CHAPTER 18:
BRIXTON BABYLON
‘A river needs banks for the water to flow.’
From the I-Ching – Manu’s favourite book
The sleek vixen was bold as brass, slinking across Acre Lane, to the manor born, as dusk fell on the Saturday of the Jubilee weekend to celebrate the Queen’s sixty years on the throne. I was with Maria Santos, Manu’s girlfriend. Manu had told me the last time we met, over a year ago, that he had written a song about the urban foxes you see all over London. ‘It’s a love song as well,’ says Maria, humming a couplet. That makes sense – Maria is an elegant beauty, funky, luxuriant unkempt hair, bright eyes. ‘So you’re the Brixton Fox?’
We had caught a glimpse of the flotilla of boats sailing up the river at Vauxhall Bridge, then decided to sidestep the collective swoon for the monarchy by going to see Kevin Macdonald’s epic documentary on Bob Marley at the Brixton Ritzy. Afterwards, we go to a cheap but good Mexican restaurant in Brixton’s market. The waitress, Maritza, a friend of Maria’s, supports the Zapatistas. The owner of the place, another Mexican, thinks they’re very good at getting money from Europeans. For him, they’re like the IRA, Irish Catholic fighters who maybe once were on the side of the good guys but who had long since become corrupt. He thinks they’re just using Manu.
Naturally, we discuss the movie, too: the clash between the symbolic visionary with a white father and black mother, who preached unity, the Marley who belonged to the world, and Bob Marley the man, who was frankly a pain to his wife, Rita, and most of his children.
Manu has been compared often enough with Marley, a revolutionary agent for a change of consciousness, a champion of the underclass and man of the people. I tell Maria that when I had been doing some reports for Oxfam in the Philippines, we went to visit an island with most remote tribal people I had ever come across – several of them wore Bob Marley T-shirts. At the start of the Arab Spring, there was graffiti on Tunisian walls scrawled with Marley quotes like ‘Get Up, Stand Up’.
Manu could quite possibly have capitalised on the dizzying success of Clandestino and Próxima Estación: Esperanza to have the same kind of global reach, to be the picture on radical students’ walls next to Che Guevara and Marley. Millions do revere him, but, with only one major CD release in the last ten years, I suggest to Maria that it was maybe because he actively, and understandably, didn’t want the next level into premier league fame. Marley was shot, Lennon killed and list of stars who self-destructed is a long one. The crazy, pressured life of Santa Maradona that he had sung about in “La Vida Tómbola”. She doesn’t think that was it, but with a laugh says it was ‘stubbornness’. Having had his instincts proved reliable often enough, he thought he was always right.
It’s not that Manu hasn’t got a treasure trove of unreleased material. There’s an album’s worth of rumba recordings done in Barcelona that at one time were going to go out under the enjoyable title The Worst Of The Rumba Volume 1. I’d heard most of his ‘Brazilian’ album which he played most of me in the Café Glaciar, including his song to his son, “Kira”, and the singalong “Ta De Bobeira” which has already become a delirious live staple. Some fierce remixes emerged of “Politik Kills” and “A Cosa” by Mike ‘Prince Fatty’ Pelanconi, the Brighton-based DJ, but there are other delicious vintage-style reggae-ish originals from the same sessions which haven’t been released. Not to mention the odd mythical song like “Salaryman” or, indeed, the “Brixton Fox”. Manu claims to have hundreds of songs in various forms on his hard drive and he could release several albums in one go if he chose to.
A valid question in an industry where the business model changes so fast, and all that is solid turns into air, is how to release this material. Maria thinks Manu would be probably perfectly happy to put them out for free, his management predictably less so. Another issue, both technological and creative, is that, while working on a laptop is liberating, it also gives you too many options. When exactly is a track finished anyway, if ever? When I had last met Manu, I suggested the old-fashioned studio constraints had some advantages – for his ‘Brazilian’ album why not just book three weeks in a studio with a top Brazilian producer like Jaques Morelenbaum and see what comes out? I even quoted a line from Manu’s favourite book, the I Ching: ‘A river needs banks for the water to flow’. It’s also true that, just as most writers need editors, for a musician an empathetic producer can have a valuable, more objective, perspective. After all, Manu’s biggest successes, both artistically and commercially, came from the two albums that had Renauld Letang as co-pilot.
