Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  In subsequent years, Italy became the country where the authorities were most antagonistic towards Manu. In the public imagination, he was an anti-Berlusconi – an idealist, eco-activist and supporter of the marginalised. That made him a threat. His name was further blackened by an interview with the French communist newspaper L’Humanité, in which he said he had friends among the black bloc, an anarchist grouping that dressed in black at protests, which included members who believed that violence was justified.

  ’Everywhere in Italy at that time I really felt the heat,’ Manu remembers. ‘The press was saying, “Here comes the worst of culture, the drug addict, let’s fight him!” Police with very aggressive dogs come to the shows. When we played the local shops closed down, very scared because the press would say that the vandals are coming. But of course the kids and everyone came to the shows and it wasn’t like that. It was the opposite to what they say in the press. The shops opened afterwards and admitted they were stupid to believe what the press said.’

  In the town of Ferrara, there was even a pirated poster of Manu. ‘It was the worst picture of me,’ he says. ‘It just said “This man is not welcome in our town.”’ Manu still has that poster at his home in Barcelona. He might not have enjoyed the heat from the authorities, but he was still enough of a rock’n’roller to get a kick from being an outlaw.

  Manu and Radio Bemba played other more surreal gigs in Italy around this time, including one at a prison in Volterra, a picturesque Tuscan hill town south of Pisa. The Renaissance exterior of the prison is on the town’s tourist trail, right next to the Etruscan gate and a magnificent fiteenth-century fortress built by Lorenzo the Magnificent. When the band arrived in Volterra, they were received like a notorious gang of gunslingers in a Western film. The good folk of Volterra had been whipped up into a panic by Berlusconi’s papers. All the shops were shut and boarded up. The relatively liberal authorities who ran the local prison had given permission for the prison band to open Radio Bemba’s show in the town, but at the last minute a message came from Milan forbidding the prisoners to play.

  Manu with participants at the event at the Volterra prison event.

  Manu then persuaded the prison chief to allow Radio Bemba to play inside the prison walls instead. It was a maximum-security jail, full of lifers, murderers and other criminals deemed to be amongst the most dangerous in the land. But once a year they had a prison theatre day, and this time Radio Bemba were going to provide the music. ‘It was like a Fellini film,’ recalls Manu. ‘There were murderers dressed as women. Other guys dressed up as Nazis, another one like a pilot. It was totally insane. But a great gig, one of the most memorable.’

  SPAIN: JAI ALAI KATUMBI EXPRESS

  The problems in Italy spread to Spain in 2003, when Manu decided to put together a tour with Radio Bemba and invited his old friend, the Basque punk-radical Fermin Muguruza, along as a guest. As they would be performing several of Fermin’s songs, they decided to go out under the slightly unwieldy name of Jai Alai Katumbi Express, ‘Jai Alai’ being Basque for ‘Merry Festival’ and Katumbi another of those favourite Manu neighbourhoods – in Rio de Janeiro. Songs like Manu’s “Merry Blues” were mixed with Muguruza tunes like “Maputxe” – most of them joyful and infectious ska workouts that Radio Bemba could gel with instantly. Starting off in small venues and rooms, the band ended up playing arenas a few months later.

  Public enemy – Fermin Muguruza.

  Muguruza was a political activist and member of the militant Herri Batasuna party in the Basque Country, whose goal was total independence. Some of its members were pro-violence, although Muguruza did not share that point of view. Manu’s own take on the independence of his mother country was at best ambivalent, ‘There are enough borders already, why do we need any more?’

  The tour ran into trouble when the Association for Victims of Terrorism (AVT) denounced Muguruza as a ‘terrorist’, on the basis of a song called “Surri, Surri” – a hit for his old band Kortatu in 1985, which had revelled in the escape from jail of a couple of ETA members. There was a firestorm in the press, particularly in Málaga, where a local politician called José Maria Martin Carpena had been assassinated by the Basque separatists ETA in 2000. Muguruza was banned from performing by the local authorities in Málaga and Murcia and, when Manu refused to play the concerts without his friend, he in turn was accused of being an ‘apologist for terrorism’.

