I ask Manu about the other banner that I’ve seen onstage, the one for the FPDT, the People’s Front for the Defence of the Land. It mentions something about a place called Atenco. It’s a story that Manu has been getting increasingly involved in. The FPDT was formed in response to plans to develop an airport at San Salvador Atenco, on the edge of Mexico City. The project was peacefully and successfully resisted in 2002 by 500 farmers and their supporters, who included Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas. A grand scheme for the airport to become part of an ‘industrial corridor’ through Mexico was dropped. It was a significant victory, which embarrassed the government.
Then another dispute kicked off in 2006, when police tried to stop sixty flower vendors from selling their wares at the local market in Texcoco near Atenco. Things rapidly escalated. The flower sellers called on the FPDT and Subcomandante Marcos came to the town and talked about how all these anti-state movements should come together in what he called ‘The Other Campaign’. The protest began to have a powerful symbolic value.
Around 300 protestors blocked the highway and a policeman was injured, an incident which was caught on camera and replayed endlessly on national TV. The next day, up to 3,500 policemen responded with extraordinary violence and crushed the protests. Armed with sketchy intelligence about the ringleaders, they knocked down the doors of suspected homes, trashed them and brutalised their inhabitants. A fourteen-year-old boy, Javier Cortés, was killed by a police bullet. A university student called Alexis Benhumera died from head wounds. Women were raped. A report by the National Human Rights Commission claimed that 207 people had been injured and 26 women suffered sexual assault. Several protestors, but none of the perpetrators of the violence, were jailed and a dozen of them received ridiculously long sentences. Ignacio del Valle, the ‘intellectual author’, who was considered the troublemaker-in-chief, was handed a 100-year jail sentence. We’re due to meet his wife, Trini, in Mexico City.
For Manu, what happened in Atenco was simply ‘state terrorism’, a phrase he went on to use with maximum impact the next year, when he returned to Guadalajara for the International Film Festival and programmed an evening of films that included a documentary on La Colifata.
At the Film Festival, Manu also spoke out in favour of Ignacio del Valle and the other prisoners. He was supposed to give a concert the next night. The state authorities started quizzing the Film Festival organiser Jorge Sánchez about whether Manu was in possession of the required working visa or whether he had entered Mexico with only a tourist visa. They also invoked Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution, which states that foreigners may not in any way interfere in the political affairs of the country, and gives the government the right to evict an offender without trial. Manu cancelled the next day’s concert, fearing that his arrest would end in violence and, in the end, the authorities didn’t use Article 33 against him. But Manu’s speech did create a media firestorm which kept the plight of the prisoners in the public eye.
When we get to our hotel in Mexico City, Manu throws another wobbly. The advertised wi-fi isn’t working and he needs to make some connections. When I ask him out for the evening, he says, slightly conspiratorially, that he has things to do.
Manu speaks out against state terrorism at the Guadalajara International FIlm Festival, 2009.
Instead, I do a quick tour of some Manu landmarks including the giant Zócalo square where Radio Bemba played to the biggest crowd of their career and the market in Tepito, full of pirated goods, which Manu namechecks in the song “El Hoyo”. Then I ask the cab driver to drop me off at Foro Alicia, named after the Lewis Carroll book, which has been ground central to Mexico’s alternative bands for the past decade or so. It’s like New York’s CBGBs with a social conscience. The Alicios offer space to alternative groups like the Zapatistas and put out scores of ska, garage, reggae, new metal and other albums. A selection of names from their artist roster gives a flavour: La Divina Pistola, AK-47, Los Auténticos Decadentes, Zero Child, as well as the peerless Kinky Beat. Manu has played here several times, and a superior semi-bootleg entitled Próxima Estación: Mexico can be found on the web.
I track down a Cuban friend, Juan de Marcos González, from the Afro-Cuban All Stars (and musical director of the Buena Vista Social Club album) and finish the evening at Plaza Garibaldi, the Mecca for mariachi bands. A wizened guy who looks old enough to have fought with Zapata shuffles up and offers me a cigar. He also has a contraption for giving people an electric shock. Naturally, I’m buying. You have to choose a dose between one and ten. I choose seven and, yes, it’s a hell of a jolt, all for five pesos.
