Again, some of the backing tracks are reworkings of older tunes, like favourite places revisited, while the lyrics to “Besoin De La Lune” (Need The Moon), perhaps the sweetest on the album, are recycled from Manu’s French-language disc Sibérie M’Était Contéee, which had been released as part of a book collaboration with the French-Polish artist Wozniak in 2004. ‘I need my father to tell ‘em where I come from,’ Manu sings in French. ‘I need my mother to tell me when I am lost.’ I told Manu, because it seemed to be the sort of thing I could tell him, that I’d lost my mother a few months earlier. ‘I cannot imagine what that must be like,’ he answered, suddenly grave and genuinely concerned. ‘I suppose it will come to most of us, but I can’t imagine it.’
Despite the fact that La Radiolina wasn’t even released yet, and the promotional campaign had only just begun, Manu seemed a lot keener to talk about his next project: a collaboration between himself and the inmates of a mental asylum in Buenos Aires. Poetry and songs were to be provided by the patients, who put on a weekly radio show called La Colifata. ‘They have so much lucidity,’ Manu enthused excitedly. ‘What they are saying is huge. It’s gonna be a much more important album than mine, all in a very poetic Spanish which is impossible to translate, all about using God’s name to make wars, about everything …’
Some of the La Colifata inmates, in fact, appear on one of La Radiolina’s strongest opening tracks, “Tristeza Maleza”, which echoes “Infinita Tristeza” from the Próxima Estación album, with lyrics about the pain that Washington’s policies inflict on the world. The patients are sampled talking about the winds of Washington and the watching eagle. It’s one of the new songs in the live set for the American tour.
There is more of a political edge to the songs on the new album. When Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, heard La Radiolina, he picked out the track “Politik Kills” as a winner and did a remix of it. The song sounds a bit like Ennio Morricone in a Mexican mariachi style, but with an implacable force in its conviction that politics needs violence, drugs, ignorance and ‘your mind’ in order to thrive. “Mundo Revés” means ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, the slogan of a radical seventeenth-century group of English proto-communists known as the Levellers. It’s also an expression of Manu’s personal sense of bafflement and incredulity with the state of the world. The title of the song also alludes to the Argentinian street slang known as vesre, where syllables are reversed. ‘Reves’ becomes ‘vesre’, ‘tango’ becomes ‘gotan’ and so on.
Every second on La Radiolina has weight and significance, to Manu at least. When I meet him in Boston, he’s still agonising whether to shave a second off here, another there. “The Bleedin Clown” is a punkish workout that lodges surreptitiously in your head, ‘an old-style song’, according to Manu, about unrequited love: ‘I wrote the song twenty years ago and every album my friends ask me why that one is not on it.’
The day after the Boston gig is a rest day for the band. I manage to scrounge a lift from Boston to New York with the photographer Jamie James Medina and his girlfriend. Jamie had flown in to do portraits of Manu for our feature. Manu gave him fifteen minutes. Nonetheless, those photos were then used for the entire tour and subsequent album campaign.
In New York, we hook up again with the band, who are staying at a rather unglamorous chain hotel in downtown Manhattan. On the recommendation of Adrian Dannatt, a local journalist friend, I entice Manu out for a drink in a funky, scruffy bar nearby in Chinatown; it has the resonant name of Double Happiness.
The bar plays old-school reggae and we spend a few beers discussing New York. We both miss the old Times Square, with its little bookshops, porno cinemas and its street chess tables where you could pass the time playing with old black guys. And you could smoke. Sleazy, perhaps, but with a scruffy freedom and individualism. Manhattan was the cultural centre of the world when Manu first came in the 1980s, a rough town that had revolutionised the music world several times over, from the underground punk explosion at CBGBs on the Lower East Side, through the disco warehouse parties and Studio 54, the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich to the birth of hip hop in the South Bronx. It all happened here in the Big Apple, in the space of a few miles and a few years. Now it was a safer city, but it had also become a lot more boring.
Gambeat and Madjid – bass and guitar powerhouse.
