The trickiest part, recalls Manu, was to explain to the Colombian authorities that they didn’t want any soldiers on the train. ‘The army wanted to put soldiers on the train for our security. We had to spend months explaining to them that our only security was for them not to come, because we had to be neutral. That was the only way to be safe. If they came, we’d be dead, it would be war.’ In the end, there weren’t any shootouts at the shows. ‘That’s the thing we are really proud of with this train. Everywhere we stopped, in every little place, for maybe one week, there was no war. Everybody partied instead.’
It took a couple of months to customise the train, and whoever happened to be around was expected to lend a hand. ‘There were no roadies or technicians. Mano Negra was a democracy, so everyone had to join in,’ recalls photographer Youri Lenquette. ‘When I arrived, I thought I was going to take pictures. Instead I was given a hammer.’ With only a fraction of the funding promised for the trip, a train that was only half railworthy and no guarantees they would get out alive, ‘anyone with any sense wouldn’t have tried, let alone gone ahead with it,’ said Yenquette. ‘But Manu had a dream.’
After a month with all hands to the wheel, the train left Bogotá on 15 November 1993, with a motley crew of around a hundred souls on board. It trundled along at about 15km an hour, and within a day it had its first derailment. At least the slow pace meant that the passengers could climb on the roof and take a piss into the air rather than in the insanitary toilets, though that was a trickier job for the women.
Manu ‘the Jesuit’ tried to impose some rules. First, no guns on board. Secondly, with the French media already running stories with sly headlines like ‘French band take a line through Colombia’, he also tried to ban drugs, but it was a losing battle in a country where coke was 3,000 pesos a gramme and the infamous punto rojo, the powerful ganja from Sierra Nevada, was also ridiculously cheap. It might have been a good idea, though. The drugs fuelled a pervasive sense of paranoia about the various armed factions whose territory they were encroaching on.
Even the most basic knowledge of politcial and guerrilla factions in this war-torn country would have required levels of sophistry beyond anyone on the train. Even Ramón, who was a well-informed and experienced political journalist, found it a challenge at times to work out who was who on the merry-go-round of death that spun bewilderingly all about them. The chief protagonist in the conflict was the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which was founded in 1964 as a guerrilla offshoot of the Communist Party. Their political idealism was soon muddied by the need to raise cash, which they did by kidnapping and imposing ‘revolutionary taxes’, even on poor farmers. Many of its leaders were killed by hitmen in the employ of the big landowners who formed their own death squads with names like MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores – Death to Kidnappers) and other paramilitary groups, often backed by the CIA and other foreign agencies.
The Colombian Army periodically tried to impose order, with decreasing results and increasing bloodshed. Into this confused and bloody situation came the narco-trafficantes, or narcos for short, the drug barons who had bought up large swathes of land on which to cultivate coca crops. Peasant farmers would sell cheap when confronted by this cauldron of violence, and then move away, adding to the overcrowding in the large cities. The narcos, of course, hired their own killers and maintained their own private armies.
If all this wasn’t confusing enough, there were also many splinter groups, an alphabet soup of destruction: the PRT, the ELN, the EPL and the PP to name but a few, each with their own operational territory. There were vigilante groups with names like Vampire, Trigger, Alpha 83, some dedicated to eliminating street kids, others, such as the self-explanatory Death to Homosexuals, with more specific missions of violence. With grim irony, there was even a small paramilitary group called Mano Negra. And then there were freelancers, who belonged to no organisation, like the sicarios, teenage gunmen who would, for a minimal sum, shoot whoever their bosses had fingered.
Manu entertains a Colombian street kid on El Treno.
In 1992, a film made by Víctor Gaviria in Medellín called Rodrigo D: No Futuro, told the story of ten teenage sicarios who ran errands for local drug barons. By the time the film was released, nine of its stars were dead, and the film’s director feared for his life, declaring that the equivalent of US $50 was enough to get him killed. In Colombia, the punk slogan ‘No Futuro’ was more than just the rallying cry of bored teenagers. It was simply, for too many, a statement of fact. Measured by its homicide rate, Colombia was the most dangerous country in the world. In Medellín, the murder toll was ten times that of Los Angeles. In the year before Manu’s train trip, there had been 25,000 murders and 800 political assassinations in Colombia.
