Nonetheless, life in Mali has improved in other ways, especially the treatment of the disabled. And the fact that blind Malians enjoy a much greater level of care is partly due to Amadou & Mariam’s tireless support of the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for Blind Youth) in Bamako, and to their own elevated profile, which reached unimagined levels after the release of Dimanche À Bamako.
The Dimanche À Bamako album was an immediate hit in France, reaching number 2 in the charts and becoming the soundtrack to the summer of 2005. The album won the Victoire De La Musique, the most prestigious music prize in France and an accolade that meant a great deal to the couple. ‘Back in the early days in Mali we would always listen to the broadcasts from the prize ceremony. So when we won the prize ourselves, it really touched us.’ It was a hit with the critics in Britain, too, with the Observer newspaper calling it ‘the fizziest Afro-pop ever bottled’ and including it in their list of the best albums of the decade.
Whereas previous Amadou & Mariam albums had sold 15,000, this one went past the 600,000 mark, and its success put their careers on a new sky-high trajectory. It led to the couple meeting with the idols of their youth, like Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd or Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, and to an invitation to play at President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Stockholm. Amadou & Mariam not only became cultural ambassadors for African music in general and for Mali in particular but also an inspiring role model for the blind and disabled.
Yet even this triumph created some sourness in Paris. There were mutterings that Manu, who didn’t need the money, was overcharging the couple for his services. In fact, according to their manager, the deal that was struck after some robust negotiation, was ‘perfectly fair’. And in any case, back when Manu first started working on the project, it seemed unlikely that it would ever become a major hit. It was a gamble for all concerned.
People also accused Manu of filching some of the material on the album from other sources, most notably the “Soul Fire” chant from a song by Lee Perry. Throughout his career, Manu has often been accused of plagiarising songs. They always say, where there is a hit there’s a writ: strike lucky with a song, and someone somewhere will claim to have written something similar. This hasn’t happened to Manu, which suggests any borrowings haven’t been blatant. Or, at least, according to Manu’s manager Emmanuel de Buretel, nothing that would stand up in court. ‘There are websites dedicated to how Manu has borrowed music,’ he says. ‘But we’ve only been involved in one court case, the one with the guy whose voice was sampled on the Madrid metro saying, “Próxima Estación: Esperanza”. All the other samples we can we have cleared.’
That was one of the mysteries of Manu. He had an above average voice, but you couldn’t say he was one of the great singers; and he admits to limited technical ability as a guitarist in a firmament of technically brilliant players. Likewise, some of his songs didn’t seem that original – surely they must have been plagiarised from somewhere?
It’s a thought that occurs to many songwriters themselves. Paul McCartney famously woke up with the tune of “Yesterday” already written in his head; singing it to others, he was convinced it must be a standard he had heard somewhere? He was lucky enough to dream it. Manu says that’s how he feels about some of his songs, especially the ones that arrive ‘already written’. They may be simple (they are performed by buskers the world over), but the best of them have that sense of immediate familiarity, as though Manu, like McCartney, was merely an amanuensis, an aerial tuned into some Akashic realm of the collective unconscious where all songs have already been written.
PART TWO
OTROS MUNDOS
In search of Manu
CHAPTER 12:
BARCELONA – THE NEIGHBOURHOOD GUY
‘The only Guru is yourself.’
Manu Chao, Barcelona, 2005
On the release of Próxima Estación: Esperanza in 2001, Manu agreed to interviews with reporters from the main European papers, including El País, Le Monde (whose reporter, Paul Moreira, found Manu ‘still a humble vagabond, the same fire in his eyes, the same stubborn faith’) and the UK’s Daily Telegraph. The latter, in their wisdom, commissioned me – and so I set off for my first meeting with Manu, at the Café Glaciar, a stylish hang-out, decorated with black and white jazz photos, in a palm-lined square in the old Barri Gòtic quarter of Barcelona.
