Something that appealed to Manu and Tom was the Zapatistas’ style, notably the playful communiqués of Marcos, full of metaphors, jokes and poetry. Marcos was a postmodern media-savvy trickster. He styled himself Subcomandante because he deemed himself to be ‘under the orders of the people’ and rejected the idea that he was a leader.
‘The Zapatistas were the first ones I came across who really explained the politics of globalisation to me, before the French intellectuals,’ says Manu. ‘And that the economy rules the world and politicians mean nothing. The Zapatistas have a good analysis of what modern society is and how it works. We felt very involved with them. Their messages were the exact same things I was thinking, and there aren’t many examples of messages like that coming at you in the world. Also, they never said they were fighting for power, nor wanting to be president. They want dignity.’
Manu’s support for the Zapatistas has continued ever since, both financially and otherwise. ‘It was, like, finally there is someone we can trust,’ he said. Marcos himself declared that ‘Music holds roads that only the knowledgeable know how to walk and builds bridges that bring worlds that otherwise you wouldn’t even dream about, closer together.’
When Casa Babylon was released in May 1994, it went into the top 10 of the French album charts and was a minor hit across Europe. But with no live band to promote it, it was yet another missed opportunity for Mano Negra to go truly global. Nonetheless, while the album enjoyed only modest success in Europe, it had an electrifying impact in South America. Josh Kun attests to scores of bands who cite Casa Babylon as a major source of inspiration. In Mexico, particularly, it inspired a whole generation of bands, including Tijuana No!, Plastilina Mosh, Café Tacuba, Maldita Vecindad and El Gran Silencio. In Argentina, it galvanised established bands like Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. There were even rock venues on the continent, like the one in Córdoba, Argentina, described in the introduction to this book, who changed their name to Casa Babylon.
‘The album has grown over the years into a sort of unofficial template for Latin American rockeros looking for models of New World collision,’ wrote Kun. The Colombian philosopher Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, whose book What If Latin America Ruled the World? examines the region’s growing influence on the international stage, said that, for him, as for a multitude of disaffected youth at the time, ‘Mano Negra were our band more than any other. And Mano Chao was a visionary.’ The shy boy from Sèvres had become the Subcomandante Manu of Latin rock.
Manu is well aware of Casa Babylon’s far-reaching influence: ‘It was something from outside that gave people permission, in a certain way. We were listening to the same things, and reading the same books. But the album showed that rock needn’t be in English. It was a bridge between rock’n’roll and the folkloric.’
After Casa Babylon, there was only one other brand-new Mano Negra product that ever saw the light of day, although the intervening years have seen a slew of compilations and tribute albums. It was a book called Mano Negra Le Boukin, which was put together by Tom Darnal – a scrapbook of album covers, articles, newspaper clippings, playbills, all wrapped up in kitsch ethnography and erotica, in the distinctive Darnal style. ‘I delayed finishing the book,’ Tom says with a melancholy smile, ‘because I knew, as soon as I had handed it in to the publishers, that was the end of the road. It was all over.’ It is a wonderful and chaotic celebration of Mano Negra, well worth seeking out; a few of the scraps and photos have been included in this book.
If Manu’s musical future seemed confused and unclear in 1994, things soon took a decisive turn for the worse. At several meetings of the Patchanka SARL ‘board’, the other members of Mano Negra turned on him – every single one of them. Manu well remembers Tom, his friend and fellow traveller for the past decade and half, alienated by the imperious treatment he felt he had received from Manu during the Casa Babylon sessions, saying, incredibly, ‘you would be nothing without us.’
In contrast to the other ‘real’ families that various members of the band had started in recent years, Manu had come to believe that Mano Negra was his family, his band of musketeers who had taken on the world and almost won. He had invested five years of his life and every last joule of his energy and dedication in those friends and in the band of his dreams, France’s potent answer to The Clash, and now those same friends sat around the table slicing him with their words. It felt as if the house which he had painstakingly built, piece by piece, was being dismantled. And what about all the jointly owned property, like the famous Mano Negra black hand logo? Manu was not allowed to use it. ‘This was the original symbol I’d made in the basement in Sèvres, with my own hand, as a teenager,’ he says, still deeply hurt by the memory. What about all the unused recordings? ‘I had thousands of hours of studio recordings, tons of songs I recorded personally. I couldn’t use any of them.’
