Variants of Santeria can be found elsewhere like Haiti and Brazil, where it is called Candomblé. Manu became fascinated with these Afro-Catholic religions in the years following his visit to Cuba in 1992, and was later initiated into Candomblé in Brazil. While temperamentally suspicious of conventional churches and their hierarchies and hypocrisy, this magical, healing, musical expression of the marginalized, appealed to Manu’s spirit.
From Cuba, the Meliquiades sailed on to Brazil, where they staged performances in Fortaleza, a modern city with skyscrapers, and on the beach in Ceara in the Northeast (where, years later, Manu’s son was brought up). The by now ragged troupe of musicians and performers put on an explosive show in Salvador in Bahia, the old, atmospheric Brazilian capital and vibrant centre of black culture. Next stop was Rio de Janeiro, which Manu has often declared his favourite city in the world. ‘It’s the only place in the world where, if you walk into a bar at midnight playing a drum, they complain when you stop two hours later,’ he claims.
The visit of the Melquiades was timed to coincide with a parade for the opening of the Rio Earth Summit, a global ecological forum sponsored by the United Nations, which made minor progress with the ratification of a climate change convention that preceded the Kyoto Protocol. Other issues on the agenda, however, such as fighting poverty and respecting indigenous rights got almost nowhere.
Protesters present at the Earth Summit included Jello Biafra, ex-lead singer of Californian punk band The Dead Kennedys and a dedicated green activist, who made a guest appearance at the Mano Negra gig. With anthems like “California Über Alles”, the Dead Kennedys had been the closest thing that the USA ever got to The Clash or Mano Negra, before the band disintegrated into bitter quarrels over songwriting rights and whether their music should be used for corporate ads for the likes of Levi’s jeans.
The story of the Cargo Tour spawned its own graphic novel by David Lorapido, ‘A Perilous Adventure’.
Despite being the main lyricist and lead vocalist, Biafra had lost a court case and was no longer able to use the name of the band. (Manu should have perhaps paid closer attention to the story, as a similar fate was to befall him.) Biafra was a key figure – part clown, part guru of American punk. He told Mano Negra that he’d just come from a demonstration involving 15,000 people and had made his own banner, which he proceeded to unfurl onstage. ‘Bush is an Eco Wimp’, it read. He explained that President Bush, George W.’s father, was ‘chickenshit’ before launching into visceral versions of The Clash’s “I Fought The Law” and the Dead Kennedy’s immortal anthem “Too Drunk To Fuck”. The heaving, super-heated Rio crowd had to be cooled down with fire hoses.
Rock music in South America still had a radical edge, having been subjected to all kinds of harassment and abuse for decades. The Mayor of Medellín in Colombia lost his job after allowing a rock festival to take place in the city. In Mexico, rock was effectively banned for a decade after 1971. In Cuba, the nueva trova singer Silvio Rodríguez was fired from his official job after declaring that the Beatles were a major influence. And in Brazil, singers like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso went into exile after their Tropicalia movement was hounded both by the military dictatorship and left-wingers who considered their music an imperialist invasion. According to the book Rockin’ Las Americas, during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1976–82) ‘police routinely disrupted concerts and beat up rock followers for the sole offence of gathering to listen to music considered threatening to the military regime.’
By the time Mano Negra’s Cargo Tour hit the continent a decade later, however, rock was being ‘decriminalised’ and the authorities were showing greater tolerance towards it than ever before. But there was still a real sense of the subversive quality surrounding rock music, unbelievable as that might seem in the current era of bland TV talent shows, branded rock bands and corporate-friendly festivals.
This was the context behind the outrage caused by Mano Negra in Argentina. After a visit to Uruguay, the Cargo Tour’s last port of call was Buenos Aires at the beginning of July, where the most notorious incident of the whole Mano Negra story took place. On a TV show called La TV Ataca, the presenter Mario Pergolini asked Tom Darnal to define anarchism. Obligingly, Tom proceeded to get up, knock over the camera and storm out of the studio shouting ‘C’est de merde. Vive l’anarchie!’ (It’s all shit! Long live anarchy!).
