’ The boss of the hotel in Lima where Mano Negra stayed asked Tom Darnal if he was looking for anything and produced a large bag of weed out of his jacket pocket. When Darnal hesitated, the hotel-manager produced a large bag of cocaine out of his other pocket. ‘I’ll take both,’ Tom said.

  Even the bosseur, hard-working Manu, ended up having a cocaine binge. ‘I was given half a kilo,’ he says. ‘It lasted one week. In Europe cocaine was the drug of the elite, but in the suburbs where we came from it was hashish or heroin. In Paris you could only get coke in the kind of clubs that would never allow us in.’ Manu ended up with an aching jaw and an over-cranked nervous system. ‘For me, this kind of shit didn’t help. It’s a stupid drug. There is nothing more boring than going to a party when everyone is on it.’ Years later, he found other more conducive drugs like peyote in South America.

  When the band paid a visit to a TV station in Lima, things became surreal. ‘The TV station was surrounded by the army, who controlled it,’ Manu recalls. ‘Outside there were fans and mothers with their children shouting out, “Marry my daughter!” We were appearing on a variety show aimed at poor people, and everyone on it was very smart. We were wearing secondhand Brixton-style gear from the 1960s and the presenter asked us where we were from before announcing, “They’ve come from Paris to show us the latest style.” When he asked me if I was married and I answered “No”, a girl suddenly jumped out and kissed me. The whole of Peru was watching. Then the presenter said, “Dance!” and I heard this slow, strange music coming on over the speakers. It was “Mala Vida”, except they were playing it at the wrong speed, at 33rpm. The announcer eventually realised there was a mistake.’

  Another TV show featured hundreds of dancing girls and rabbits. For the band, it was like being in Alice in Wonderland whilst off their
heads on drugs.

  Tom Darnal remembers Manu being more disciplined than most of the rest of the band. A nickname, ‘The Jesuit’, began to stick to Manu. It wasn’t entirely friendly and Tom thinks that it was a little unfair: ‘He wasn’t a puritan by nature, but he could be a bit moralistic. He didn’t like the band to exploit young girls. And as far as I know, he was always faithful to Anouk.’ Anouk, who was still Manu’s long-term girlfriend, became an honorary member of the band, helping out on PR and videos. She was even beginning to have some musical ambitions of her own. Some of the other guys, on their first foreign tour, living dangerously, sky high on adulation and coke, were less circumspect with the willing Latinas.

  Whatever anxieties they had harboured in the past about their ability to please foreign audiences and make it overseas were now banished. The band performed more of their Spanish songs, like “Patchanka”, and beefed up the salsa-flavoured elements in their repertoire. The newest band member, Pierre Gauthé, proved his mettle in the testing fire of the tour. ‘Antoine wasn’t a salsero and neither was I,’ he remembers. ‘The refrain in “Patchanka” is a pseudo-salsa chorus which was maybe a bit mechanised, but Antoine had a gift, he had amazing energy. I had to learn to play like my ass was on fire. We combined knowledge and expertise.’ Antoine was the more visceral player, Pierre the more musically trained. Together they packed an astonishing punch.

  Mano Negra at their peak, back in France in 1990. Manu is grabbing a hank of Daniel Jamet; Philippe Teboul looks on from the percussion.

  Although none of the band were Latino musicians, the audiences in South America loved the sheer vigour of the brass and the way in which it combined with the rock and punk energy. Mano Negra went out to South America almost as musical tourists but learned a lot there, building up a new cohesion and confidence. They came back a changed band. Photos and film clips of the tour found their way back to France and boosted the band’s already strong mystique. The promotion of their next album, Puta’s Fever, used plenty of South American footage (up there on YouTube for the curious). Manu called the continent rambotico, from the Spanish word estrambotico, meaning ‘outlandish’ or ‘freaky’. ‘It’s a new word I invented,’ he says. ‘I felt I had come home.’

  Back in France, their brains still swarming with South American impressions, Mano Negra set about trying to finish their debut album for Virgin at the plush Studio Marcadet in the 16th arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne. Whereas Patchanka had been the work of an ad hoc ‘patchwork’ of friends, this time round a permanent and well-drilled Mano Negra were producing their first coherent band album.

  Some of the old tracks, such as the longer version of “Patchanka” which had surfaced in South America, were revisited and reworked, something that became a pattern with Manu. The album opened with another version of the surf-punk workout “Mano Negra” before segueing into “Rock’n’Roll Band”, a rollercoaster ride which would win no prizes for its original rhyming: ‘If you wanna dance / Take a chance’. But Mano Negra weren’t aiming to win the Prix Goncourt or become members of the Academie Française, so no one cared.

  Several tracks on Puta’s Fever became live staples, including the wacky “Magic Dice”, with its drunk fairground organ. The song was the first sighting of Manu’s obsession with chance and was inspired by reading Luke Rhinehart’s book The Dice Man, in which the main character rolls a dice to take his decisions, a habit the band adopted. If the right road to take seemed unclear, the dice and the gods of randomness were called upon to decide.

  Another highlight was a laid-back, latin-reggae track called “Guayaquil City”, written by Tom and Manu after their trip to Guayaquil in Ecuador – a tale of murder, strikes, Colombian drug barons and Chinese gangsters. ‘The city will explode / So hot it can’t endure’ went the lyric.

  The Puta’s Fever sessions also produced a bewitching trio of singles. First came the bouncy rock-rap “King Kong Five” – Mano Negra’s fantasy name – which could be played live in different tempos and styles. Then there was “Pas Assez De Toi” (Not Enough Of You), a perverse love song whose lyrics translate as: ‘I feel like turning up the gas / Like blowing my brains out / Like explaining to you how / Your indifference doesn’t affect me / I can very well go on without you.’

