Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Anouk – the love of Manu’s early life – on the solo album he produced.

  Anouk was one of the people Manu felt he could trust, and who he felt understood him. He decided rather impulsively to ask her to become his manager and she accepted. Manu could also help her. During the years she had worked to promote Mano Negra, Anouk had always harboured desires to make her own album. She had sung backing vocals for Mano Negra and Manu loved her unaffected voice. She asked him to help her record her songs. Virgin were happy to release her album, Automatik Kalamity, possibly thinking they would get some kind of new Manu album.

  But Manu didn’t hijack the project, self-effacingly helping her to realise her vision, adding guitars even when the songs like “Mauvais Sang” seemed to be aimed at him: ‘Quand arrive la nuit / L’autre je connais / La distance qui nous sépare / Dévoré la passion /Résidu d’amitié / Je connais la couleur / Des jours de mauvais sang’ (When the night arrives / I know the distance which separates us / the passion is devoured / Just a residue of friendship / I know the colour / Of the days of bad blood). On another song, “Je Ne T’Aime Plus”, which ended up on the Clandestino album, Anouk and Manu sing a poignant public farewell to their relationship: ‘Tellement j’ai voulu croire / Parfois J’aimerais mourir / Je ne T’ame plus, mon amour’ (I so wanted to believe / Sometimes I want to die / I don’t love you any more, my love).

  The album, with a downbeat pop-reggae vibe, sounded as if it might have commercial potential, but it barely troubled the charts.

  Working with Anouk, and dealing with Virgin again, got Manu thinking about what he could do with the songs he had accumulated on his travels. The black dog of depression hadn’t stopped his prolific creativity. ‘What had really got to me,’ he later reflected, ‘was that I had become cut off from my instinct.’ He had always followed his gut feeling before, in both his professional and personal life. ‘Every time I tried to act in rational way, I thought things through too much, and it came to nothing.’

  Since Galicia, he was feeling a little more connected. There was a sense of possibility rather than nothingness. The rust had burnt away. While he was working on Anouk’s album, some Sèvres friends introduced Manu to a young sound engineer called Renaud Letang, who had worked on spectaculars with Jean Michel Jarre and others. Although ten years younger than Manu, the two had plenty in common, and Letang became Manu’s pivotal musical co-pilot. He had been born in Tehran but brought up in Sèvres and, having also lived in Venezuela and Indonesia, had a cosmopolitan worldview. The two met up in a café in Sèvres and Letang passed a kind of test when Manu left him with over fifty songs he had written on the road. The ten that Letang suggested they work on were more or less the same ones that Manu thought were the strongest.

  Working once again in the cave-like garage under the Chaos’ house in Sèvres in June and July 1997, Clandestino started to take shape. One big artistic question for Manu was how prominent the electronica and techno elements should be. Just as Mano Negra had created an impact with what they called patchanka, an innovative mix of punk, rock and Latin elements, Manu was wondering whether a similarly unique mix of his songs with electronica might work.

  In the end, it was an accident that made up his mind and changed the course of the album, his career and his life. The audio software on Letang’s computer developed a bug, which accidentally stripped out the electronics and drums, leaving the music naked, spare and beautiful. It was like an old painting covered in layers upon layers that had been stripped bare to reveal a masterpiece. ‘Le hazard est mon ami,’ Manu likes to say. Chance was his friend.

  ‘We felt we had given birth to a UFO,’ Letang remembers. For even though they could tell they were on to something, it didn’t sound like anything that either of them had ever heard before. Manu gave Letang a lot of leeway to work on mixes, much to the astonishment of the members of Mano Negra, who were used to Manu’s studio control-freak perfectionism. When it came to decide on the final versions, Manu and Le-tang played them to the children of some Sèvres neighbours, who were aged three, five and six. ‘The ones the children liked were the one we chose,’ Manu claims.