Manu doesn’t usually surface till midday, so I spend the next morning doing essential tourist stuff including the Frida Kahlo Museum and the Museum of Anthropology. Manu still isn’t back at the hotel at lunchtime. I head to the venue, the Foro Sol, a sports arena which is home to the Red Devils, the Diablos Rojos del México, a Mexican Baseball League team. We’re assured that the place will be nearly full to its 55,000 capacity, which is about the same size as the Shea Stadium where the Beatles played in 1965 – the biggest gig ever at the time. The rain starts coming down in sheets, monsoon-style.
Manu’s absence is explained – he’s been on a cloak-and-dagger mission to visit Ignacio del Valle and the other prisoners in Atenco prison. Several of the activists from the FPDT are there at the Foro Sol, along with Ignacio’s wife, Trinidad Ramírez, or ‘Trini’ for short. Backstage there’s a solemn ceremony. Manu and Gambeat are each given a bandana, a straw hat and a machete. ‘The machete doesn’t mean violence,’ Trini says. ‘It is a symbol of the defence of the land and the heart of Atenco.’ Hortensia Ramos, also from the FPDT, explains that the bandana is ‘a symbol of the sweat of labour and marches, the tears of the mothers of political prisoners, to wipe the tears and sweat of Atenco, as well as the Chiapas and Guerrero’.
What might, in other circumstances, at least to an English sensibility warped by Monty Python, have a certain comic potential, is actually quite moving. The ceremony is given extra weight by the apocalyptic rain, the 50,000 strong crowd outside and the complete sincerity of Manu, Gambeat and the macheteros from the FPDT.
Not your usual backstage action: Trinidad Ramírez initiates Manu into the ranks of the macheteros. PHOTO © ROXANNE HAYNES
I’ve never seen Manu quite so fired up and passionate before a gig, and this translates into a powerful performance by the band. The rain has eased off, but such a vast crowd needs warming up and, to begin with at least, the intensity is at a lower wattage than in Guadalajara. But the set starts to soar about halfway through, powered by the rhythm section of David, Philippe and Gambeat, with Julio’s keyboards adding bedrock to the Madjid and Manu show up front. Angelo’s trumpet is perfectly ‘Mexican’.
The crowd really kick off when the band play “El Hoyo”, the song about their city, and “Volver, Volver”. Then Trini is brought onstage. ‘Here we are,’ she shouts. ‘We want you to remain free and enjoy. Be happy!’ The audience as one shout ‘Libertad! Libertad! Libertad!’ in return. The universal cry for freedom echoes through the centuries.
CHAPTER 17:
PARIS–SIBERIA
‘And since he seeks, he seeks, and he looks …’
From Manwoz biography
Pig’s Alley is the servicemen’s nickname for Pigalle, the seedy Parisian neighbourhood where Manu has a tiny bedsit above his management company, Corida. I go to meet him there. Round the corner, a man with aetiolated skin, pale as a baby polar bear due to lack of sunlight, abuses me for not taking his business card, which advertises the name of a nearby lap-dancing club.
Pigalle is full of blinking lights designed to hypnotise the unwary visitor and switch off his brain. Korean massage parlours alternate with shops selling the most banal tourist tat. It’s the kind of place where, after midnight, the ATM machines should flash the warning message: ‘ARE YOU REALLY SURE ABOUT THIS?’ Within a few blocks there are joints that aspire to more sophisticated and
artistic manifestations of the erotic craft, with their quaintly seductive burlesque shows and historical pedigree, places like the Moulin Rouge or the Musée de l’Érotisme. Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso lived hereabouts. Slightly further east, towards the North African neighbourhood of Barbès, there’s a funky concert hall called La Cigalle, which is run by Manu’s management company. Pigalle, of course, was also the place where Mano Negra did their riotous tour, playing the strip clubs.
Manu’s bedsit, also owned by his management, where he stays when visiting Paris, is like a student garret: mattress on the floor, basic sound system, computer, a few clothes on a rail. A half-eaten box of Valentine’s chocolates lies forlornly on a shelf. He reminds me that when he was young and living in suburban Sèvres – he had always wanted to escape Paris as soon as he could. ‘There wasn’t that much to do there as a teenager,’ he remembers. ‘You’d hang about by the petrol station in a little gang. Maybe the police would move you on. Then you’d go home.’ Of course, Paris was never a centre for his beloved rock’n’roll, which only fuelled dreams of other horizons. ‘When I go back to Sèvres, it hasn’t changed that much. I was the only one to escape. I was the lucky one. Now the kids of my gang are hanging around the same places.’
