Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Not everyone appreciates Manu here. The Argentine singer Fito Páez is a contemporary of Manu’s who has released politically charged albums like Ciudad De Pobres Corazones (City of Poor Hearts), dedicated to the memory of his aunt and grandmother, who were assassinated. He has also raised large sums at benefit concerts for the likes of UNICEF. ‘Who is this guy posing as a French urchin, with sixteen credit cards, coming to lecture us?’ he was quoted as saying. Manu is cool, as ever, when he is asked about this. ‘There are at least twenty different Manu Chaos who are not like me at all,’ he responds. ‘If I start worrying about the stuff people think about me, I would be stupid.’

  When the talk eventually gets back to his music, Manu is asked about the genesis of “Rainin’ In Paradize”, his new single, whose accompanying video, by the celebrated Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, features several scenes shot during recordings of La Colifata (‘Emir suggested we hire some actors to look crazy in the video,’ Manu tells me later. ‘I told him I knew some real crazy people who would be much better.’) The song’s lyrics reference the illegal Iraq War, sanctioned by our democratic leaders, and mentions other atrocities like the civil war in the Congo and the massacres of Liberian refugees fleeing to Monrovia, which have taken place below the radar of the Western media. The chorus has a manic urgency: ‘This world go crazy. It’s an atrocity.’

  Manu says the song started life as a reggae number, and it was the musicians he was with, guitarist Madjid Farhem in particular, who transformed it into a guitar thrash. But then Manu’s songs have the kind of strength and simplicity, built with sturdy structures, that can stand being sung in different styles and Manu himself often recycles them to suit the moment or the band he happens to be with.

  After the conference, Manu picks up his guitar and sings a few songs, including “Desaparecido” (The Disappearing One), which has obvious dark resonances in Argentina, even if Manu claims it is merely autobiographical. He’s then joined by Radio Roots, the pick-up busker-style band who had accompanied him to Córdoba, for a roughneck version of Camarón de la Isla’s nuevo flamenco classic “Volando Voy” (I Fly Out). The assembled journalists start dancing, something you don’t generally see at press conferences.

  We go back to the Tango House before setting off for the Cantina Cervantes. The name seems apt for this trip, for there are times when I feel distinctly Sancho Panza to Manu’s Don Quixote, a deluded sidekick following him on his madcap adventures.

  Cervantes is a simple cantina that inspires confidence because it’s so packed with locals. There’s a twenty-minute queue to get a table. I chide Manu that if he was proper rock star, he’d make a fuss. After all, what’s the point of fame if you can’t get a table at a restaurant? He just shrugs. ‘I’m too shy.’ With us are Paulo and Mark, who are staying at the Tango House and making a TV film about La Colifata, and when we everntually get seated the wine and conversation flows.

  I ask Manu about the local pop hero La Mona Jiménez, who he had mentioned when we were in Córdoba. There was a glammed-up picture of him in that day’s local paper, looking like a cross between Gary Glitter and James Brown. Manu tells me that he plays to several thousand people each weekend in Córdoba, where the gangs stop fighting while he plays, but only rarely does gigs in Buenos Aires and never further afield. He never tours, apparently because he doesn’t want to and doesn’t need to. La Mona Jiménez has made 72 albums and, according to Manu, is obsessed getting past the 100 album mark before he dies. He’s also supposed to have so many children that he’s lost count. He’s quite possibly on track to exceed the 100 children as well 100 album mark. ‘It’s a great thing for a girl from the neighbourhoods to have his baby,’ Manu says, rolling another cigarette. ‘She knows they will be looked after.’

  The subject of “Rainin In Paradize” comes up and I suggest that what saves it from becoming a political rant is the insane chorus ‘Go Masai, go! Be mellow, go Masai go, be sharp …’ I said that an English writer would never have written that and pass on Charlie Gillett’s observation that Manu’s English is for people to whom English is a second language – which is the majority of English speakers. ‘My father used to say that about my Spanish lyrics,’ Manu responds, as he takes a swig of wine. ‘He’d tell me, ‘‘You can’t say that, it’s not correct!’’.’