  ‘I have spent years saying I am against violence of the ETA,’ declared Muguruza in his own defence, ‘but it seems no one believes me. Yes, I am a leftist and in favour of independence. But this is a witch hunt, an ideological persecution to delay any political solution.’ Manu regretted ‘the stigmatisation of people trying to find a peaceful solution to the Basque problem’, while pointing out that Fermin’s offending song had been released eighteen years earlier.

  These attacks were especially painful to Manu due to the memory of his beloved grandfather, Tomás Ortega, who had fought against Franco. Didn’t Franco’s general Emilio Mola say that it was ‘necessary to spread terror, eliminating without scruples and hesitation all those who do not think as we do’. That meant democrats, Reds, Jews, Freemasons, Muslims, trade unionists, gays, ‘free’ women, socially conscious priests and other deviants, all of whom were victims of Franco’s calculated campaign of terror. ‘In my neighbourhood, it was hurtful to be branded as some kind of terrorist,’ recalls Manu, ‘but, for the sake of my grandfather, I answered the press, saying, “I was born in France, I’m a republican and a democrat.”’

  Just as he was dealing with these caricatures from the right, Manu began to be attacked on his left flank, particularly by voices emanating from his native Paris. Thanks to his enormous success and profile, he had become a target for the moralising left. Manu’s manager Emmanuel de Buretel believes the reason was simple jealousy: ‘Out of the optimistic alternative scene in the 1980s, Manu was the only one who really made it worldwide.’

  An infamous barb came in 2003 in the form of a catchy punk song called “Manu Chao” by Les Wampas – a band that Daniel Jamet, one of Mano Negra’s guitarists, had gone on to join. Over a riff that owed a fair debt to “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramónes, the song had a chorus that translates as: ‘If I had the wallet of Manu Chao / I’d go on holiday to the Congo / If I had the bank account of Louis Armstrong / I’d take a vacation until at least Easter’. It appeared both as a single – which went top 20 in France – and on an album pointedly titled Never Trust A Guy Who Having Been A Punk, Is Now Playing Electro.

  ‘What bothers me about people like Manu Chao is that, while they protest, they live lives of the elite, who criticise the system while taking advantage of it,’ Les Wampas lead singer Didier Wampas explained. ‘The song isn’t a settling of scores, the chorus just came to me like that. Maybe it’s because of my communist education, but I do have some trouble understanding how you can be a billionaire and still be criticising. When you are selling albums at 140 francs, you accept the system. You’re in. When you are Manu Chao, you could sell your albums at 30 francs and still make money.’

  The argument elicits some sympathy from Manu. ‘I did fight with Virgin 20,000 times to make the discs cheaper,’ he says, ‘but the distributors just say “Super! Manu Chao lowers his price, that means more for us.” The public end up paying the same. Artists don’t have that much power to intervene in the price, even when they’re signed to an independent.’

  In any case, these days, Manu makes the reasonable point that filesharing allows people to consume his music for nothing. He has declared openly that he’s not worried if people download his music for free. ‘If I was a fifteen-year-old with no money, it would be really stupid not to get the songs I like on the internet.’ This, of course, generates the counter-accusation that Manu doesn’t support independent labels, for whom piracy can mean life or death. ‘I didn’t actually say I was pro-piracy,’ Manu clarifies. ‘The Senegalese you see selling CDs on the street are actually part of a mafia
to whom they pay ninety per cent of their takings and who control that market. It’s pure exploitation. There’s nothing worse for me than these kinds of mafias.’ He does recognise that piracy can be the ruin of a small label: ‘The public has to be responsible and buy the discs from independent labels. For me, I’m earning good money, so it doesn’t really matter.’

  More problems and flak came flying Manu’s way after he guested on a track by Noir Désir, one of the most revered groups in the story of French rock. The song was called “Le Vent Nous Portera” (The Wind Will Carry Us), a pleasantly melancholy tune that features Manu’s distinctive guitar sound. Manu came into the studio and laid down a guitar part as a favour to the band. ‘It was done very casually,’ he remembers. ‘It maybe took twenty minutes.’ The band asked about credits and payment and Manu said he would be happy with the standard union rate for the session and a credit as one of the musicians, nothing more.