Somehow the talk bifurcates back to spiritual matters. I mention Shaman: Wounded Healers, Joan Halifax’s extraordinary book, and Manu admitted that he’s fascinated by the subject. ‘I met many shamans in my life,’ he says. ‘Some who say that’s what they are. Others who don’t, but who are.’
I suggest to Manu that he himself is a bit of a modern shaman, channelling bigger energies, travelling to other worlds and reporting back to the tribe.
‘No,’ he replies, ‘but, in my own way, I try to be a medicine man. For the moment my passion is music, and I’m tied to it. But if this passion goes down a little bit, I would like to learn more. I want to cure with my hands. But that takes years and you have to live more on the inside. Now it’s all on the outside. Everyday, I try to find a little place, maybe a tree or a river. I’ve learned how to auto-repair because there’s a lot of stress in my job.’
Manu doesn’t meditate exactly, but he does have his mantras ‘because I’m a shy guy, getting onstage is something almost violent for me. But I repeat to myself that, “Shame don’t kill. Shame don’t kill. Shame don’t kill.” If it’s a bad concert, it’s not like someone’s gonna kill me.’
Manu and fame make a strange couple; fame inevitably injects an element of unreality into his existence, if only in the way people treat and interact with him. And then there are the temptations of celebrity; for example. the bevies of Latinas who sweet-talk their way backstage after the shows ‘I’m too romantic for all that. Maybe that’s stupid, or maybe that’s my salvation. I’ve got friends who love to be the centre of attention – but I’m a shy guy. Now I can handle it, more or less. Or I realise which bars not to go to. I used to be the guy observing in the corner at parties, more like a journalist, maybe writing a song about it – now that’s not possible any more.’
Then there’s the temptation to believe the hype, inflating the ego until you believe you can do anything. Be a political leader, for example. At the Genoa G8 summit the Italian government asked Manu to represent the anti-globalisation protestors, and he’s been present at other forums since. ‘That would be an error, the worst mistake,’ Manu says in a tone verging on anger, as if riled by a much greater danger than being a rock star lothario. ‘There’s nothing so corrupt as being a leader.’
Nonetheless, politicians have tried to co-opt him. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela among them. ‘I’m not a Chavista,’ Manu elucidates. ‘But I would like to see some equilibrium in how things are reported. I used to go to the neighbourhoods in Venezuela and there was no hope. Now there’s hope.’ He tells me he was invited to meet Chavez, got in the car – and halfway there told the driver to turn back. Then he fixed me those intense unnerving eyes and told me that he’d met the Devil in person, twice. ‘Once in Madrid, and once in Tokyo. He was like a man and I spoke to him, but I knew he was the Devil. One of those times he was an Englishman.’
Sometimes it all gets too much and Manu feels like he’s losing himself, making too many compromises with the business world. He has a few potential ways out, like going to India, where nobody will know him, or studying healing with a shaman in the Amazon.
While he muses that he is sometimes tempted to give up life in the spotlight, quite often over the New Year’s chill-out period he usually takes in Brazil he thought that his role for now was to help out with causes that seem to need him. Often, when he has come close to dropping out completely, he has found it impossible. ‘I have a few weeks on the beach,’ he tells me, ‘writing songs, smoking, writing more songs. Then I start to think of all the people struggling out there, and I don’t feel so comfortable doing nothing about it.’ Manu h
as the microphone and can’t just walk away.
When I ask what he is scared of, he says, ‘I do have a terror of routine.’
There’s nothing routine about the show in Brooklyn. Looking at Manu onstage, he reminds me of a Latin Charlie Chaplin, a little guy with a big heart. The word corazón, the Spanish for ‘heart’, is all over Manu’s lyrics, and at the end of the set he bashes his own heart with his mic. An official gets onstage to warn the crowd that there will only be one encore because the storm is imminent and could be dangerous. A couple of minutes later, there’s huge peal of thunder followed by blinding flashes of lightning and the heavens open. Rain chucks down in sheets. Undaunted, Manu races through the encore and the crowd sing “Próxima Estación: Esperanza” in unison as the rain and music conduct a mass baptism of hope for the future, for the belief that music can be more than a commodity.