  I tell Manu I’ve been reading the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and cogitating on his belief that progress comes from misunderstanding. In other words, if you understand something completely, you will never innovate. Manu nods his head and crooks his neck. ‘That’s maybe what happened with us,’ he reflected. ‘Mano Negra never really understood English punk, so we did something new.’

  I realise, having dropped the names of Cervantes and Vico, that Manu hardly talks about books, although he sometimes mentions Chester Himes, the black thriller writer he read in order to learn English, and Eduardo Galeano, whose Open Veins of Latin America is one of the most incisive critiques of North American imperialism in the continent, or his family friend Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude. But he says his university is the road and his teachers those who he meets on his voyages. Manu prefers to eat the meal rather than read the menu.

  After going via the local supermercado to pick up a bottle of Scotch whisky we arrive back at the Tango House, where Manu asks if I want to listen to some of his new music on his computer. I do of course, although it’s always nerve-wracking when a musician plays their new music to you. Faking enthusiasm is not my strong point and I haven’t loved every single one of Manu’s productions.

  In Manu’s room the laptop is open on his bed. He lights a joint, plugs in a lead to a small beat-up boom box, and plays me demos that he’s been working on with Amadou & Mariam’s son Sam and the band SMOD, which Sam formed with his friends Ousco and Donsky. The mix of guitars and beats recorded mainly on Amadou & Mariam’s roof in downtown Bamako, the capital of Mali, are richly layered. Sam raps in Bambara, the local language, and in French. The dynamics are impressive, from disco tunes to ballads. It’s very African, but totally modern. I tell him I think it’s a winner.

  Then he plays me some roughs from his La Colifata album, recorded at La Tribu and at a studio outside Buenos Aires owned by one of one of Argentina’s top bands, Los Piojos. The tracks are mainly spoken word numbers using Manu’s music as backing track. He translates some lines for me: ‘This is a broadcast from Mars / We’re alone / We’re hungry / Green cars helicopters / Too much wars in helicopter’. Another track went like this: ‘The loneliness at the hospital / We feel it / There is a sun, above / So far from the other stars / I love the sun / I love the stars / The sun kills nobody / Women drive me crazy’. There’s quite a lot of stuff about mothers, too.

  I’ve got my notebook out but can’t keep up with the speed of the texts Manu is reciting. The music adds to the strangeness. Manu tells me how he first heard about La Colifata from a neighbour of his in Barcelona, Carlos Larrondo, whose TV film about the project had just won a prize. Manu became fascinated by the poems of the inmates, and started using them for a compilation he was making of busker bands in Barcelona, which was eventually sold on the street to raise money for his street musician friends. He then met some of the people connected to La Colifata when he went to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in Brazil.

  I pour Manu a whisky, thank him for letting me hear the new music – I don’t think even his record company people have heard it – and crash out. It’s difficult to sleep under the whirring fan of my room but I shoo the Malvinas cat out, and eventually drift off with the sounds of West Africa, killer bass lines and snatches of mad poetry floating in my head.

  The following day, Manu emerges at midday and we head off to the Borda hospital, or the Neuropsiquiatrico Dr José T. Borda to give it its precise name. According to the journalist Santiago Roncagliolo of the Spanish daily El País, the complex of buildings – the largest mental asylum in Argentina – was, during the so-called Dirty War, the site of absolute horror, as scor
es of desaparecidos were burned in its ovens.

  Every Saturday the radio programme La Colifata 100.1 MHz is recorded in the open air, close to the wards where the patients sleep. This is by far the most pleasant area of the complex, an airy courtyard overlooked by flowering trees. I’m introduced here to some of the Colifatas, as they call themselves. Hugo, running around manically, I recognise from the “Rainin’ In Paradize” video.