  When the song came out, it was released as a single with a sticker flagging up the Manu Chao involvement. This strategy proved especially effective in Italy, where Manu’s fame far outstripped that of Noir Désir. Their album went on to sell a million, largely due to the fact that “Le Vent Nous Portera” became a hit single. Both Manu and his manager Jacques Renault were upset that Noir Désir and their record label had cashed in on the Manu Chao name in order to sell their own record, and that what had originally been a simple friendly favour had been turned into the cornerstone of an entire marketing campaign. So Renault contacted Noir Désir to demand a royalty over and above the original session fee.

  Shortly afterwards, Bernard Cantat, the lead singer of Noir Désir, beat up his girlfriend, the actress Marie Trintignant, during an alcohol-fuelled brawl over infidelity in a hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania. The following morning she was found in a coma and died a few days later. A post-mortem revealed she had suffered multiple head injuries. Cantat admitted hitting her, but said that she had received the fatal blow when she fell and hit her head on a radiator. A Vilnius court found Cantat guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to eight years in prison. It was a notorious scandal in France, where opinion was divided between those who thought the episode was a tragic accident and those who saw Cantat as a murderer.

  At this point, Manu might have been better advised to withdraw his legal demand for royalties. Perhaps it was that streak of Basque stubbornness that made him stick to his claim. But his stance generated considerable ill feeling, which Noir Désir’s record company mischievously stoked into controversy. Still, the cash that Renault extracted from Universal went towards setting up Manu’s charitable foundation – which he has since used as an end for other bad money, for example, a settlement from HSBC when they used a track of his without authorisation.

  PARIS-BAMAKO: AMADOU & MARIAM

  An entirely new musical avenue presented itself in 2001. Manu had first heard the Malian musicians Amadou & Mariam whilst on a visit to Paris from Barcelona. As he was driving around the péripherique ring road late one night, he happened to hear their breakthrough track “Je Pense À Toi” on the radio. ‘This song burst out and grabbed my attention,’ he remembered. ‘I was instantly hooked. I didn’t know who the song was by. When I sung it to my friends, they said, ‘Everyone knows that – it’s Amadou & Mariam!’ I rushed out and bought all their CDs. Every day I’d put their records on at home and when I started singing along I’d add to them. All these ideas for backing vocals and melodies came into my head. It became a game I played every day.’

  Manu loved the blues-rock edge to their music. ‘The blues came from Mali,’ he explained. ‘John Lee Hooker’s ancestors must have come from there. But I also loved the immense amount of humanity, the strong sense of sweetness and gentleness in their music.’ Amadou & Mariam also appealed to Manu on a philosophical level. The lyrics of tracks like “Tout Le Monde Est Troublé’ (The Whole World Is Troubled) bemoan war, brothers falling out and disease, but are undercut by driving, positive music, a disconnect which seems to imply that there may be terrible problems in the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dance or celebrate. ‘We sing about finding beauty in the face of hardship,’ says Amadou Bagayoko. ‘We want the audience to be happy, and to dance. We don’t want them going home and committing suicide.’

  Amadou & Mariam’s own personal history mirrors the triumph of courage over adversity expressed in their songs. The couple are both blind – they met at Bamako’s Institute for the Young Blind in 1975, where they were brought together by their mutual passion for music. Mariam lost her sight to measles at the age of five, but a year later started singing at weddings and baptism parties. Amadou became blind as a teenager, but was already an accomplished musician, and he later played with Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako, one of Mali’s leading groups, whose ranks included Salif Keita, an albino with one of Mali’s greatest voices who became one of the first global world music stars in the 1980s after the release of his extraordinary and inventive album Soro.

  Amadou & Mariam began to make a name for themselves in Mali and beyond during the 1980s. Owing to the lack of good studios in Mali, they moved to the Ivory Coast for four years, where they released a series of cassettes, which brought them to the attention of African music lovers in France.

  It had been four years since Manu had been in Africa, and he felt the music drawing him back. ‘Throughout all that time I’d missed the place,’ he says. ‘It was a physical sense, I felt it in my guts. You don’t just walk away and forget Africa.’

