By the time he had finished in Mexico, it seemed to Manu there were two possible futures for the world: a Mafia future, in which the Señor Matanzas of this earth, the gangland bosses, would take control alongside the newly unfettered bankers and undemocratic corporations with no thought for the fragile health of Pacha Mama. Or a version of a Zapatista future. The choice was Manichean; the angel of justice versus the devil of money. It informed Manu’s politics thereafter, and when Clandestino turned out a success, he gave part of the royalties to the Zapatistas.
RIO DE JANEIRO 22.9°S 43.2°W
Manu’s next destination was a city he had loved when he first visited it on the Cargo Tour, Rio de Janeiro. He avoided the tourist hot spots of Copacabana Beach or chic Ipanema and opted instead for the bohemian neighbourhood of Santa Teresa, halfway up the hills to the poor favelas. There he found rooms with a capoeira teacher called Sorriso, who lived with his daughter Valeria in a funky apartment strewn with cushions, hammocks, drums of assorted sizes and the one-string berimbau instrument used in capoeira ceremonies.
Capoeira combines music and martial arts in high-energy balletic movement and aerial acrobatics. It was first developed as a form of self-defence by communities of escaped slaves in the seventeenth century, and was banned, on pain of prison or torture, until the 1930s. These days most big cities have a capoeira centre and plenty of foreigners come to Brazil to learn the art. It also has more philosophical dimensions, including the trickster element of malicia, a quality that enables the capoeirista to detect deceit and to sense a person’s real motives. Capoeira practitioners are supposed to gain deep levels of insight and even an understanding of the basic forces of the universe.
A related and also historically suppressed part of black Brazilian culture is Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion that is a close cousin to Santeria in Cuba and Voodoo in Haiti. Manu was fascinated and thrilled when a Candomblé priest pronounced him a Son of Changó, the Yoruba God of Thunder. He was intrigued because he had already written songs which featured Superchango, his own cartoon version of the deity, and had spent evenings cooking up the fable of Superchango and his nemesis Cancodrillo (a half-dog, half-crocodile beast), which he later said was the mythical basis or back-story that underpins Clandestino.
Manu in Rio, partying on the street in the barrio Santa Teresa, 1997.
Manu spent three months based in Rio but his restlessness drove him to explore the rest of Brazil. Among many trips, he made one to the great music and religious centre of Bahia, Salvador. Many different expressions of religion flourished there; groups like the Irmandade da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of the Good Death), a secret society of Afro-Brazilian women whose philosophy, as their name suggests, urges everyone to face death whenever it comes, without regrets, having forgiven and been forgiven all sins. Ever since encountering the group, at the end of each day Manu tries to do a reckoning of those he has offended and, if necessary, ask forgiveness, to keep his soul clean. He also claims to be ready to face death whenever it should it come.
Later, he went to Manaus, deep in Amazonia, and took a boat down the black, silky Rio Negro where he tried ayahuasca, probably the most powerful natural hallucinogen known on the planet, considerably more potent than peyote. Nearly everyone gets physically sick from ayahuasca and the visions that the drug provokes can last for days. But for Manu ‘it is a way to confront your demons’.
Politically, the group that appealed most to Manu in Brazil was the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the landless movement that fought for the redistribution of land in favour of the impoverished in rural areas. He visited a couple of MST squat settlements, whose legality they based on the most recent Constitution of Brazil which states that land should fulfil a social function. MST also points out that, based on census statistics, Brazil is one of the most unequal countries on earth, with three percent of the population owning two-thirds of all land.
The movement started in 1985, when 2,500 landless families arrived in trucks, buses and motorbikes to occupy Fazenda Annoni, a 9,500-hectare plot of land in Rio Grande do Sul. By 2010, around 400,000 families had appropriated some 35 million acres. Often they were brutally evicted, and hundreds of squatters have died in the process. But like the Zapatistas, the MST encampments gave the squatters a voice. They were organised as participatory democracies, in which women were given an equal say and environmental concerns were taken seriously.