  Later, I meet Beatnik, the voice from “Tristeza Maleza” on La Radiolina, a song about Señor George Bush and how the American Eagle sees everything he does. He seems pretty sane, but obsessive. When I invite him for a chat the next day at the Tango House, he spends at least an hour talking in minute detail about bands from 1968, particularly about the betrayal, as he sees it, of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, before recalling how he had a job as a customs officer when Mano Negra first visited Buenos Aires on the Cargo Tour in 1992. ‘I’d never seen anything like it,’ Beatnik tells me with a distraught expression. ‘They came from another universe. They were like Cortez arriving on horseback to meet the Incas!’

  It was Beatnik who persuaded Alfredo Olivera, the psychologist who runs La Colifata, to let him vent his obsession on a ‘classic rock’ hour for the patients, while ‘in a state of euphoria’. He wrote and read his poems on his show and a few of these made their way on to Manu’s La Colifata album (this was released in 2009, as a free download, as clearing the rights to the poems and songs, some of them mangled versions of classic songs of the past, became a nightmare).

  Beatnik told me that he realised he wasn’t crazy. ‘Madness is a prison you feel can’t escape from,’ he said. ‘But I was exploring the depths of my mind.’

  The format of La Colifata’s radio show is explained to me by Alfredo Olivera. Patients who want to say something, read a poem, sing a song or play some music, can do just that. The names of all those who want a turn are written up on a blackboard. About four hours of ‘rushes’ are taped each Saturday and the most interesting material is edited down into a forty-five-minute radio show, or ‘microprogramme,’ which is broadcast on several Argentinian radio stations as well as on the Colifata website. Usually there’s a score of people or so who attend the recording in the hospital’s garden, but when word leaks that Manu is coming several hundred turn up, including a posse of dreadlocked fans.

  One after the other, various patients go up to the mic. One guy in a dishevelled suit sings a romantic old tango called “ El Reloj” by Luis Miguel, completely out of tune but with emphasis on the heart-rending line ‘don’t tell me the time, because she’s gone forever,’ which he delivers with true feeling. Some contributions are little more than a shriek of pain. Others are untranslatable nonsense. One patient says ‘I went everywhere in the world, now I’m just having a rest,’ slowly, in a deep voice. Another just says, ‘with the help of God I will recover’ and ‘a hug and love is worth a thousand pills’.

  A couple come to the microphone and relate how God has spoken to them both and brought them together. It makes me think of Thomas Szasz’s comment that ‘If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you’re schizophrenic.’ There are surreal moments of poetry, too, such as the line ‘I look forward to a country where there is no food and people eat songs’. A woman in a threadbare dress says, ‘I’m bad, I am selfish and everything is for me. I want everything that’s bad in the world.’

  Then there’s the sports news. Football results are read by a gent with slicked-back hair and manically overwrought sportscaster tones. He criticises the behaviour of the fans at the Boca Juniors match and expresses indignation at the performance of striker Leonel Núñez, who plays for Independiente at the time. It’s all very convincing, until someone points out that the results he is reading are from tomorrow’s matches – our commentator knows the future.

  Music drifts on between these contributions and sometimes underneath them, often with startling incongruity. The disco standard “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” is played while a man wails about how Palestine should be liberated and the world free from mental terrorism.

  Manu accompanying members of La Colifata, recording their album.

  When Manu comes on, he plays guitar under some of the poems, then takes the mic himself. He dedicates a Galician bar song called “ Carreteiro” to ‘all the mothers in the world’, and performs a song based on the repentista troubadour style of northeast Brazil, but with his own words, before continuing with several hits including “Welcome To Tijuana”. Roots Radio join him, after hanging about for hours. ‘We’d only do it for Manu,’ says Markos from the band. When they come on, the crowd go crazy, perhaps as a kind of release from the tension of the afternoon, dancing with each other and with the mental patients. A strange afternoon of poetry and pain turns into a wild, surreal, Felliniesque fiesta.

  Afterwards I speak to Alfredo Olivera. ‘One approach to the definition of insanity or psychosis indicates that those stricken have lost language. They do not utilise language as we do or they speak nonsense,’ he says. ‘Radio permits the patients to begin to reconstruct this aspect. And by people hearing the patients, we are able to change the idea that all people in psychiatric facilities are dangerous.’ Alfredo calls this ‘media therapy’. The hospital sends the programmes out for free and only asks that the patients are given whatever feedback comes from the outside. It’s a way of increasing communication both ways.