Manu was still in Uruguay when this outrage occurred. The rest of the band had gone to Buenos Aires by plane without him. He arrived in Buenos Aires on the Melquiades and saw what he thought was a welcoming committee from the French Embassy down on the docks. Instead of welcoming him, however, the diplomats told him that Mano Negra had to leave Argentina immediately. ‘They didn’t want people like us in the country and our plane was ready,’ Manu remembers. ‘They advised us that we shouldn’t go down into the streets because we had offended the Argentinian people and they were going to kill us. They said we would never be allowed back and our career in Argentina was over. But ten minutes later, I was in the harbour and some dockers came to me and asked me if I was the guy from Mano Negra, and they said they loved the band. When I talked to Tom, he said everyone was stopping him to congratulate him on the street.’
Just as the Sex Pistols’ liberal use of swear words on Bill Grundy’s British TV show had propelled them to into the tabloids and the national consciousness back in 1976 – ‘The Filth and the Fury’ was the infamous frontpage headline in the Daily Mirror – so the Mano Negra TV incident launched Mano Negra skywards in Argentina. The band, and Tom Darnal in particular, woke up the next morning to find themselves famous.
The Cargo Tour had been a success in Manu’s estimation. The brilliant and spectacular entertainment on the boat, the band’s exhilarating performances, firing on all cylinders, and the many life-changing contacts and inspirations, matured everyone in the band, musically, politically and spiritually.
However, the strain of such an exhausting adventure had also been enough to provoke open rebellion and the first defections from the band. Antoine had loved the technical work but was disillusioned with all the ego-tripping that came increasingly to the fore, despite all the talk of no more heroes. ‘I felt almost more at home with Royal de Luxe,’ he said. ‘It was a good feeling, because I was getting sick of the band. I took advantage of the situation to make a switch and become a mechanic. I was happy to get my hands dirty again.’ He had decided to leave the band.
Jo Dahan was the next to go. He’d always been the most purist member of Mano Negra, politically speaking, and had never wanted to sign to a major label in the first place. He joined the Wampas, whose biggest subsequent hit, ironically, was a tune called “Manu Chao”, which reached the French top 20 in 2003. Its lyric went ‘If I had Manu’s Chao’s wallet, I’d take a holiday in the Congo’.
A band on the brink of implosion: Daniel Jamet, Jo Dahan, Philippe ‘Garbancito’ Teboul and Manu Chao.
Daniel Jamet also decided to call it quits, partly because he was shocked by the death of Helno, the lead singer of Mano Negra’s friends and rivals Les Négresses Vertes, from a drugs overdose. Shortly before Helno died, he met up with Daniel and said, ‘I have everything I should need to be happy, but I’m miserable.’ Daniel empathised. Life was too short to be miserable in a band in which he felt he wasn’t an equal part.
The tension between the collective rhetoric and the reality of Manu’s leadership was always going to be tricky for everyone to live with and accept. Manu, while egalitarian in principle, was unwilling to compromise artistically. ‘If you have a guitarist that wants to experiment with his fuzz box onstage when that isn’t something you rehearsed,’ he told Jackie Berroyer, ‘that creates a problem. Someone had to have the artistic vision.’ And friction resulted from the fact that the media naturally tended to focus on Manu in interviews, not least because he was highly articulate and an accomplished interviewee. Manu claims he encouraged the others to do more media chores. ‘But, in fact, they didn’t actually
volunteer much, although they still complained about it.’
Some members of the band were annoyed that Manu seemed to contradict himself on a regular basis. Tom Darnal quotes the example of Manu refusing to talk to the conservative press or media, but at the same time loving the idea of doing the music for a Brazilian telenovela, the hugely popular soap operas that gripped Latin America. The companies making these telenovelas were right-wing media conglomerates like Globo. But, according to Tom, the splits also boiled down to a simple human fact – ‘We just got fed up with each other.’