In the tour bus afterwards, upfront with the driver, I remark that Changó, the god of thunder, was in the house. Manu smiles wearily, drenched and elated. Hanging in a corner of the bus, there’s a jacket with a pair of cow’s eyes painted it on it. Oh yes, the cow that saved Manu life. The one that might lead him to tranquillity some day. I remember something that Manu had told me before the storm broke: ‘I’m glad I got lost, because now I’m better with people. I’m stronger.’
CHAPTER 14:
BUENOS AIRES – TANGOS AND DELIRIUM
‘Reality is not always probable, or likely.’
Jorge Luis Borges
Opulent, squalid, grand, decaying, European, Latin, contradictory – we must be in Buenos Aires. Manu is here working on an extraordinary project: an album with patients from South America’s largest mental hospital. It’s a radical idea, subverting the religion of celebrity culture and undermining received notions of the creative genius and the star singer. These performers were never going to make it into Hello! magazine. But, for all Manu’s genuine empathy for the marginalised, the project is also deeply personal: ‘Craziness – a lot of people are depressed in this world. I experienced it myself. It’s not usually something dangerous, it can be positive. How you feel in yourself when you are crazy depends on how other people see you, and how people think of people who are crazy.’
The aim of the project is to benefit La Colifata (The Crazy One), a weekly radio show that’s recorded at the Borda hospital, during which inmates can read a poem, sing a song, have a rant and more or less do whatever they want. An edited half-hour version of the show is broadcast and has been picking up listeners. It’s reputedly having a therapeutic effect on the patients, as well, who seem to benefit from having their voices heard and enjoy the feedback they receive.
One night, later in the week, Manu tells me that there is another highly personal reason for his interest in madness. It’s possible that insanity runs in the family: his maternal grandfather, the courageous Tomás, who fought against Franco, ended his days in an asylum.
In Buenos Aires, I’m staying with Manu at a guesthouse called the Tango House, a stylish if dilapidated mansion that was once the home of tanguero heartthrob Hugo del Carril. We’d travelled here by train from Córdoba, where Manu had done a spontaneous and incendiary benefit concert for the homeless charity La Luciérnaga with a pick-up band of buskers and friends called Roots Radio. It’s a companionable journey, drinking maté tea through a metal straw called a bombilla and smoking joints while we chug across the rolling pampas.
The Hugo del Carril connection feels right. The actor and singer directed a pro-union film called River of Blood in 1952 and composed stirring Peronist marches. There was incidental synchronicity, too, in the title of his last film, La Malavida, the name of Manu’s first hit song. The Tango House is a treasure trove of assorted del Carril memorabilia, vinyl discs, a wind-up record player, his typewriter and numerous old photographs, del Carril looking distinctly Valentino-like with his slicked-back hair and melancholy, debonair playboy looks.
Manu gives me a guided tour of the house, mentioning a museum he went to dedicated to the greatest star of tango, Carlos Gardel, who died tragically in 1935 in a plane crash. According to Manu, there’s an under-eighteen part of the museum that shows a handsome model of Gardel and then an ‘adults only’ section featuring a waxwork of what he looked like when they dug him out of the plane. Another waxwork shows the extent of Gardel’s venereal diseases, no doubt another reason for the melancholic nature of some of the tango romantics.
There is a dusty bandoneón, the serpent-like squeezebox, in a corner of Del Carril’s house. The instrument is a nineteenth-century German invention and became the key to tango, more suited than the accordion for ‘reflecting the melancholy and nostalgia of the Italians who missed the mother country,’ according to Maria Susana Azzi, biographer of Ástor Piazzolla, the great tango revolutionary.
We talk about Piazzolla. How the Argentinians took their tango seriously enough for Piazzolla’s nuevo tango style to cause fist fights in TV studios – and how some taxi drivers would refuse to take him, and others would refuse payment. On a previous trip to Buenos Aires, I’d met Piazzolla’s guitarist Horacio Malvicino, who told me he’d received death threats for ruining tango and that physical confrontations were fairly common. ‘Fortunately, Ástor had been a boxer and knew how to take care of himself, and playing the bandoneón every day gives you strong arms.’