  On the finished album, Manu’s musical odyssey though the Grande Babylon opens with two, spare classics. Manu is lost in the century, running is his destiny: “Clandestino”, the opening track, is an instant classic, with the weight of inevitability. Then comes “Desaparecido”, the song he had composed in Galicia, with its insistent refrain of ‘cuando llegare?’ (when do I arrive?) that is never answered. Manu and Letang spent a large amount of time giving the acoustic guitar the right amount of attack and the voice the right sinuousness on these songs. Manu was plugging into a bigger picture, empathising with the lost and the oppressed, whilst singing about being lost himself. Its sound had to match that – and not a personal, singer-songwriter vibe.

  The next track, “Bongo Bong”, uses the lyrics of the Mano Negra song but with a new bouncy, quirky and highly catchy backing track (Robbie Williams was amongst those who later did a cover version). The song tells the story of a monkey bongo player who’s a big shot in the jungle but moves to the big city, where he is ignored. The stoner lyrics no doubt appeal to that universal grievance of not getting due recognition for one’s perceived talent and general brilliance and the song segues into “Je Ne T’Aime Plus”, the strange, heartbreaking duet with Anouk.

  Another twist and we are in the bleak world of “Mentira”. ‘Everything in this world is a lie,’ goes the song, with politicians a firm target of course, but also promises of love. Then there is “Por el Suelo”, the song he had written about the poor in Chiapas, with its haunting phrase ‘Esperando la Última Ola’ (Waiting for the Last Wave), a nihilistic end-of-millennium surfing image, a dark mirror to the sunny optimism of the Beach Boys. Manu used it as a doomy subtitle on Clandestino’s album sleeve. All that’s left for the world is the ‘tequila, sexo, marijuana’ of “Buenvenido En Tijuana”, as Manu’s smashed voice flirts with death and tries to obliterate the pain with sex and drugs, in the border between Mexico and the US and between this world and the next. In ‘Dia Luna … Dia Pena’ there’s no reason to live any more.

  Renaud Letang – Manu’s producer and collaborator on Clandestino.

  “malegría” is one of Manu’s new invented words and, like the song, “Lagrimas De Oro” (Tears of Gold), it describes and finally celebrates the bittersweet nature of life. Then, at last, in “El Viento” Manu magically becomes the wind itself. There was a crazy wisdom about the song-cycle and something of the weight of a prophetic vision as well.

  By autumn Manu and Letang had a version to play to Virgin. The only person in the company who actually thought it would sell, according to Manu, was Emmanuel de Buretel. ‘Manu came round to my house one evening,’ Emmanuel remembers. ‘His father was there, too. I told him I thought the album was fantastic. A killer. Some of the songs were for the ages.’ Ramón also loved it: ‘I was impressed by Mano Negra but I didn’t understand them. With this album, I really thought Manu was a poet, a true artist.’

  The fact that a record company executive, a classical-music-loving sixty-year-old Marxist, and some three-year-old neighbours all loved the record hinted at its potential universal appeal. But most music professionals, and Manu himself, were sceptical. It was a personal record that didn’t fit any radio station format. The general opinion was that it would sell a few thousand to loyal Mano Negra fans, but that its lack of rock energy might alienate as many as it attracted. There was also no regular band to promote the album and Manu knew that its acoustic approach with electronic elements, not to mention the samples of Subcomandante Marcos, would in any case be a challenge to reproduce live.

  Manu was fairly convinced that Clandestino would be his swan song. He was impressed, however, that Virgin were willing to promote it by funding and helping to produce his Feria de Las Mentiras (Festival of Lies) in Galicia, the project he had dreamed up in Madrid. Although people assume Manu hates all corporations, he acknowled
ges that there can be good, adventurous people working for them, and Virgin’s backing of the festival was one such case.

  But Manu’s lack of confidence in Clandestino was clear when he met the old Mano Negra manager Bernard Batzen at the Festival Mediterranée a couple of weeks before the release date. Manu gave him a copy and self-deprecatingly said it was a maquette, a demo, rather than the finished article.

  Clandestino came out in April 1998, and, with a low-key promotion, it crept into the lower reaches of the French charts, reaching number 19, where it stalled. A couple of low-budget but effective video clips were filmed – as ever, by François Bergeron – for the songs “Clandestino” (with faces of different nationalities either full of hope for a new life, or in despair at being blocked from travel) and “Desaparecido” (a simple performance framed by Bergeron’s hallucinogenic Inca images).