Although in Mano Negra, Manu was accused by the band of being a bosseur, a hard-driving Jesuit with his unrelenting work rate, now he’s more likely to be criticised for slacking, with a dearth of major albums. In fact, generally Manu is doing all kinds of things, but if he’s seen as flying the flag for slackers, maybe it’s admirable. What Thoreau wrote, in 1863, applies even more now: ‘If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.’
A charitable view would be that one of the reasons Manu feels at home in Africa or South America is because he doesn’t quite believe in the European notion of time. Not an excuse that would wash with your own boss in New York or London, perhaps, but then most of us haven’t been described as ‘the last free man’. And a considerable part of this powerful symbolic appeal of Manu is as a free man, a ‘post-European trickster’ beyond borders, whether musical, ancestral or geographic.
Back at Maria’s Brixton basement flat, I ask how she copes with Manu’s elusiveness and loco mosquito tendencies. She replies that some people’s dream may be to live in a cottage in the country and raise kids, but not her’s, nor Manu’s. She then turns the tables and it seems that she may have another motive for meeting me when she fixes me with her dark eyes and says: ‘I hope you are not mythologising Manu.’
The observation is so astute, and direct, that it startles me. I’m focusing on the more exciting events in Manu’s life and to do that there’s a necessary selection process. In that respect, this book is like any novel. Conversations that took place on different days end up concertinaed together. And who was it who said that facts are stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer? I tell her I’m trying to make my book as honest as possible and won’t merely portray Manu as some kind of warrior-saint that some of his fans seem to think he is. This possibility concerns Maria. She tells me of a weird incident on the previous summer’s US tour when a very pregnant woman came up to Manu and asked for her unborn child to be blessed.
Manu’s no saint, for sure. But people expect things of him, even on a mundane level. Maria mentions that when he has a hangover he reckons the best cure is Coca Cola. One time in Miami, she went to the local shop to buy some Coke because there had been some heavy partying the night before, and this couple came up to her and said, ‘but you’re Manu’s girlfriend’. The couple had been to the concert the night before and had seen them together (Maria is quite a striking-looking woman). The couple were shocked and actually rather horrified. Surely Manu didn’t consume Coca-Cola?
Maria asks if I want to see some footage she had shot of the last US Tour in the summer of 2011. It’s good stuff. She had picked up a quality video camera in New York and was excited about putting it to proper use for the first time. She did have, as they say, access to all areas and expertly shot some charmingly frank but professional-quality material starring Manu, Madjid, Gambeat and Philippe as they toured North America as La Ventura. The tour achieved what was possibly Manu’s greatest success in the States yet: playing to wildly enthusiastic crowds in sold-out arenas, like the 12,000-seater Klipsch
Amphitheater in Miami. Having avoided North America for most of his career, was Manu, in his middle age, finally seducing the Great Satan?
The tour finished with a free concert in Phoenix, Arizona, and some high-profile agitprop sponsored by the National Day Laborer’s Organizing Network. Maria includes footage of Manu and Madjid performing right outside Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s infamous tent-city, which houses over 10,000 undocumented immigrants in very basic conditions. ‘The duo sang “Clandestino” of course. ‘Me dicen “el clandestino” por no llevar papel’ (They call me ‘clandestine’ because I have no papers) rings the chorus,’ remembered one blogger, ‘and while the song alludes to unauthorised immigration from Africa to Europe, as well as Chao’s own family’s fleeing from Spain, the message hits powerfully in Arizona in 2011.’
‘It may sound stupid, but Arizona, for me, from my childhood, was the centre of the world because I used to spend so much time watching films of cowboys with my grandfather,’ Manu told the Arizona Republic. A commentator on the newspaper’s website was not impressed: ‘Yeah? And I’ve formulated my political stance on foreign countries like China by watching Jackie Chan movies.’ When the paper asked Manu why he was getting himself involved in politics, he answered: ‘Because everywhere you go, there are social problems. You can’t close your heart and say nothing is happening. Politics is all around you. So my way of writing songs is a little kind of journalistic way. I’ve never found a place where people told me, “Manu, here, everything is going good”.’