In Ceará, the parched northeast of Brazil, Manu spent a few days on the road with the Repentistas, the troubadours of Northern Brazil, who are known for their ability to improvise a song on the spot and survive on the lethal sugarcane liquor cachaça and little else. Later, in Sao Paulo, Manu sang on a track called “Sem Terra” (Without Land) with the Brazilian band Skank, an upbeat number whose tempo belies its subject matter: ‘Who wants to ignore them / Who suffer and have already suffered / In Paraná, in Pará, in Espírito Santo’. The music was a Jamaican dancehall pop-ska mix and the album O Samba Poconé on which it was eventually released in 1996, became a sizable hit, selling over a million copies.
Rio was confirmed as Manu’s favourite city in the world, and Santa Teresa became his ‘special’ neighbourhood. Manu became the guitar player of the barrio bars. The old guys didn’t know who he was, but every time he went to them they would encourage him to stay and play for hours. One of the only times that Manu appeared in the media during his ‘long weekend’ was when he gave a short interview to MTV Brazil and answered questions posed by his friend Sorriso. He looked tanned, relaxed and untroubled.
Santa Teresa has many artists, the most famous of whom was the Chilean-born Jorge Selarón (who died in January 2013), whose trademark pictures of African pregnant women can be found in local restaurants. He was celebrated for the dazzling mosaics installed in an obsessive labour of love up the 215-step staircase between Santa Teresa and Lapa. Manu would pass by the toiling artist and exchange a few words on his way to Lapa’s atmospheric bars, which specialise in chorinho (little cry), the first, and very charming, urban jazz music pioneered in Rio, traditionally played by a trio of flute, guitar and the four-stringed cavaquinho.
Manu also wrote a touching love song in Santa Teresa and dedicated it to Valeria, who had become his girlfriend. It appeared on Clandestino as “Minha Galera” (the title can mean ‘My people’ and also ‘My Boat’). In it, he describes Valeria as his cachaça, his capoeira, his flamenga (female follower of the Flamengo soccer team), his vagabond, his waterfall. It’s a simple and beautiful song, one of his successful ‘list’ songs – like “Me Gustas Tú”, a compendium of things he loves, which eventually became his biggest hit.
Rio was a beautiful existence in many ways, but Manu was still torn up inside, trying to invent his future, feeling that he had lost his instinct. He experimented with various kinds of music, with the drums and berimbau, with a kind of new capoeira music, and, in the spirit of Royal de Luxe, he even dreamed of starting a new circus, but he was unable to turn such ideas into anything solid.
Rio was and remains the dreamlike cidade maravilhosa for visitors, but Manu saw another reality in the slums: ‘There are some people who romanticise the anarchy of the favelas, but life there is dangerous and violent.’ Outsiders, like Manu, were tolerated if they knew the right people, but there was always the danger of getting caught in the cross-fire of inter-gang rivalry or the frequent shootouts between drug dealers and the police.
Manu, however, would wander through the huts and doorless concrete shells that stood on top of each other in the Favela Baronesa, next to Santa Teresa, talking to the kids and playing his guitar in the open-air beer shacks. And, while he had found a nostalgic charm in the chorinho of Lapa, here he encountered a new music called funk carioca that sounded positively futuristic. It was based on minimal loops by Miami DJs, which were mixed with the occasional brass stab and rap or vocals, mainly in praise of sex or drug gangs. When Manu was in Brazil, the style was still in its infancy and he saw it as kind of tropical e
nergetic punk, with a brutal freshness. In wasn’t until the 2000s that the music was exported, by DJ Marlboro and others, and appropriated by hip artists like Diplo and M.I.A.
Then, one rainy day, he found himself in that favela bar when the cow that would change his life came loping in. The way it looked at him … He was sure there was some wisdom to be gleaned from the oceanic depths of its compassionate gaze. Caught in a kind of purgatory of indecisiveness, he told himself, ‘Manu you are so lost, be crazy now. If I see a cow it’s yes, if I don’t it’s no. I lived for two years like that and everything went OK. Better anyway.’
A little later, in one of Lapa’s bookstores, he discovered the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divinations, over which you throw stalks or dice to highlight particular passages which have relevance at a particular time. Questions are answered, usually in an ambiguous manner. ‘This book became one of my favourites. It’s a book that can talk to you. I did the process, and the first time the text said, “Follow the cows and you will find fortune.” I was very happy. This day was very important to me because I said, “I’m not crazy.” By treating the cows good, I did find fortune. I made Clandestino and found fortune. For money, for my life, for everything … that’s the story.’