  It turned out that Manu knew Amadou & Mariam’s manager, Marc Antoine Moreau, from the heyday of the alternative indie-rock scene in Paris during the 1980s and they met again at a concert in 2001. Manu mentioned that he would be thrilled to work with the duo, though it wasn’t until September 2003 that their calendars coincided sufficiently for a meeting to take place in Paris. ‘We went into the studio for a day to mess about and have a bit of fun,’ Manu recalls. ‘But we ended up working so well together that we stayed on in the studio for six days.’

  All those hours of ‘homework’ that Manu had put in listening to Amadou & Mariam’s music paid off. ‘We didn’t have to spend months together in the studio to get a vibe going. There were songs that Amadou & Mariam had written and others that we came up with in the studio. It all happened very spontaneously and everyone was surprised that we got the basis for an album in one week.’

  Manu had some useful backing tracks to work with for the opening song “M’Bife”, and cooked up another couple of songs called “Taxi Bamako” and “Senegal Fast Food”, the later an effervescent ditty with its Manu-esque globalised lyrics, ‘Il est cinq heures à Mali / quelle heure est-il au Paradis?’ (It is five o’clock in Mali / What time is it in Paradise?). In addition, he roped in old cohorts Philippe Teboul on percussion, Pierre Gauthé on trombone and Roy Paci on trumpet for the Paris sessions, to help fashion a wonderfully driving backing track to Amadou’s song “La Réalité”, with its signature message, ‘C’est la triste réalité, mais … dansons ensemble’ (That’s the sad reality, but let’s dance together anyway).

  In January 2004, before resuming work at Amadou & Mariam’s place in Bamako, the capital of Mali, Manu and Marc Antoine Moreau travelled to the Festival in the Desert, an event which, since its founding in 2001, had rapidly become an annual gathering of mythic proportions. It took place on the shores of an ancient lake, in amongst talcum-white sand dunes, sixty kilometres west of Timbuktu. In other words, the middle of nowhere. Manu performed several times and spent hours jamming around a campfire with the desert blues band Tinariwen.

  A serendipitous trio – Manu onstage with Amadou & Mariam at the Festival in the Desert, Mali, 2004.

  Once at Amadou & Mariam’s house in Bamako, the album began to take an African shape with the help of local musicians like djembe player Boubacar Dembélé and the Ivorian afro-reggae superstar Tiken Jah Fakoly, who sang lead on a lament about corrupt politicians entitled “Politic Amagni”. The track included a chant written
by Manu that was reprised in the song “Politik Kills” on his next album, La Radiolina. It tells how politics needs ignorance and feeds on blood. For the final track on the album, Manu recorded a lovely, touching love duet between Amadou & Mariam called “M’Bifé Blues”.

  Manu loved being back in the heat and chaos of an African city, and he regularly escaped to the roof of Amadou & Mariam’s house to drink mint tea and smoke joints. He also met and jammed with the couple’s son Sam and his rap crew SMOD (the initials of the group’s four founding members) up on the roof. The young rappers’ refusal to slavishly employ either American or European rhythms and the social awareness in their music appealed to Manu. ‘Hip hop in Europe is all about bling bling, about money and girls,’ Sam says. ‘Most hip hop in West Africa isn’t like that at all. We have problems and so we can’t just talk about having a big car. There’s no point in copying the Americans. Right now, Africa needs to talk. Africa must stop crying.’ Manu was sufficiently inspired by SMOD that he agreed to play on their next album (Ta I Tola, released in 2004), and to produce an album with them as well. Thanks to the constant traffic of projects coming Manu’s way, the geographical distance and his wayward working methods, it would take another six years before that album saw the light of day.

  If there’s a subtext running through Dimanche À Bamako, as the Amadou & Mariam album was eventually called, it’s a comparison between the chaos of modern Bamako and the gentler city that the couple remembered nostalgically from their childhood days. As Mariam reminisced to writer Andy Morgan: ‘When I was young, Bamako was like a little village. We’d go into each other’s houses and tell stories. We girls would go out in the moonlight to the riverbank and have fun. Nowadays they don’t do that because they are just watching TV.’