Madjid and Manu in Arizona.
Maria’s video captures a festive, gang atmosphere on the tour bus. Gambeat dabbles with chiropractic medicine, which Manu turned him on to. Madjid sings Bob Marley songs; it turns out he has a useful, soulful voice. Philip bashes away on a tambourine. Manu loiters, his old-faithful acoustic guitar in his hands, rolling joints, meeting the fans. There’s another scene showing them all cracking up at some images on a phone. Maria smiles. ‘Probably porn,’ she says.
Her video ends on a high note of the band playing “Ta De Bobeira” with the lights swooping over an insanely pogo-ing crowd. The title is Brazilian slang, from Bahia where Maria was born, meaning ‘Messing Around’ or ‘Fucked Up’. A rough translation of the lyrics: ‘You walked up to the shantytown, and danced the whole night / You were high, and put rum into the baby bottle / You used drugs, and rolled over the bed, the whole night / You slept and someone stole your wallet …’ After the heavy politics, it’s back to fiesta.
Later, Maria sends me this text: ‘Why do they say – never meet your hero?’
My last interview with Manu had been a year earlier, also in a café in Brixton before the US Tour. We had talked about the curse of fame – ‘a dangerous drug’, as Manu put it. ‘Though I was lucky, because it happened little by little. It wasn’t something massive that happened when I was twenty-five, which can burn you. I had a little bit of neighbourhood fame with Los Carayos, more with Mano Negra and even more with Clandestino. I had to learn to protect myself, because it can send you crazy. I know that. The relationship with people can be false. I experience that very often. People can talk to me for half an hour before recognising me – then they change, so I know perfectly well it’s different before and after. I used to be the guy observing in the corner at parties, maybe writing a song about it. Now that’s not possible any more.’
Since then, Manu’s gone off the radar. No response to emails. Maybe it’s because of the last session, when he had finally opened up to me about the Mano Negra split. It’s a wound that clearly hasn’t healed and Manu had been obviously upset remembering the events. By coincidence, the writer and musician Marcus O’Dair had just shown me a chapter in progress from the book he is writing on the British singer Robert Wyatt. Wyatt told him something striking: in comparison to falling out of a window, becoming a paraplegic and being confined to a wheelchair for life, he felt his ejection from Soft Machine, his first successful band, was far more painful. These bands can be closer than family.
After our last meeting, though, I’d seen Manu playing with a stripped-down trio with Madjid and Philippe Teboul, during a benefit appearance for Colombiage, a festival of Colombian culture that took place at an antique theatre, the Coronet, near the Old Kent Road. For the first time since before Mano Negra, Philippe was back behind the drumkit rather than in his usual percussive role, and was clearly relishing every moment.
Manu and Madjid in their flat caps, playing the Brixton community festival.
Then I saw Manu again at Hop Farm Festival in Kent in the summer of 2011. For me, it was the most uplifting and intense performance I’d seen since Mexico. His old cohort Gambeat joined the trio to provide the bass bedrock of a four-piece band Manu was now calling La Ventura; the fourth wheel was back on a turbo-charged car. It was notable how, during the set, people drifted away from another stage on which Morrissey was playing to come and watch Manu. By the end of the show, the audience was sweat-drenched and euphoric, singing along with choruses in English, Spanish or just a kind of improvised Esperanto.
The following year, in August 2012, Manu played just one gig in Britain – at a small under-the-radar community Festival called Brixton Come Together, organised by Maria. Playing on a ramshackle stage on the green outside St Matthew’s Church, he seemed entirely at home; much more so than at some of the more conventional rockstar places I’d seen him in, like Glastonbury, where he said all the fences and passes made him think of Palestine.
At Brixton, there were a few food and charity and environmentalist stalls and a sympathetic crowd of a few hundred. The spendidly named La Troba Kung-Fú, a band of Catalan rebels from Barcelona, played a mestizaje of infernal cumbia, reggae and rumba which warmed up the audience nicely. Then Manu’s band, wearing the kind of flat caps that were last briefly fashionable worn by Gilbert O’Sullivan forty years ago, had Madjid on guitar and Philippe on drums, the accordionist from La Troba Kung-Fú, and on percussion a kid from the local Hill Mead School, which Manu had visited earlier. They rattled through acoustic versions of some of Manu’s classics before ending with a scorching singalong tune by 1980s Spanish bad boys Los Chunguitos.