The final, heart-breaking scene was played out by the band when they voted – democracy in action – that unless five members of the original band were involved in any future project, then the name ‘Mano Negra’ could never be associated with it. Manu answered with the terrible, Learlike statement that ‘If I can’t use the name Mano Negra, I will never make any music ever again.’
And, at the time, he meant it. He felt cast out into the wilderness, betrayed by those closest to him. To make matters worse, his relationship with Anouk had also become merely platonic. The rumour on the train was that she was having an affair with Fidel. Manu and Anouk would work together again, but the romantic spark was gone. He found himself, aged thirty-five, horribly alone, his career over, in despair. Over the next few years, his wandering existence was often accompanied by depression and suicidal thoughts.
Manu’s dark night had begun.
CHAPTER 8:
THE LOCO MOSQUITO
‘A cow saved my life.’
Manu Chao, recalling a night in Rio
Manu hit the road and hit rock bottom. ‘I decided to end my life in Brazil,’ he says. ‘It really was a depression. It was very bad. Not that I wanted to kill myself, exactly, but I thought about it every day. It was my first thought of the day. That’s the song “Dia Luna … Dia Pena” on Clandestino. “Day of the moon, day of pain – with no reason”. That’s the terrible thing about depression, it’s a sickness – you have to find a reason to live, quick!’
At his lowest point, Manu found himself in a bar in a shanty town – a favela – in Rio when a cow walked in. It was raining. ‘I got face to face with this cow, which was lost like me. Just looking at the cow’s eyes I felt good. There was something immensely tender in her eyes. After that I started to meet cows in very strange places, so I figured the cows wanted to say something to me. Since then I realise why cows are sacred in India. One day I will go to India to say thank you to them.’
Manu was in a strange, unbalanced state of mind. ‘I was crazy and unable to make any decisions about my personal life or my professional life. But it turned out that to be so lost was also good because I was always recording – and Clandestino is the result of the recordings from this time. I didn’t know I was making a record – it was pure therapy.’
Out of the chaos and madness, Manu’s biggest record was born, even if he had no idea of that at the time. With his damaged ego, his debilitating conviction that his career was over, and his experimentation with drugs, Manu cast his net deep into the water of his subconscious and pulled out a masterpiece. ‘The album came out of hundreds of projects that didn’t work. It was a baby of those years lost in the century.’
When he was at his worst, his mother Felisa gave him some sage advice. ‘She told me that for you, life is pena. But it’s good to go to the end of life for one reason – curiosity. Even if it’s hard.’ One of Manu’s greatest characteristics is an insatiable curiosity. The word ‘curious’ is a favourite of his.
The period from 1994 to 1997 was a lost weekend for Manu that ended up lasting three years … and became a part of his mythology. ‘He went missing-in-action
… an insurgent Parisian-Basque nomad who travelled the Americas without an identity,’ as the writer and academic Josh Kun put it.
As part of the quest he took peyote in Mexico, became convinced that a witch had put a spell on him in Brazil and travelled down to Galicia on a motorbike with his father. He entertained children in the Zapatista villages in Chiapas. He trudged the streets of myriad cities. He found it impossible to stay in any one place for more than a couple of weeks. ‘I had a bad addiction to travel,’ he admits.
Contrary to what people around him predicted after the breakup of Mano Negra, what Manu missed most wasn’t the performing, it was the travelling. ‘With Mano Negra, I never spent more than three days in the same town in five years. It took me eight years to be able to stop in one place for more than a month. Wherever I went on the planet I had to leave, I felt claustrophobic. I couldn’t make my life anywhere because everywhere I went my body needed the fix of another place. I didn’t have a home for seven years. I had my things at my parents’ place and always slept at friends’ places.’