In this world turned upside down, where life was cheap, some of the big drug barons became popular folk heroes. Most notable among them was Pablo Escobar, who had spent some of his ill-gotten millions on building cheap housing and, on one occasion, handed out a thousand keys to a thousand lucky families in a single day. He also built schools and even a fabulous zoo, with free entry to the people, stocked with tigers, lions, rhinos and elephants, which had been flown in from exotic locations and housed in gilded cages. There was an ulterior motive, though. Elephant dung, when smeared on packages of cocaine, was apparently the most effective way of confusing police dogs. But, compared to most of the other actors in Colombia’s violence, Escobar was seen as a man of the people. He was killed while Manu and his cohorts were on the train, and his death was mourned far and wide.
Ramón Chao’s book The Train of Fire and Ice is subtitled Mano Negra in Colombia, but, as Manu points out, the subtitle was highly misleading. ‘I blame the publishers rather than my father. The band was effectively finished by the time of the train trip. We’d spent a year setting up the project, and they only decided to come at the last moment, and even then most only stayed a few days for the first concert.’
According to Tom Darnal, the one other member of Mano Negra who stayed on board for the whole trip, Manu was hoping for a ‘miracle’. He had no thoughts of pursuing a solo career at this point, far from it. The train trip was to be make or break, a kind of endurance test of the band’s mettle and capacity to survive the most loaded odds. The trip was less well organised than the Cargo Tour, and had almost no money at its disposal, but if the band members were committed to Mano Negra they would come, or so Manu believed. In a sense, it was also a way for Manu to ask his comrades the question, ‘How much do you love me?’
There were other musicians on the train who were possible new Mano Negra recruits, notably Fidel Nadal, a rapper the band had met in Argentina, who was to appear several times on Mano Negra’s final, posthumous album Casa Babylon. There was Jean Michel Gambit (also known as Gambeat), the giant, friendly bass player from The French Lovers, who played trashguinguette, a kind of unplugged French punk music hall mixed with formulaic rock’n’roll, which sounded as if it had been played without mics or amps in bars and dance halls throughout France and arranged by a psycho.
Like Les Casse Pieds, The French Lovers were alumni of the school of the Paris metro. ‘We met hanging around the neighbourhood. We used to talk, play music and then crash at six in the morning at Mano Negra’s office,’ recalls Mano. ‘I decided we had to bring The French Lovers along, especially as we didn’t know if Mano Negra would come. I was determined about that and somehow we found some francs to make it happen.’
The first show was in Santa Marta, on Colombia’s luminously green Caribbean coast. Five thousand people wandered from Philippe Mazaud’s Ice Exhibition to the Light Tent via the Brazilian capoeira dancers who provided an exotic counterpoint. Tom Darnal set-up his tattoo parlour, and his most popular designs were Jesus and Roberto the Dragon, who was the biggest attraction of the whole feria, with his projector eyes, smoke-spewing nostrils and ten-foot-long jets of fire which were expelled over the crowd to the sound of a special theme tune written by Tom. The French Lovers
played a set and when Xoumoul, their guitarist, cut his finger and needed stitches, Manu took his place.
Members of the public were always asking where to buy tickets, even though the show was free. But as crowd control swiftly became a pressing issue and unmanageable crushes built up at some attractions, it was decided to issue slips of paper which, in a parody of bureaucratic form-filling, were obtainable from the Office of Human Desires. Each applicant had to write down their passions or dreams for the future on the slips, which could then be handed in at the Ice Show as entrance tickets. A huge queue developed at the Office of Human Desires and local entrepreneurial types immediately started selling slips for 1,000 pesos. The written desires of the audience included winning the local beauty contest, or the lottery, or a motorbike, as well as the return of lost parents, the end of violence and Colombia winning the World Cup.