Several of his friends didn’t make it out alive. ‘We used to deal a bit in marijuana, some speed,’ Manu tells me. ‘Then I recall one of the big guys coming round one week with some powder … it was heroin … saying we should sell that. I was lucky. Never touched it.’ But several of his gang got hooked and at least a couple of them OD’d. How much of his escape was just dumb luck, another spin of the wheel of la vida tómbola? Unlike many in his Sèvres gang, Manu had a loving family living in a house full of books to give him a moral core, confidence and a global outlook. As a teen dreamer, he was driven not only by a deep-rooted desire to break out of the suburbs, but fierce ambition and an aptitude for hard work. He had been endowed with a strong constitution and intelligence by the genetic lottery. Mano Negra were in the right place at the right time, but Manu was ready and set before the space opened up.
‘Sometimes when something lucky happens,’ he thinks, ‘your hand is burned, because you are not ready for it.’ But when fortune did smile on him, Manu seized every opportunity with both hands.
It was only when he came back to Paris, as a ‘foreigner’, after avoiding it for years, that he was able to appreciate the beauty of his native metropolis. It was in this Pigalle garret that he made his own kind of peace with the city he describes as ‘cold-hearted’, by recording and putting together a book and CD called Sibérie M’Était Contéee, in collaboration with the Polish illustrator Jacek Wozniak. Wozniak was introduced to Manu by his father Ramón, who had met him in Paris magazine circles, and liked his work so much he had several images tattooed on his body (one for each book, remember).
Manu’s relationship with Wozniak, since their initial collaboration, has become almost symbiotic, with Wozniak almost a visual equivalent to Manu’s music. He created Manu’s distinctive logo, the artwork of Radiolina and other albums, a myriad of features on his website and videos, and a 2012 book (Manu & Chao). Manu and Wozniak have also collaborated – under the name ‘Manwoz’ – on art exhibitions in Perpignan, Barcelona, Guadalajara and Mallorca. They gave their Manwoz character the following, oddly familiar, biography:
Born in the distant plains of Ukraine in 1959, near the sinister Chernobyl, Manwoz was an only boy in a large family. His father was Galician, his mother ran a tavern. At a young age, Manwoz became bored of school and family and at fifteen decided to travel the globe in search of … Disappeared. And since he seeks, he seeks, and he looks …
The Sibérie M’Était Contéee book and album effectively marks Manwoz’s first appearance. But, for Manu as a musician, the most striking innovation is that the album’s lyrics are in French and the subject matter is Paris. Like so many of Manu’s projects, it evolved as he (and Wozniak) continued to work on it. It was originally issued as a 48-page book with a CD of 6 songs – but it grew to 148 pages and 23 songs in a second edition.
In the corner of Manu’s studio flat, there’s a brown box full of tattered sheets scrawled with lyrics and a black box full of technological toys. These are the raw materials and tools that he used to create the Sibérie songs, recording and mixing by himself for the first time, overdubbing trumpet and accordion on sometimes very basic electronic sequences. The music – a low-key, dreamy delight – is influenced by musette, the popular Parisian dance music of the 1930s, and by the switchblade cabaret and ‘dirty waltzes’ of earlier Parisian generations.
The Sibérie book – dedicated to all the fishers in the river of love. It has become a collectors’ item. You need to imagine the grey as yellow, of course.
Manu recalled how much he had hated French language songs in his youth: ‘French music to me was bullshit. It was the music of my grandfather, and I never wrote songs in French. French was the worst, it was old school.’ Only much later did he appreciate the treasures of French chanson, discovering singers like Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf, who, he slowly realised, were rock’n’roll in their own way, of a totally French stripe.