  Sell-out? The band own up to all charges on Puta’s Fever, aligning with the sex workers of Pigalle.

  The third single, “Sidi H’Bibi”, was the old metro busking favourite that showcased Daniel’s fluid, accomplished guitar playing. Absurdly, for what is only a celebratory wedding song, it was banned by mainstream radio in France, who judged it too comforting to the enemy because it was sung in Arabic and released during the first Gulf War. Despite, or even because of, the ban, it was a top 20 hit in France.

  The band returned from South America to face a fully loaded concert schedule. That had been their instruction to Batzen: book as many gigs as possible. ‘From that point on we never really went home,’ says Tom. The tour dates just came rolling in – Amiens, Nantes, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Roskilde, Rotterdam, Geneva, Rotterdam and their first date in London.

  Journalist Andy Morgan remembers Mano Negra’s visit to London’s legendary Marquee Club, where there was a real sense of anticipation. John Lydon, previously of the Sex Pistols, milled amongst the hipster crowd. In a review for the British folk and world music magazine Folk Roots (now fRoots), Morgan enthused about ‘a welter of original songs in English, Spanish, Arabic and French. Full throttle ska merged into lilting Latino via thrash metal, dub reggae and … believe me … most points in between. Guitarist Daniel Jamet drove his Les Paul to the absolute threshold of feedback and noise and then with equal ease broke into a jazzy doodle that old Les himself might well have been proud of.’

  A second London gig at the Town & Country club ended in a fight between the local security crew and the band. ‘They came after us with sticks,’ recalls Frank Mahaut, Mano Negra’s lighting guy. The band’s friends from Archaos, the French punk circus, also happened to be in town. An all-night session of mutual drinking and dope smoking was needed to calm everyone down. But the gig was a stand-out. A few weeks before he died in 2010, the revered English DJ Charlie Gillett recalled it as one of the most exciting he’d ever seen: ‘Manu did the crowd surfing thing and the band generally instilled delirium in everybody who saw them.’

  The band’s work rate was ramping up. To illustrate their commitment to hard graft, Batzen mentions that he was offered a show in Lausanne on Christmas Eve 1989 and thought the band might turn it down. But in the end, not only did they perform the show, ‘they also jammed for hours afterwards in different combinations playing great punk, salsa and soul music’. Christmas Day was spent recuperating.

  The Iveco van Mano Negra travelled in was jammed with the nine band members and crew, plus boxes of T-shirts, posters and records. ‘It was more crowded than a Tokyo capsule hotel,’ said Jacques the indefatigable roadie. ‘Like stuffing nine people into a one-man apartment. But that van carried us everywhere we needed to go, so hats off to it.’

  Often they played two shows in one day and usually sold out both. Jo says that the adulation was great to experience, but adds that it was hard not to change with success. ‘Everyone starts looking up to you and laughing at your jokes. Which is stupid. But every night we ruled. We really thought we were the best band in the world.’

  Virgin were delivering on their promises to promote the band to the hilt and Puta’s Fever was given high-priority marketing status. A TV clip of the time shows Manu saying, ‘We played in London, we’re number three in Holland, number two in Italy and we’ve never even set foot there. I don’t know what’s going on.’ He looks quizzical and slightly taken aback by the vertiginous ascent of the band.

  The biggest venues in Paris beckoned, too, but instead, in March 1990, Mano Negra and Batzen hit on the wonderful notion of doing a tour of Pigalle, the old red-light district below Montmartre. From a business point of view, this was crazy. The band could have easil
y sold out the Zenith arena or some other big Parisian club for fifteen times the money they would earn in the bars and theatres of Pigalle. But the band reckoned that some of the old Pigalle sleaze joints that usually programmed strip shows would make ideal venues. ‘We’d seen these clubs like the Folies Bergères and L’Erotica, beautiful rooms that we thought would be amazing to play some rock in,’ Manu said at the time. ‘We did it because it was wild idea,’ says Santi. ‘It was a media coup, a great example of alternative, creative marketing.’

  The band reacted to the accusations of sell-out by calling their new album Puta’s Fever, deflecting all that earnest criticism by referring to themselves as putas (whores). The album title and Pigalle tour were perfectly in tune with Tom’s deliciously erotic retro album cover. It was a titillating story for the media, who duly lapped it up. The whole campaign was also Manu and the band’s way of showing solidarity with marginalised workers in the sex industry and the frequently exploited hookers whose clients were, as often as not, hypocritical moralisers.

  At the time, the record industry was in a panic thanks to the widespread practice of making cassette copies of new albums, which, it claimed, was seriously damaging sales. Record companies had launched a Europe-wide campaign with the slogan ‘Home taping is killing music!’ Mano Negra’s take on the issue, pithily expressed in a slogan on the album artwork, was ‘Home fucking is killing prostitution.’

  The live shows in Pigalle were wild and the band often carried on playing outside on the street to fans who couldn’t get into place Pigalle. Some of them ended up dancing gleefully on top of cars. All this mayhem was the cue for ‘major problems with insurance companies and car owners’, Bernard Batzen recalls. But it was all good footage. François Bergeron made an atmospheric film of the Pigalle tour, capturing the band’s shows as well as putas of indeterminate sex and other denizens of the night like the preserved-in-aspic chansonnier Pierre Carré, who had been singing on most nights in a bar called Noctambules on place Pigalle for over forty years. In other scenes, Manu drives a motorbike, with Pierre and his trombone perched precariously on the back seat, while Daniel, who was the group’s most accomplished comic, sings a raucous hung-over version of the song “Roger Cageot”, half-submerged in a morning-after pile of cardboard boxes and apocalyptic debris.