Looking back, I’m a little surprised the interview was not my last. In part because it was the Telegraph, which, with its conservative politics, must have slipped under Manu’s radar when he accepted the publicity schedule. But more because of my own particular line of questioning. I had a theory at the time that when interviewing a rock star you should try and unsettle them a bit, disturb their sense of being in control, so they won’t unload the same warmed-up anecdotes that they give to all the journalists. It was a strategy that had worked nicely with Lou Reed, who is famously monosyllabic and hostile to interviewers. So I kicked off by asking Manu if recycling his old material meant he’d lost his inspiration, and then suggested, ‘Your lyrics all sound like they were written when you were stoned, as if you wrote the first thing that came into your head.’
Manu wasn’t bothered in the least by either question. On recycling, he answered that newness was overrated, society was neophiliac, and capitalism was entirely fuelled by making people feel insecure so they kept buying new things. The recycling of riffs and tunes happened all the time in reggae and dancehall, so it was no big deal. ‘Why this obsession with the new? I wear the same trainers usually till they fall apart. Let’s make more use of what we have.’ And, on the question of his lyrics (which are, of course, often highly poetic), he just paused, laughed and then said, with disarming frankness, ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I write.’ I laughed, impressed at his lack of defensiveness and gave up trying to be provocative.
Most of the time, as a music journalist, you feel you have your subject more or less figured out before you even meet them. You’ve already clicked where they are in the scheme of things. That didn’t feel at all the case with Manu. For one thing, there were those eyes. The only way I can put it is that it seemed as though he had seen things that most of us haven’t, and maybe he had really seen more than most people. He had jumped between worlds, from the most extreme of the Brazilian favelas to the gilded landscapes of the A-list rock star life, where he’s been feted by presidents and loved by millions. Or maybe it was just the drugs: he had spent weeks off his head at a time on peyote and other powerful hallucinogens.
Five years later, I’m sitting in the same café, possibly the same table, watching the same hot ebb and flow of downtown Barcelona life, waiting for Manu Chao. Since our first meeting, he has become a genius loci of the city, the bohemian puckish spirit of the Catalan capital.
I’d actually seen Manu a few times since that first meeting in 2001. The first was at a Radio Bemba concert only months later, in Paris, the week after ‘9/11’. It was a strange time, in which the gods of celebrity had been temporarily deposed. The world seemed to be spinning momentarily on a different axis. Vacuous stars had been on TV to raise money, attempting to look serious and concerned, whereas Manu seemed to possess the weight and moral vision to cope with the madness and calm us all down.
Then there was a concert at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in March 2002. The performance was a rousing one but also memorable because I’d run into Joe Strummer backstage, together with his wife, Lucinda. Strummer was trying out his bad Spanish on Manu, despite the fact that Manu speaks perfectly good English. ‘He adored Manu’s music and they were good friends,’ Lucinda said to me, some time after Strummer’s vulnerable heart gave out suddenly in December 2002.
I’d also met Manu briefly in London, again in 2002, in a café near Brick Lane. He was with a couple of students who ran political websites, in the midst of a conversation about how new archaeological digs were revealing the complexity of indigenous Amazonian culture, when a rep from Virgin Records, his label
at the time, arrived breathless to inform Manu that he had secured tickets for the Brit Awards, which was taking place that very same night. Manu would meet David Bowie and Robbie Williams (who had covered Manu’s song “Bongo Bong’”). ‘I’m spending the evening with some friends,’ was Manu’s polite but dismissive reply. Taken aback, but undeterred, the Virgin man added that he had also landed a spot on an influential TV show the following week. Manu wasn’t having that, either. He explained that he was splitting up his group at the weekend and going off backpacking.
Now, five years on, I had managed to secure another interview with Manu, having no idea that the meeting would lead to this book and a ringside seat at several of the most significant moments in the next few years of Manu’s life, watching him record with patients at a mental asylum in Buenos Aires, jam under the desert skies in Sahrawi refugee camps, perform to monstrous crowds in New York and Boston, headline the Glastonbury Festival, DJ at a London squat … become initiated into the Macheteros of Atenco in Mexico.