On the way back from that Brixton gig, I thought of some other times I’ve seen Manu in London. One night back in the autumn of 2007, I swung down to Peckham in deepest south London, where I saw Manu DJ-ing at a squat fundraiser. He’d promised a Latin American political/music organisation called Movimientos to spin some tunes and had turned up with discs in his rucksack to play records till the small hours. To get in you had to bang on some iron gates, which creaked open a crack to reveal Manu, wearing long shorts and a white jacket, standing around a large open fire with drummers jamming. Nearby, a squatter wearing a large housecoat was holding a pet snake. A couple of bands, including the exuberant Colombian outfit Malalma, played to a crowd of a little over a hundred. Then Manu took to the decks and spun a mix of reggae, cumbia and reggaeton. Emmanuel de Buretel, the only guy in the whole place wearing a suit, said it was typical of Manu to do this kind of benefit, while refusing, for example, to speak to the French press to promote his latest album La Radiolina.
Then there was the time in the spring of 2008 when we spent a morning at the London offices of Al Jazeera, where Manu faced one of Britain’s most renowned interviewers, David Frost, famous for his historic interviews with the disgraced US President Richard Nixon in 1977, which spawned the hit film Frost/Nixon. Manu felt Al Jazeera had been a little more balanced than the others in its coverage of the Iraq war and politics of the Middle East, so he had agreed to talk to Frost who had a chat show on the channel. Neither man said anything unexpected, but the ability to talk directly about the lyrics of “Rainin’ In Paradize”, about Iraq and the Congo, was a refreshing rarity on TV.
Afterwards we had played table football in a bar – Manu won and, oddly, apologised sincerely. Then he started telling me what he said was the ‘genesis myth’ behind the creation of Clandestino. The key to the record. It was, he warned, a long s
tory, about Cancodrillo – a mix of crocodile and dog – and a god called Superchango:
‘There’s this little dog called Pepiño who comes from Galicia in Spain and at that time there’s no food, only misery. The cure is emigration. So the dog emigrates to Venezuela and the only thing he takes with him are these seeds of pimientos, like peppers. This dog is so awful that everyone laughs at him. He’s like a cross between a mongrel dog and Charlie Chaplin. Anyway, he gets to Venezuela and everybody laughs and laughs and laughs. Everybody except this one girl, a crocodile black woman. She can’t talk, she’s mute, she doesn’t laugh. They fall in love, get married and go to the countryside. They plant the little pimiento seeds from Galicia and one of the seeds grows into their son, a mixture of European dog and crocodile … a mestizo Cancodrillo!
Superchango and Cancodrillo by Wozniak and Manu.
‘When he comes out of the belly of his mother, the first thing Cancodrillo sees is the face of his father and, like everybody else, he starts laughing, laughing, laughing and crying, crying, crying. But the cry is a good cry, and the more he sees his father, the more he cries, and the more he cries, the more he gets rich. He becomes an asshole. He builds factory after factory selling pimientos. He becomes a big businessman. Very quickly he understands that it is better to do your business during the night, and he becomes like a Mafia man. The more money he makes, the more he cries, and the more he laughs, the more he makes money. He turns all the people from the countryside who belong to his mother race into slaves working for him. That’s the song “Lagrimas De Oro” (Tears Of Gold).
‘Cancodrillo lacks new challenges and he always wants more. First he buys the army, then he buys all the politicians. He has everything and he wants more and more. Then one day he goes into a bar in the middle of the night, a bar for Mafia, and he meets this guy. Now everybody is scared of this guy because when he laughs, he opens his mouth and you can see his crocodile teeth. He is the first person ever to stand up to Cancodrillo. This guy is Superchango and he is a god from Nigeria, born as a slave. He laughs at Cancodrillo. He’s not scared of him. They fight, they get drunk, fight again, get drunk. Nobody wins.
Clandestino Page 28