Even so, staying for a longer period of time in one place compared to the constant motion of touring in a band (when time contracted) was a revelation to Manu. ‘I’m a shy guy. I was so happy to be in the crowd and not be the one who goes up onstage and sings. You have to be sharp and very wise to get rid of the invitation of the conservative rock’n’roll circle bullshit. Every disco is more or less the same all over the world. But go around the train station or bus station and the central market, you can meet people and feel the city. The market is the place I really like.’
It wasn’t only the end of Mano Negra that Manu was grieving; it was also the end of his long relationship with Anouk, the love of his life. ‘It was the end of the band, the end of personal things, a thirty-something crisis, which maybe is normal enough, no?’ Having been burnt by love – ‘being in a band is also a question of love’, he says – travelling was also a convenient way of avoiding become so again. “Trapped By Love” is the title of one of the songs on the album Próxima Estación: Esperanza, but which was written around that time. ‘When you are Trapped By Love, so much in love with a girl and she says stop and everyone knows it, you are fucked!’ is Manu’s terse précis of the lyrics.
Manu wasn’t the only one to go off the rails after the breakup of Mano Negra. ‘It was a strange family story, a violent split,’ remembers Frank Mahaut, the lighting guy who was very much part of the Mano Negra collective. ‘Two brothers shouting at each other. Everybody became crazy. But, for the years we were together, it was my band. Afterwards it was hard. I tried to work with other bands but it was so boring in comparison. I became a junky for five years.’
Tom Darnal was also bruised and battered. ‘When you are king of the world, what do you do after that?’ His view of Manu’s state of mind was that ‘If you have good people around you, like Emmanuel de Buretel at Virgin, who believed in him, and enough money, you can go deep into your depression. If you don’t, you can’t permit yourself to go down’.
Although that might sound unsympathetic – Manu’s black feelings were real enough – Manu himself has some sympathy with Darnal’s point of view. ‘One thing I came to respect was meeting people who had nothing, who had to look after a family, who retained their optimism and hope. They couldn’t afford to get depressed; they hadn’t got the time. So they were some of my best professors.’
These meetings with the lost and marginalised people that he met on his journeys through Europe, Africa and South America, the disenfranchised and dispossessed, many of them displaced by exile, migration and xenophobia, were essential to Manu’s emerging vision. He became a poet and critic of a new globalisation that meant a playground for the rich, and freedom of movement for some, but increasing barriers and exploitation for the rest. Manu, of course, with money to buy plane tickets (the one genuine luxury for a man allergic to expensive hotels) was only too aware he belonged to the privileged. ‘I met so many people who couldn’t travel. I couldn’t invite them to my home, even if I had one. They didn’t have a passport, so there was an inequality in my friendships because of the bureaucracy.’
Even if Manu is exaggerating when he says that Clandestino was the result of a hundred different projects, his lost weekend was populated by numerous, mainly abortive, ideas. He thought about starting a circus in Rio. He began recording a techno album in Naples. He collaborated with bands in Tijuana and Brazil, and he jammed with musicians in myriad bars in at least three continents. He explored assorted political movements and found himself on a spiritual quest, particularly in Brazil and Senegal.
He had finally managed to build a promising career by the age of twenty-eight, but at thirty-three he felt as if he had slid on a snake all the way back to square one. As depressives go, he was a manic one. Rather than retreating into his shell and disengaging from the world, his appetite for the world cranked up to an almost frenzied level. He still had Deprisa, Deprisa (‘Hurry, Hurry’) tattooed on his arm.
Manu doesn’t recall the exact, dizzying itinerary of those loco mosquito years under the radar, and it would be impossible to be exactly sure of precisely where he was at any particular moment, but there were numerous key moments in amongst the weeks and sometimes months that he based himself in one city or another.