When Manu finally turns up at the Glaciar, on an antique bicycle with no seat, he looks bronzed and fit, like a Galician peasant who has been working the fields. Those three-hour gigs of his were clearly aerobic. He begins by complaining that trendy, overpriced bars are pushing out his favourite neighbourhood haunts. The little street-level co-ops and associations, which he uses as an office, and the concert halls where he would go into battle with his 50 euro guitar, the cheapest on the market, were being closed down. Buskers are being arrested in the street, which still remains a favourite rehearsal space.
I talk about our previous meetings, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire concert, and meeting Joe Strummer – something of a heroic figure to both of us. Manu says he isn’t against meeting heroes, or stars, in principle: ‘Sometimes, I’m quite interested in getting to know them because they’re part of the world and I’m curious. I like my position because I can be in the ghetto or in the street meeting people one day and talking with stars the next. I’m curious to know about these guys and how they manage their lives.’ But Manu is careful to add, ‘I prefer to meet stars I don’t care about.’ The ones he admires always let him down.
The only exception is Joe Strummer. ‘Joe has been like an uncle to me,’ Manu says. ‘We met and played together in the time of Mano Negra and he used to send little letters or postcards. I met him the last time six months before he died, at a festival in Japan. He was staying in the campsite, washing in the river. I saw him at six in the morning and he was changing a little tape, organising the music, making sure everyone at that little party was in the right mood. He taught me another lesson. I was lucky to be around him. God bless Joe.’
Manu, Gambeat (right) and other members of Radio Bemba, with Joe Strummer (centre, in black), at a party in Granada, Spain.
I’d heard Manu’s line about Bob Marley being a ‘professor of simplicity’. Something in that resonated, like a key to understanding Manu the man, and his success. At my cheap, bohemian hotel off the Ramblas, there was a copy of the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu, who had written the spiritual masterpiece sometime around the sixth century bc whilst wandering around China with a dancing girl. Flicking through the book, I happen across this phrase: ‘Manifest plainness. Embrace simplicity. Reduce selfishness. Have few desires.’
I find myself thinking of the contradictions between Manu’s success as a pop star and his attempts to keep things basic, both in terms of material possessions and music. I have the notion that the name ‘Chao’ could easily belong to some oriental wise guy and Manu certainly has the wiry cat-like litheness of a kung fu merchant. Something disorienting you do notice is that sometimes Manu seems much older than his years, then, minutes later, much younger.
I broach the subject of simplicity with Manu by quoting the poet, filmmaker, sometime opium addict and boxing manager Jean Cocteau: ‘A true artist has to go through complexity to reach simplicity.’ ‘Yes, that’s true,’ answers Manu. ‘But try explaining that to a twenty-year-old. You must first complicate your life and then simplify it.’
Another essential Manu characteristic is his nomadism. Travel, says Manu, is both his drug and his school. I’m also a compulsive traveller and we talk about the way in which travel can lead to a kind of innocence. You find yourself someplace new, where everything is a little strange: the language, the music, the buildings, the people. The effect is to make you feel like a child again, trying to figure things out. Many artists try to reconnect to the creativity of childhood and travel is one way of doing it. And when you’re forced to notice your surroundings because they’re unfamiliar, time – or at least memory – slows down. There’s an illusion that the inevitable black express train to oblivion coming your way might just be delayed for a little longer. We agree that travel can also be an antidote to depression, especially if indulged in short bursts. Every moment seems to be significant, every trip a narrative.
I tell Manu that listening to his albums is a little like travelling, in that you get different views of the same thing, repeated in different ways, as if you were moving over a landscape. His music is perfect for listening to on planes and trains, with its exhilarating pulse of forward projection and shifting horizons. He talks of how technology has allowed him to indulge these passions, music and travel, at the same time. He recorded his two solo albums using a portable studio. ‘In the old days,’ he said, ‘you had to go into a studio for a couple of months. Now I have a portable studio, which I can take as hand luggage. I treat technology like a kid does; I enjoy making mistakes.’