  As the marketing people at Virgin had thought, the main radio stations in France such as RTL2 or NRJ failed to see how Clandestino could fit with their programming format. De Buretel also says that references to marijuana in a couple of the tracks was another excuse for the established media to steer clear. Meanwhile, Les Têtes Raides, an indie folk-rock band that included ex-Mano Negra member Pierre Gauthé, released their album Chamboultou the same week and it sailed into the French top 10. The comparison was depressing.

  The reviews and reactions were more encouraging – and not just in France. Ernesto Lechner of the Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘it is inspiring to see an artist like Manu Chao reach out in so many different directions and pull it off, because the record is extremely cohesive. Besides all the ideas and the concepts and the lyrics, it’s just a very, very beautiful record to listen to from beginning to end. It’s really almost a concept album. It’s a cycle of songs.’ The song-cycle was a favoured format in the nineteenth century, reaching its zenith in works like Schubert’s Winterreise. Manu was revisiting it with his own pre-millennial ‘winter journey’ in song.

  And Manu managed to pull off the Feria de Las Mentiras, which became a ten-day extravaganza. ‘The inaugural parade will be chaired by a monumental octopus, the God of Lies,’ read his proposal, ‘embodying the contradictions and hypocrisy of the world past and present. There will be confusion between background cries of sea gulls and brass band music. There will be an inhuman monster’s lair … of the terrible Octopus. To enter, each will pay, after telling a lie. Inside, everything is flashy, attractive, false and illusory. All weekend its doors will be open to the public. It’s the world of television, advertising, charlatans, hucksters, swindlers and thieves of all kinds. In short, the world today. One motto: everything must be profitable, consumable, disposable.’

  François Bergeron’s Inca-hallucinogenic video for “Desaparecido”.

  For the street parade, scheduled for the sixth day, Manu proposed that ‘The bands of Galicia will mix the drums of Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Senegal to recreate the ambience of a grand carnival. Children will be the heroes of the Court of Miracles. Miscegenation and recycling will be the watchwords.’

  Manu was using the experience of working on the Cargo Tour and the Colombian train trip, and combining it with his love of fiesta and carnival to create a communal event he thought could be an antidote to the increasingly commercialised music festivals sprouting throughout Europe, with their overwhelming corporate presence and overpriced food and drink.

  The event ran from 7 to 12 July, 1998, and it was a great success. Manu invited sympathetic bands like the Latin hip hop crew Sergeant García from Paris, Amparanoia from Barcelona and his local friends Os Diplomaticos from La Coruña. Joséfa Pinto supplied the Galician folk. Some improvising Brazilian repentistas came from the province of Ceará to compete against the local refuegista storytellers. There was cheap good quality food, drumming, football and a true carnival atmosphere. It lost a lot of money, however, and plans to replicate it elsewhere were shelved.

  CHAPTER 10:

  DAKAR, BARCA … INSH’ALLAH

  ‘Clandestino has spawned an exchange of hope. Something strong and tender.’

  Manu discovers what he has created

  After the Feria in Galicia, Manu was left with a feeling of anticlimax. He had few expectations of Clandestino becoming anything more than a modest commercial success – and even if it did, he didn’t have a band to promote it. With the album dispatched, he was again at a loose end, tormented about what to do next. He was thirty-seven years old. The other members of Mano Negra were mostly family men and happy fathers by now. Manu himself was alone without a lover or any prospect of children. He’d given music a good shot, but perhaps it was time to think of doing something else. He decided on travelling to Africa, seeing what was really happening, and maybe helping out, becoming some kind of social worker. Also, he had a vague idea for another musical train trip in a similar vein to the Colombian trip, this time between Bamako, the capital of Mali, and Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

  Within three months, he was married and living in Dakar. And he’d converted to Islam. And, equally extraordinary, within a year, almost entirely through word of mouth, and through constant play in clubs and beach bars, Clandestino had become a worldwide phenomenon, and Manu had on his hands the biggest-selling album in French rock history.