It was time to return to the old continent.
CHAPTER 9:
CLANDESTINO
‘Me gusta Malasaña … me gusta la mañana’
From “Me Gusta Tú”
MADRID 40.4°N 3.7°W
Manu was back in Europe early in 1995. He recalls that it felt like a ‘slow moving old tanker compared to the swifter boats of South America’. But in Madrid, where he was based for a few months in the first part of the year, he found a sympathetic ambience and energy in Malasaña, a gloriously bohemian neighbourhood that had been the centre of the movida, the hedonistic countercultural movement that sprang up after the death of Franco in 1975.
In the post-Franco euphoria of the 1980s, taboos were broken daily. Late-night bars, nudist and bondage clubs, punk and goth venues and stylish boutiques appeared as if from nowhere, accompanied by the open use of recreational drugs. Spanish pop-punk bands like Radio Futura and Nacha Pop gained a national audience, fashion designers such as Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada pioneered an eccentric but sexy movida style, while filmmakers like Iván Zulueta and most famously Pedro Almodóvar, chronicled the sense of messiness and freedom that prevailed during those years.
The movida was already history by 1995, but the bars and the attitudes remained. In Malasaña you could hang out at bars like the Pentagrama (El Penta) or La Via Lactéa and be flirting or deep in conversation with photographers, actors or musicians till the early hours. Manu and Gambeat, his Parisian friend and bassist, both moved to the neighbourhood and became friends with a guitarist called Madjid Farhem. Madjid could play both flamenco and rock, and Manu rated him almost as highly as his hero Paco de Lucía. Manu, Gambeat and Madjid formed a trio and, augmented by different local musicians, did a few tentative gigs, playing old favourites from Los Carayos and Mano Negra numbers and some of Manu’s new songs.
There was finally some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. ‘It was beautiful,’ Manu says. ‘It was the start of something.’ Manu had found a new gang and Madjid and Gambeat were to remain his key musical partners in Radio Bemba, the name he used for all his groups from then on. The world ‘bemba’ is Cuban slang for ‘gossip’ and ‘word-of-mouth’ and was adopted by Castro’s rebels up in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the early days of the Cuban revolution.
Manu also began to plot a new happening – an event he called La Feira de Las Mentiras (The Festival of Lies), which would include circus, food, politics, and music. Unlike the other schemes he had been dreaming up, this one eventually did take place in Galicia in 1998 and was to be a worthy follow-up to the Mano Negra spectaculars like the Caravane des Quartiers, if not quite as insane as the Cargo Tour or the Colombian train ride.
Manu also met a gorgeous, spirited actress called Paz Gómez – the girl who would appear in the video of “Me Gustas Tú”, on his second solo album. In the song, Manu namechecks his everyday passions, Malasaña among them.
Things seemed to be looking up, although Manu was still feeling unsettled and indecisive about reviving his musical career. Maybe, he thought, he should just give it all up and live in Africa or Asia as a social worker, or follow the family trade as a journalist. There was a nagging sense that, no matter what he did, the black cloud would never lift. He had a persistent intuition that the problem was that someone, perhaps one of the Candomblé priests in Brazil, had put a black magic spell on him, which he couldn’t shake off.
GALICIA 42.8°N 8.5°W
Manu’s father, Ramón, was planning a motorbike trip from Paris to his birthplace in Galicia to research a book he was writing on the pilgrim route to Santiago. Concerned about his son’s state of mind, he asked him to come along. Ramón was turning sixty that year and used it as gentle leverage. The two needed some father and son bonding after Manu had been AWOL for a couple of years in South America.
Ramón’s book, Priscilianio de Compostela, which was published in 1998 in Spanish and Galician, propounded the subversive theory that it was not Saint James the Apostle whose remains are in the ancient Cathedral of Santiago but a Galician heretic called Priscilian, who had been executed in the fourth century, the first recorded Christian to have been executed by the Christian authorities for heresy. The precise nature of Priscilian’s offensive doctrines is lost in the Galician mists, but Ramón writes that he and his followers allowed women to read the scriptures, had a great faith in nature, used apocryphal biblical texts and held mixed-sex retreats in the woods. Their opponents accused them of indulging in sex orgies and pagan and Satanic rites.