From the start the train had its stowaways – many of them lost street kids who boarded and refused to get off. In Santa Marta a black teenager called Rondelle, appeared onstage, dancing and singing with incredible panache, and then started drumming before rolling offstage. Manu befriended him and managed to find an organisation that helped young people to take him under their wing. He even thought about adopting Rondelle and bringing him back to France. But when Manu tried to contact him again, he had disappeared, and the charity had no idea what had become of him.
Mano Negra didn’t play on that first night in Santa Marta but took to the stage the following evening. Gambeat took on bass duties and Fidel Nadal rapped in Spanish at machine-gun speed, providing a brilliant and novel counterpoint to Manu’s baritone voice. Fans came from all over Colombia. Many had caught the band on the Cargo Tour and they treasured this unforeseen opportunity to see them again at this strange and wonderful feria, celebrating and dancing late into the humid night. Some new Casa Babylon material was premiered and the evening offered intriguing glimpses of a potential new direction for the band. But, from the band’s point of view, the sound was terrible – there were problems with the backline and they couldn’t hear what they are playing. And it turned out to be the last gig that Mano Negra ever played.
For several members of Mano Negra, the train trip was the last straw. Here was Manu dragging them into another quixotic scheme, for no money, in terrible conditions, as some kind of loyalty test. By the time the train trundled in to Márquez’s birthplace of Aracataca, where the gypsy Melquiades had revealed his block of ice, a stop ironically billed as the climax of the whole trip, Santi, Philippe, Pierre and Jean-Marc, the trumpeter who had been brought in to replace Antoine, decided they were bailing out and going home. The defection of the drummer, percussionist and brass section was the irrefutable end of Mano Negra, even if some of them helped to finish Casa Babylon back in Europe.
The band who had revolutionised French rock died there in Aracataca, the birthplace of magic realism. It was a disaster for the train trip. They were the big draw. How were Manu and Coco going to appease the funders from AFAA, who happened to be present? Or the press? ‘It’s not serious if some of Mano Negra leave,’ announced Cati, putting a brave face on the whole affair. ‘Manu is staying and so are Tom and Fidel.’ But no one was convinced.
There was a meeting to decide whether the Train would actually carry on with its journey. Ramón describes how the railway workers swung the argument. One of them, Diablito, put the case for continuing with sincere passion. ‘You don’t realise the hope this train brings to the villages we go through. It makes them dream of peace, of developing the country. Disappointing them will do a lot of harm. It would have been better not to start.’
So the train staggered on, through small towns like Bosconia, Barrancabermeja and Dorada, before returning to Bogotá, much to the appreciation of the locals. ‘Imagine the ambience – it was crazy,’ says Tom. ‘Half the train was on coke, half the crew had left, the money ran out completely, Coco lost a bundle.’ There was one Colombian whose job was to sit at the front of the train looking out for bombs. ‘At certain points they thought a bomb would be likely, and we all had to travel in the last wagon.’
The conditions were atrocious. ‘There was no chance to take a shower, no water, terrible hygiene, forty-degree heat and your clothes sticking to you,’ Tom remembers. ‘Sometimes you are pleased to remember such adventures in hindsight, but in the case of the train, actually, even to remember is painful.’ So why did Tom stay on board when the other Mano Negra guys jumped ship? ‘It’s my character,’ he explains. ‘You go to the end unless you have a really good reason to leave.’
The end of the line for Mano Negra: Youri Lenquette’s classic image.
Coco was hospitalised with an eye problem and most of the train-goers were afflicted with some kind of illness or other. But for Manu it was ‘maybe the greatest adventure I ever had’. His and Coco’s grandiose dream of reviving the railways in Colombia might have come to nothing. But the fact the train existed and got to the end without fatalities was a small miracle.
Back in France, there was still an album to finish. Manu wasn’t going to let that slip. Casa Babylon’s wild-style mix was more focused on Latin America, with large doses of reggae, the added raps of Fidel and pure rock’n’roll on tracks like the football terrace chant of “Santa Maradona”, a paean to the great football demigod (or demon, if you happen to be English and remember the ‘Hand of God’ incident in which his handball goal knocked England out of the 1992 World Cup).