On Sibérie there’s a delving back into fertile former eras of Parisian cultural history. One influence is the colourful, one-armed (the other was blown off in the First World War) literary figure of Blaise Cendrars, who knew and influenced poets like Breton and Apollinaire. In the 1920s he lived in a room in Biarritz with murals by Picasso and drove around in an Alfa Romeo with customised paintwork by Braque. Much later, in 1954, he collaborated with the painter Fernand Léger on Paris, Ma Ville, a love letter to the capital, full of disillusion and nostalgia. His poem of a Trans-Siberian journey with his lover Jeanne has her repeating: ‘Say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?’
Another figure hovering behind the album-book is Jacques Prévert, the surrealist poet and political activist, who was also an accomplished collagist and screenwriter. His most celebrated film, Les Enfants Du Paradis, is referenced in Sibérie. His playful poetry is loved by children and is often read in schools in France.
Manu had gone mining for inspiration in the Dada and Surrealist movements of the 1920s, which were, in large part, a reaction to the mindless slaughter of the First World War. The wayward anger, nihilism and anti-authoritarianism of those movements shared some sensibilities with punk and the New York scene of the 1970s. In the 1920s, Paris was the stage for wildly original performances like Parade, a surrealist ballet with jazzy music by Erik Satie, designs by Jean Cocteau and costumes by Pablo Picasso which included people dressed as skyscrapers. Or George Antheil and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique, with its music for pianolas and aeroplane propellers.
In the 1970s, as Manu had discussed with me in New York, Manhattan could boast a similar blurring between the avant-garde and popular music. Rock bands such as Television and Talking Heads had high-art credentials, while composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass were reaching a rock audience. Within a few years and within a few square miles, punk, hip hop, disco and salsa were developed before exploding worldwide.
Unlike in the era of punk, so inspirational to Manu, whose energy came almost entirely from elsewhere, the French capital was the global centre of the cultural action during the 1920s. That time of Paris’ cultural apotheosis began to fascinate and inspire Manu. The alternative heyday of 1980s Paris, with its music, street theatre and anarchic circus, had possessed a similar potential, perhaps, but it imploded before lift-off. Manu missed the camaraderie that had existed back in those times, as well as individual friends like Helno, of Les Négresses Vertes, who died of a heroin overdose in 1993.
Helno’s memory inspired the album’s most original and haunting track, “Helno Est Mort”, which mixes the tunes and some of the words of the nursery rhyme “Au Claire de la Lune”. Midway through the lament, a counterpoint tune comes through, with the celebratory flavour of a New Orleans funeral blues while Manu repeatedly chants ‘Don’t wanna l
ose nobody close to me’.
After the noisy breakup of Bérurier Noir, Les Négresses Vertes (The Green Negresses) were the other potential world beaters, besides Mano Negra, to come out of the alternative cauldron of the Paris 1980s underground. They mixed punk, mambo, flamenco, Algerian raï and riotous choruses, and their first single was called “200 Ans d’Hypocrisie” (200 Years of Hypocrisy). They were signed to Virgin in the same week as Mano Negra. Helno, their charismatic lead singer, and songwriter, was not just a friend; he was perhaps the closest parallel to Manu in the Paris music scene, a shadow and mirror.
Quintessential Manu: Wozniak’s cover for the Sibérie CD.
The title Sibérie M’Était Contéee (Siberia was told to me) is multi-layered. ‘Sibérie’, for example, can be read as ‘If Paris’ (si means ‘if’, while bérie is a slang pronunciation of ‘Paris’), and may have a resonance of Jean Tiberi, mayor of Paris in the 1990s. The subtitle ‘A tous les pêcheurs du fleuve amour’ (To all those fishing in the river of love) plays with the words pêcheurs, which means both ‘sinners’ and ‘fishermen’, and amour, which means ‘love’ but also refers more obliquely to Amur, the river in Siberia which winds its black, serpentine way along the Manchurian border and was regarded as sacred by the Qing Dynasty.
With its unholy bleakness and frozen winters, Siberia seemed to Manu to be a reasonable if unlikely metaphor for Paris, which he evokes with poetic images like the ‘small golden neon sun’ setting bleakly over the Gare du Nord. ‘I spent my first twenty-six winters in Paris,’ he tells me. ‘I felt that so many of the human relationships were grey. These days I come as a foreigner – my Paris is really Ménilmontant and the bars in that area.’
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