It was the beginning of the end of Mano Negra. ‘It all started with everyone sharing the same goals, and the same direction,’ Manu explained twenty years later. ‘But you end up compromising with what you want to do and what the others want to do – and the band were all strong characters. If you compromise a bit, you can accept that, but there has to be a limit to compromise.’ Another growing problem was more personal. ‘As time went on, more of the band became attached and some had become fathers and family men. Three of us were single and still wanted the rush,’ Manu says. ‘But it was natural for the others to have different priorities.’ Bernard Batzen has his own explanation: ‘Manu is an artist twenty-four hours of every day. Most of the other musicians were part-timers compared to him.’
The tension wasn’t helped by the fact that there was a new album to do. Casa Babylon, Mano Negra’s last opus, was never going to be a straightforward piece of work and the tortuous process involved in its creation is evident in that it was recorded in numerous different studios in France, Germany, the States and Argentina. There was a silver lining, however; the album is reckoned to be Mano Negra’s greatest, both by the critics and the band itself.
What happened to the Cargo boat? The Nantes street was reconstructed at a museum in Normandy, while the boat was sold to Greek shipbuilders to transport materials for the reconstruction of Beirut. Meantime, South America was calling again. Coco and Manu had dreamed up an even greater and crazier scheme.
CHAPTER 7:
PRÓXIMA ESTACIÓN – VIOLENCIA
‘We’re not going to make politics; we just want to give something free for the people.’
Manu Chao
Colombia, November 1993. ‘The guerrillas wouldn’t shoot a bunch of clowns, would they? I mean, where’s the propaganda value in that?’ Manu was praying his intuition was right. They had been offered protection by the army, but Manu had turned it down. Then, four hours outside of Santa Marta, a group of masked men with AKA sub-machine guns held up the train. They were hardened men, trained killers, who were used to fighting the army and ambushing military patrols, but on this occasion it was difficult to say which party was the most shocked. The guerrillas were confronted by a train pulling twenty-one carriages, full of a hundred unwashed punks and hippies, assorted other vagabonds and, as their protection against slaughter, a handful of clowns.
There was also a cage wagon for Roberto, the giant metal flame-throwing dragon (or possibly iguana, no one was sure about that); a yeti wagon, which unleashed snowstorms; a museum wagon full of frozen sculptures; and a fairground wagon. Other wagons housed a tattoo parlour set-up by Tom Darnal, a studio for the Colombian broadcaster Caracol Radio, who were one of the sponsors of the trip (the guerrillas eyed Caracol’s satellite dish with great interest), and a performance stage for the musicians. The ice sculpture idea only worked sporadically because some narco-traficantes had stolen a truck containing a large ice-making machine. Having no clue what to do with it, they later dumped it in a ditch.
After plenty of confusion, and an intervention by Manu, who explained that the whole idea of this caravan on rails was to put on free shows for the people, the guerrillas let the train pass, even offering to take over from the clowns as tour security for the rest of the trip.
One of the passengers on the train was Manu’s father Ramón Chao, whose evocative memoir of the trip was published under the title The Train of Fire and Ice. Ramón felt his paternal presence might magically protect his offspring. ‘As long as I was there, no harm would come to him,’ he claimed, somewhat self-importantly. When he first asked Manu if he could be part of his son’s latest adventure, Manu said that he wasn’t the organiser but that Ramón could come along by all means. But could he try and make what he wrote more readable? ‘You mustn’t use too many literary references,’ he told his father. ‘Your last novel was too ornate. I couldn’t finish it.’
There have been some legendary rock’n’roll train trips. Nigel Williamson summed up their history in Songlines magazine: ‘The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin once took a ten-day train trip across the Canadian prairies, stopping every night along the route to jam and drink the local saloons dry. Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers undertook a similarly debauched coast-to-coast US train tour in 1969, landing their record company with a $100,000 tab from the bar and restaurant car. Yet there has surely never been a ride quite like the one Mano Negra took across Colombia in 1993.’