  I ask if there’s a relation between the Colifata project and the anti-psychiatry movement or the ideas of people like Laing and Szasz. The anti-psychiatrists were suspicious of the very notion of asylums, which they saw as places for parking uncomfortable social elements, more to insulate the outside world against the mentally ill rather than perform any healing function. Alfredo concurs that one of the functions of the project is to debate the uses of the very institution we are in.

  A criticism of the anti-psychiatrists, which could perhaps be also levelled at Manu when he talks of the poetry of the patients who ‘are close to God and super-lucid’, is that they are over-romanticising the insane. ‘I think that is a danger,’ Alfredo says but thinks Manu understands the situation here well enough. ‘Madness is an illness to be cured,’ Alfredo declares, but adds that some insane people can access intensely poetic and creative states of mind. He doesn’t think Manu is exploiting them. ‘He’s become a friend and the royalties from the record will bring us much-needed money. Without Manu, we may well close.’ We agree that it’s probably better, anyway, to romanticise the patients than ignore or criminalise them, as happens all too often.

  That evening, walking near the Tango House, three girl fans start chatting to Manu in the street and he invites them for a drink. Paulo films this exchange on his video, and we find a cantina with outdoor seating so we can smoke. Paulo has put the video camera by his chair, but somehow it gets stolen. Manu thinks someone may have seen us filming in the street and followed us. Paulo is completely distraught, but Manu is philosophical. ‘There’s nothing you can do, it’s gone. Don’t let it ruin your evening.’

  The girls are gorgeous and flirty. They’re amazingly self-assured, although they can’t be more than seventeen. I remember that when I met David Bowie in my twenties I was almost speechless. I dub them Sporty, Posh and Baby. Sporty says she watches everything Manu does on YouTube. ‘These days, even if he sleeps, it’s on YouTube.’ Manu is perfectly friendly, but doesn’t flirt back.

  Back on the terrace at the Tango House, I ask Manu about his radio obsession. It’s curious that his father and brother both work in radio, his band is called Radio Bemba and his last album was called La Radiolina. He loves radio for the space it gives to the listeners’ imaginations. ‘For the real reason, you would have to ask my therapist,’ he says, not for the first time in our conversations.

  I ask Manu if he’s had many friends with mental illnesses. He responds by saying it’s possible some kind of madness runs in the family. His only contact with mental patients before La Colifata was his grandfa
ther Tomás, who ended his days in a mad house. ‘The first time I went to visit was with my mother. It was hard to see him there, but it wasn’t a bad place,’ he reminisces. ‘We were all in a garden and it wasn’t the horror that an asylum can be. When I saw he was more or less well, it was a minor domestic tragedy, but everybody was with their madness and accepting the folly of the other. It was there that I said, “What grace!” That boundary between who is and who is not crazy is not clear to me. If madness causes terrible pain, then it should be treated. But if not, what is the problem? What’s wrong if someone is not formatted as required by the Judeo-Christian society?’ Manu rolls up a joint and we retreat into silence.

  CHAPTER 15:

  SAHARA LIBRE! DAKHLA, ALGERIA

  ‘I am not the lord of the desert But the slave of naked horizons

  From the poem ‘Pas de nom’ by Issa Rhose

  The in-flight entertainment on the Air Algeria flight from Algiers to Madrid is first class. Even before take off, Manu Chao and Madjid are strumming their guitars and, as the plane zooms off with the lights of Algiers twinkling below, they simply carry on playing, despite the panicky looks on the faces of the cabin crew. Johnny McLeod magics a megaphone from under his seat and announces that everyone can smoke. No one does. Half-Scottish, half-Algerian, Johnny is a musician, philosopher and genial host of the Babel bar in Ménilmontant, one of Manu’s favourite neighbourhoods.