PARIS 48.9°N 2.3°E
Manu’s spent the immediate post-Mano Negra weeks back at square one, in Paris, a city he had been trying to escape from since he was a teenager. He jammed with Gambeat, the bassist from the Colombian train trip and avoided the other members of Mano Negra. Another close Parisian friend at the time was Aldo, a man after Manu’s heart. ‘He’s an important man, a free man. He lives on the street, he has no clothes, no ID, no papers. We didn’t really have a place to stay except for my parents’ house. Gambeat and Aldo were my family in Paris.’ They used to sleep regularly in the record company office, leaving early in the morning before anyone else arrived.
Aldo was someone even less concerned with material possessions than Manu, someone he could emulate. Furthermore, according to Manu, he was a visionary who had special powers. ‘He predicted things like the economic crash exactly two years before it happened. He’s extra lucid, that’s for sure.’ Gambeat, christened Jean Michel Gambit, was to be in all manifestations of Radio Bemba, Manu’s post-Mano Negra outfit, and became a more level-headed influence.
LONDON 51.5°N 0.1°W
Manu had become more and more interested in techno, house and electronica, thanks in part to the influence of Tom Darnal. The context of this fascination was a brand-new dance movement, fuelled by the drug Ecstasy, that had had sprung up over the last few years, all over Europe but particularly in Britain. Inspired by the house music coming out of Detroit, 1988’s ‘Second Summer of Love’ saw young ravers trancing in urban clubs like Shoom! in London and thousands of revellers dancing until dawn in fields in the middle of the countryside, at events with evocative names like Spiral Tribe or Raindance. These young ravers linked up by means of the then-novel mobile phone, connecting with strangers as equals in a state of Ecstasy-fuelled bliss, to the sound of minimal, euphoric, pumping, four-to-the-floor house, techno and trance music, often pursued by the police.
Gambeat, shirtless as ever. A veteran of the train tour, he remains a fixture in Radio Bemba. This photo, with Manu, was taken on the first Clandestino tour.
The police’s excuse was that they were cracking down on drugs and the illegal use of property, but there was a strong sense at the time that this movement was something subversive that was threatening to the established order. It had a star-free egalitarian ethos that appealed to Manu, even though it was soon commodified and star DJs and clubs like Ministry of Sound became highly profitable enterprises.
It was a moment where a youth music culture unified a whole generation with anti-authoritarian energy, and even if it was more hedonistic than political, Manu was fascinated. But musically, his experiments with electronic dance music never really gelled. In Londo
n, he had a brief musical fling with Leftfield, one of the emerging electronic dance groups, who later had a punk-electronica hit with John Lydon, the former Sex Pistols singer. A few aborted days in the studio, mostly hanging around, came to nothing.
NAPLES 40.8°N 14.25°E
In Naples, Manu’s collaboration with the electronica band Kwanzaa Possee progressed far enough for a for it to earn a name, Treize à Table (Thirteen at the Table), after the lyrics of a Jerry Lee Lewis song. That old love of rock and roll still burned in Manu.
Thirteen proved to be an unlucky number for Manu and although the project was sufficiently promising for Emmanuel de Buretel from Virgin to come and investigate, it came to nothing. ‘I was a little concerned about Manu,’ remembers De Buretel. ‘I knew he’d taken the break up of Mano Negra very hard, he seemed to have lost his confidence. But I also knew he had incredible energy and talent. But then in those years he went off the radar for months and months – then, as now, he hadn’t got a mobile. You have to wait for him to contact you.’
BOGOTÁ 4.6°N 74°W
Over the next few years, in between his pinballing around Europe and Africa, Manu spent most of the time in the continent that had provided him with so much inspiration since the earliest days of Mano Negra. He went back to Bogotá to film a clip of two of the strongest tracks from the final Mano Negra album Casa Babylon – “Senor Matanza” and “Sueño se Solentiname”. It was Manu’s last duty for Mano Negra and he was in a dark state of mind, which wasn’t helped by de Buretel’s assertion that, had he been able to keep the name Mano Negra, he would have been offered a major new deal, and his new band would have been a worldwide priority for Virgin. But the other members of Mano Negra had successfully barred Manu from using the name and so he had no idea if or when he would ever record an album again. Even if he did get a new band.
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