Initially, the train was Coco’s idea. Flushed with the success of the Cargo Tour, the majordomo of Royal de Luxe approached Manu with his latest scheme. It had been inspired by the time he’d spent time travelling in Colombia after the Cargo Tour. ‘I saw train tracks everywhere but never trains,’ Coco remembers. ‘I asked about it at Bogotá central station. The engines still worked, but none of them ever left the marshalling yards. Hundreds of towns that had been served by trains in the past had been cut off, leaving them hostage to the army, drug traffickers and guerrillas. I told myself something needed to be done. But what? So, to make people talk about something other than terror in Colombia, I conjured up the idea of a train reconciling the two hereditary enemies – fire and ice.’
It turned out that the longest and most significant railway line that Coco and Manu could revive was the old Sun Express from Bogotá to Santa Maria, which passed through Aracataca, Márquez’s birthplace. One Hundred Years Of Solitude is a fabulist’s account of this town’s history, a tragicomedy woven from the epic story of a local family, which opens with the line ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ This was a sign, Manu and Coco decided one stoned evening. It was written in the invisible book of fate. They would call their transport The Train of Fire and Ice – which also forged an elegant link with the cargo boat which had been named Melquiades, after the gypsy in Márquez’s novel who brought ice to Macondo (his fictional name for Aracataca).
For Manu the idea was particularly potent. ‘After touring there,’ he explained, ‘I realised in fact that there are two countries in South America. The big border is between the cities and the countryside. There are two universes, which are totally different. With the Cargo we went to all the big cities and with the Train, the idea was not to play the big cities but to play for the people of the deep-down country, which is another culture, another people.’ The train with its vagabonds and gypsies wasn’t going to stop at cities like Cali or Medellín, but at small places like Gamarra and Bosconia. Meanwhile, it would give a publicity boost to the railways, which were increasingly under threat.
Initially, railways had been built in Colombia primarily for the transport of single products, linking the coffee-growing areas to the sea, for example. The United Fruit Company had its own railway to freight bananas from their huge farms to ports on the Caribbean coast. It had been impossible for the humble citizen to cross the country by rail for more personal and mundane purposes. Aware of this shortcoming, the government poured millions into developing an interconnected network between 1922 and 1934. But in the following decades, and especially under the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, ‘an offensive against the Labour movement led to the dismantling of large state enterprises’, according to Ramón Chao. Bus and truck companies, the domestic airline Avianca and other private companies emerged as savage competitors to the state railways. By the time of the Colombian train adventure,
there were only 1,600 km of track left in use, and the authorities had allowed them to deteriorate to such an extent that derailments were commonplace. Ramón quotes the president of the rail company as saying that ‘the average speed this year has risen to twenty-three kilometres an hour, and we’ve had 1,000 derailments’.
It took more than a year to prepare the The Train of Fire and Ice, with Coco, the ‘irresistible’ production manager Cati Benainous and Manu straining to convince the Colombians that the idea was feasible and searching high and low for backers. A decent tranche of seed money – 550,000 francs – was provided by AFAA, the French arts organisation directed by Jean Digne, who believed culture was to be found as much in the streets as the Paris Opéra, and had already backed the Cargo Tour in 1992.
For Manu this planning stage was just as fascinating as the actual trip itself. ‘One village was run by guerrillas, another was paramilitary, so we had to say, “In six months we want to come and give a concert. Of course, we ain’t gonna come if you’re going to kill, kidnap or rape us.” We told them we were musicians and clowns. “We’re not going to make politics; we’re not coming with the government. We just want to give something free for the people.” So we had to negotiate all that.’
Manu remembers the advance guard, ‘in a little car, on the train, with a few friends, like in a Western, going from village to village‘. In each one ‘there seemed to be so much violence daily. Within families it was like Yugoslavia, where one brother might be a paramilitary and another a guerrilla. In every village they seemed to burying somebody.’
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