  DAKAR 14.6°N 17.4°W

  Like those other Manu favourites – Havana, Rio and New Orleans – Dakar is one of those rare cities where the air itself seems to hum with music. The car horns, the shuffle of people through the busy markets, the shouts of street vendors, all seem to be part of some urban symphonic pattern. People sing as they go about their business, and even if they are just talking to each other or into their mobiles, still a novelty back in 1998, they talk in a singsong Africanised French or the equally lyrical local Wolof language. There are flower-sellers who wear baskets on their heads, which make them look like their hair is made out of flowers, as if in a surrealist painting. Everything is imbued with movement and energy.

  Dakar is also a stylish and fashion-conscious city, where local sapeurs, with threads modelled on the latest Paris styles, or at least convincing Parisian knock-offs, gild the local bars and boulevards. Manu frequented the rougher clubs, some of which only open at around 4am, where you can hear djembe and talking drum jams that totally rearrange your ideas about rhythm. He was also fascinated by the griots, the praise singers who have the histories of important families going back centuries fully memorised but can also be found at local wrestling matches bigging up the fighters. Even stranger were the groups singing Hindi film songs in the Peking district, using West African grooves rehashed Bollywood-style, with Indian playback singers like Lata Mangeshkar reincarnated in the form of a six-foot Senegalese goddess.

  Of all the countries in Africa, Senegal has the greatest mix of musical connections, plugged in to the Arab world, Europe and the Americas, and the variety and pulse of the rhythms on display is unmatched. A nation of nine million souls, it has a musical impact way above its size, and when Manu arrived it boasted international stars like pop-mystic Baaba Maal, Afro-salsa groups like Africando and a genuine superstar in Youssou N’Dour, who, when not touring, appeared regularly in his own Club Thiossane in the La Médina district.

  But, like those other great musical cities so beloved by Manu, Dakar also had its B-side of corruption and poverty. Manu had no intention of being a mere tourist and preferred to mingle with the people down on the streets and so he found lodgings with a Senegalese family in downtown Dakar.

  Senegal is on the outer edges of the Islamic world, which in those days before al-Qaeda in the Maghreb seemed very far from the strict, desert puritanism that holds sway in Mecca and the Arabian Peninsula. Senegalese music stars like Cheikh Lô and Youssou N’Dour follow differing mystical Sufi-inspired forms of Islam. For Youssou it’s a combination of being a Mouride (a devotee of the Senegalese Sufi mystic, Amadou Bamba) and a follower of the Tidjani Brotherhood (of Moroccan origin), while for Cheikh Lô it’s the Baye Fall, a sect whose devotees loo
k like Rastas with their exuberant dreadlocks and multicoloured patchwork tunics. The Baye Fall also revere nature, believe in the purifying benefit of work and also follow the path of the Senegalese saint Amadou Bamba. In many ways, Manu felt on their wavelength.

  Living with an Islamic family, in a predominantly Muslim nation, Manu became drawn to Islam. The fact that this faith was demonised by the West only made it more appealing to him. If Islam was the spiritual path of millions of poor people through North and West Africa, and of all his Senegalese musical heroes, with a strong tradition of poetry and music, it was worth investigating. Manu was still searching for a path that might bring him peace of mind. ‘I loved to pray with the locals and go to the mosque,’ he remembered later. ‘It was very good to stop your everyday life five times a day to reconnect and think. But to begin with, while the family was praying in a Muslim way, I was praying in my way.’

  Used to musicians’ hours and rising late, Manu found himself enjoying the duty of getting up at six in the morning for prayers. But the path to Allah wasn’t easy. ‘When I went to the mosque and became a real Muslim,’ Manu recalls. ‘The free part of myself said, “No, I don’t want to learn something I don’t really understand by rote.” For me, being raised in Europe, the position of women in Senegal was very difficult. When I asked, “What does it mean?” the family tried to teach me. But they couldn’t explain enough for me to understand. I respect that, and Islam too, but I realised that my real religion is my own one. In Brazil, in Africa, I learned that there is not only rationality in life.’ Manu says he has also learned a lot else from his fellow Muslims, including cleanliness. ‘I learned to wash the body five times a day. In Europe we are pigs.’ But once you become a Muslim, you’re a Muslim for life, so Manu remains a Muslim, despite his heterodox views.