Ramón’s book is a shaggy-dog story that mixes the politics and doctrines of the early church with his own motorbike pilgrimage, in which Manu – named Oscar after his Mano Negra pseudonym, Oscar Tramor – plays a supporting role. Ramón rides a small Honda, Manu a larger Yamaha 500TX ‘with aviator helmet, leather jacket, trousers cut off at the calf, and his bag and guitar at the sides’.
‘Manu was depressed,’ Ramón recalls, ‘and had said that maybe his salvation was in Galicia. To begin with he was in his shell, but once in Galicia he started writing songs.’ As he puts it in the book, ‘Je ne sais si l’eau ou les mystères Galicians, mais Oscar renait au fil des heures’ (‘I don’t know if it was the water or the mystery of Galicia, but Oscar was reborn with the passing of the hours’). By the end of the book, Ramón is satisfied that Oscar is ‘going through a resurrection’.
Manu with his brother Antoine and father, Ramón
A key part of the trip was when father and son stayed with the Pinto family, neighbours of Ramón’s family in Bastavales, a village close to Santiago. Since her husband had died, Joséfa Pinto looked after the family farm – cows, of course – along with her daughter Nina. According to Ramón, they were ‘true examples of Galicians in a perfect state of conservation’. Ramón went back to Paris and his work commitments, but Manu remained there for some weeks, the tranquillity of the surroundings aiding his recuperation.
Joséfa was ‘a teacher of life, a force for happiness’, according to Manu. She also knew many Galician folk tunes and played the local drum. Although in her sixties, she would jam with Manu until the early hours. Manu also had other friends in the area, including the band Os Diplomaticos, from Monte Alto in La Coruña, and he would sometimes go off for days with them. This trait led Joséfa to give Manu the nickname el desaparecido, the disappearing one – which prompted him to write the song, which became a keystone of Clandestino, in her kitchen. Manu says it is his one true autobiographical song. It is certainly juicy with resonance, particularly the line ‘Deprisa, deprisa a rumba perdido’ (Hurry, hurry down the lost highway), which namechecks the Carlos Saura film about vagabonds that Manu had tattooed on his arm. The phrase ‘rumba perdido’ echoes another of Manu’s mentors: Hank Williams, th
e hillbilly Shakespeare and his classic song “Lost Highway”. There are also political resonances in the song – to the 30,000 supposed ‘subversives’ whom the rightwing Argentinian junta of the late 1970s and early 1980s ‘Disappeared’, though Manu insists the politics in the song were accidental.
Manu also wrote other songs at the Pintos’ house, including “Bixo Do Coco”, a bixo being a local word for an insect that gets in your head. It was a fertile time. Joséfa’s rural retreat, her care, the healing breezes and abundant green nature of Galicia were probably just the therapy that he needed.
PARIS 48.9°N 2.3°E
For all Ramón’s talk of Manu’s ‘resurrection’, it was a gradual recovery. But he did go back to Paris, where he reunited with his ex-love, Anouk. Even if they weren’t together as a couple, he felt great tenderness for her.
One day, when he was at the Khelifas’ family house, where he sometimes still stayed, tragedy struck. Anouk’s grandmother was run over and killed in an accident. In Anouk’s garden, he played some soothing music on his guitar, including a new song called “Clandestino”. Those simple but powerful chords rang out, carrying Manu’s song of heartfelt empathy with struggling Peruvians, Bolivians and Nigerians with no papers, whose ‘vida va prohibida’ (life is forbidden). They were destined to move ceaselessly, like the ‘raya del mar’ (manta ray). ‘Correr is mi destino,’ sang Manu, ‘perdido en el gran Babylon’ (to run is my destiny, lost in the great Babylon). Although Manu, of course, could travel as he liked, two things remained ‘illegal’ in the chorus: marijuana, which made him a criminal, and Mano Negra. The final chant of ‘Mano Negra – illegal!’ made it clear that the legal prohibition on using the band name still rankled painfully.
Clandestino Page 15