It’s possible that travel is hard-wired into the human soul and that being on the move is more natural than living a sedentary existence. I tell Manu that I’ve been reading Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness. He claims that wandering is a human characteristic genetically inherited from the vegetarian primates and those nomadic genes are more prominent in some of us than others. Chatwin also makes the point that nomadic art is more instinctive than rational, and those with nomadic tendencies are naturally averse to piling up possessions. Both observations seem apt in Manu’s case.
I’d been told that Manu had no fixed abode. It was one of many legends that floats around him. And yes, he tells me, for seven years he did indeed have nowhere, but now he has a permanent base, a flat in Barcelona. ‘I had musical instruments and other stuff in Madrid, Mexico, Paris, Rio …’, he says. ‘It wasn’t exactly efficient for making an album. And I love the street life here. There’s still a strong anarchist tradition and in my neighbourhood there are lots of immigrant musicians from South America, and people from North Africa and Pakistan.’ The Pakistanis ride around on scooters banging a can to let people know they have gas for sale, a sound which Manu had used on Próxima Estación: Esperanza.
I push Manu to define his politics and he says the vital key for him is the neighbourhood. It’s essential to his worldview. The late DJ Charlie Gillett used to call Manu ‘the neighbourhood guy’. ‘You cannot change the world, I cannot change the world,’ Manu asserts. ‘I cannot even change my country, even if I know what my country is. But everybody can change his neighbourhood. I try. That’s a responsibility of everybody. I hope the solution is there. I don’t believe any more in one big revolution that’s going to change everything. I believe in thousands and thousands of little neighbourhood revolutions. That’s my hope.’ In fact, he believes that revolution starts with changing yourself, which is ‘by far the hardest part’. Then, maybe, you can change your family or your neighbourhood.
Who to vote for is always a problem: ‘I’ve never voted for anyone, only against people. There’s never been someone I really believe in. In any case, the problem with democracy is that politicians don’t have the power they used to have. The corporations have more power.’ He says there is more power, in voting terms, if you are a shareholder of a corporation.
Manu sets out in Barcelona, cheap guitar strapped in place. The collage illustration is from the book Manu & Chao by Jacek Wozniak, the artist who created Ma
nu’s logo and with whom he often collaborates.
You can’t pin an easy label on Manu – anarchist, socialist, ecologist, Marxist – all are wide of the mark. Like so much about him, he can’t be put in a straitforward box. What matters is neighbourhood action, consumer action, and support for the underdog, the marginalised and the oppressed. He feels that his personal responsibility is ‘to use the microphone’ that he has as a celebrity to broadcast the inequalities he sees around him. But he also repeats that he is just a musician, without the answers, lost in the century like everyone else.
Manu looks up at the clock and tells me he was supposed to be at a bar to meet a Russian promoter, about an hour ago. ‘Come for a beer,’ he says, and we set off through a warren of walkways until we reach a wall lit up by a red painting of a woman entwined with a snake, with the legend ‘El Mariatchi’. The bar is a favourite of Manu’s – one of several drinking dens in his barrio set-up by okupas or squatters. It is furnished with unmatched plastic chairs and battered tables and the speciality of the house is the Hydro-miel, a potent cocktail of honey and assorted spirits. It turns out the honey for the liqueur comes from bees owned by Manu. He’s bought some hives. That I hadn’t been expecting, but Manu enthuses, saying one of his escape fantasies is retiring as a beekeeper.
Manu is immediately surrounded by numerous friends, a guitar materialises and he sings “Mr Bobby”. Then others start to sing, and half the bar joins in on bottles or whatever percussive objects are to hand. Manu plays a few numbers from an as-yet-unreleased album with a Brazilian theme, the most memorable being a song to his son, Kira. Later he explains to me that Kira is six years old and living in Fortaleza in northwestern Brazil, the result of a short-lived relationship with a Brazilian woman. He usually manages to see them for a month or two around the New Year.
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