Despite its fragmented gestation in different studios in the years leading up to and after the train trip, Casa Babylon was a great artistic leap forward. The sincere regret of Philippe and others is that the breakup of the band robbed them of the chance to perform the material live. ‘It took three months to recover from the Cargo Tour. We should have stopped, taken some time off to think about it, maybe do nothing for a year after all the touring. But no one considered that option,’ Philippe remembers. As for the train, ‘It was a tough experience, crazy, but real. We all cried – I mean, we suffered.’
Partly as a result of Manu’s experiences in South America, the songwriting on Casa Babylon was deeper and more mature. Unlike some of the other Mano Negra material, the songs still sound absolutely fresh and strong. On tracks like the mid-tempo “Señor Matanza”, Manu, singing in Mexican Spanish slang over an implacable salsa-reggae groove and an insidious descending organ line, takes on the big, corrupt authority figures who own the town, the land, the bars, the jineteras (hookers) and have the power of life or death. Manu went back to Bogotá on his own to film a clip for the song, with the faithful François Bergeron, as ever, directing.
On “Sueño De Solentitiname” (Dream Of Solentitiname), Manu dreams of Guanajuato, Guatemala and Panama during a night of unrest, asking the ‘beloved world’ for a cure to his pain. On “Bala Perdida”, people ‘boil night and day on the avenue’, seething with ‘expensive cargo’ and ‘guajira blood’. There are characters who reappear from earlier albums, like the little urban monkey who ‘speaks his mind.’ Then there’s a track featuring Super Changó, the Yoruba God of Thunder, a key deity in Cuban Santeria and Brazilian Candomblé, reborn as a cartoon superhero – Batman from south of the border. Manu went on to develop this character in a story he used as a basis for Clandestino.
The album was described as ‘a masterpiece of kinetic aural globalism’ by Josh Kun, a writer specialising in rock en Español, who highlighted its use of samples, spoken-word snippets and atmospherics recorded on the road – all of which looked ahead to Manu’s solo albums, Clandestino and Próxima Estación: Esperanza. Casa Babylon was a parent to those twin siblings, with Manu’s hand firmly on the tiller. With Mano Negra in ruins, the album is often seen as his first solo work, to the annoyance of the other musicians who took part, though it’s not a claim Manu ever makes himself.
While the band had disintegrated, Manu was in the studio every day. ‘The others came and went,’ he remembers. At times he did go off on his own, booking studios and paying for them himself if
necessary. ‘The band still owe me money for that,’ he claims. A couple of tracks towards the end of the album, “La Vida” and “Sueño de Solentiname”, were recorded in this way.
From Manu’s point of view, with his work ethic and driven nature goading him on, and with the dysfunctional collective playing only an erratic role, it was up to him to bring the album to fruition by any means necessary. Tom, stalwart to the end, resented the fact that Manu would finish mixes without telling him. ‘I’d start a tune and leave it and by the time I came in the next day it had become something else, a Manu song,’ he recalls.
Nonetheless, Tom was responsible for injecting a valuable boost of energy: the opening of Casa Babylon is a storming track called “Viva Zapata”, the first musical testimony to the new political movement of the Zapatistas. Tom had been in Mexico in January 1994 when the the Zapatista Army of National Liberation emerged out of the jungle in the Chiapas region of Mexico to occupy the important regional centre of San Cristóbal de las Casas. The Zapatistas were named after Emilio Zapata, the leading figure in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Both Tom and Manu found their campaign inspiring and both became involved in the cause with its demands for indigenous land rights, political equality and self-government. Tom later spent a few weeks in the mountains in the Chiapas. ‘They said they wanted a foreign person to look after a school far into the mountains in a small village and look out for planes.’ Manu also sought out the Zapatistas out a couple of years later and ended up jamming with their charismatic leader Subcomandante Marcos, who always appeared in a mask to keep his real identity secret.
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