Manu retires to his room off the courtyard. As a guest at The Tango House, you get free entry to one or two local milongas or nightly tango sessions. The atmosphere in the local one is fairly gloomy, but as the novelist Ernesto Sabato once wrote, ‘only gringos dance tango for fun’. Sabato also wrote that ‘The Argentine is unhappy with everything, including himself.’ I meet a Japanese girl in the milonga who is studying the dance. She points out the curious fact that, as well as the expected machismo of many tangos, there’s also was a curious mamismo. Several of the tangos are mother songs.
It seems that discussions about the Oedipal and other psychological subtexts of tango are unavoidable in Buenos Aires. If anything, they are to be encouraged. Manu’s project with the mental patients feels appropriate to the city. If Paris is known for its fashion, LA for its films, then Buenos Aires, apart from tango, is a mecca for psychotherapy. There are more psychoanalysts or therapists per head in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world. It’s estimated that there’s one for every fifteen citizens. The barrio of Palermo also boasts an area called ‘Villa Freud’, because of its high concentration of shrinks. But there’s a flip side to the Argentine obsession with psychiatry: an interest in anti-psychiatry. This was a movement which came to fruition in the 1970s, led by such characters as R.D. Laing, David Cooper and Thomas Szasz. According to Laing, madness ‘need not be all breakdown. It can also be breakthrough. It is potential liberation and renewal.’ That’s something Manu had experienced for himself.
Street view: Manu takes a break outside La Tribu, his Buenos Aires ‘office’.
The slogan of the La Colifata radio show is ‘In a society where everyone is unbalanced, only the mad are really sane’, an echo of Laing’s statement that madness is ‘a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world’. Also relevant both to Manu and to Buenos Aires was Szasz’s analysis that ‘doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.’ Many of those in the mental hospitals – and, presumably, most of the ‘regular’ folk discussing phobias and complexes in downtown Buenos Aires – were neurotics.
The psychotics, meanwhile, had used their implacable conviction and insane certainties to get into positions of power. This was the country of the Disappeared, the roughly 10,000 to 30,000 so-called subversives (no one knows the exact figure) who were killed in the Dirty War that raged between 1975, when a military coup ousted an elected government, and 1983, when democracy was reinstated in the wake of Argentina’s defeat in the Malvinas/Falklands War.
General Ibérico Saint-Jean, the junta’s military governor of Buenos Aires, had a simple plan:
‘First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then their sympathisers; then those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid.’ There was brutal and systematic state-sponsored torture. Parents were tortured in front of their children and vice versa before being killed. A favourite method of disposing of the bodies was to dump them at sea. But, before the authorities got the hang of the currents, bodies were often washed back ashore. All this dark history was an important context of the Colifata project. Manu was simply asking, ‘Remind me who, exactly, are the insane?’
I wake up the next morning with a strange rash over my body. Before Argentina, I had been in Belize – where I caught what turned out, tragically, to be the last concert of the great Garifuna singer, Andy Palacio – and, after a couple of weeks of intense travel, I am laid out. Manu calls a doctor, a Manu fan naturally, who confirms a diagnosis of exhaustion exacerbated by an allergy to the Tango House’s cat and jams my rear with an injection of antihistamine. ‘Aha! A Malvinas cat,’ says Manu, highly amused.
With that sorted, we head off to a scruffy, friendly alternative radio station called La Tribu, where Manu has set-up a makeshift office for the week. There’s a press conference for over a hundred assembled Argentine media. Manu fields the questions, including ones about La Luciérnaga, the homeless charity in Córdoba, and others about the La Colifata radio project.
Wherever Manu goes, especially in South America, the majority of questions are about politics. Someone wants to know his opinion of the Piqueteros. He says he’s sympathetic. The Piqueteros (pickets) movement developed after the Argentine economic collapse of 2001, when two out of three residents fell below the poverty line and unemployment rose to around forty-five per cent. Their favoured means of protest was the roadblock. Banging on a drum and shouting ‘Que se vayan todos!’ (They’ve all gotta go!) was one way of expressing frustration with the politicians and the establishment. The wave of protests and activities receded as the economy recovered in the 2000s, but have returned since the global economic tsunami of 2008.
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