‘Correr es mi destino’
To Dad and Michelle
and kudos to Andy Morgan
by
PUBLISHING DETAILS
Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao © 2013 by Peter Culshaw
First published in 2013 by
Serpent’s Tail, 3A Exmouth House
Pine Street, Exmouth Market
London, EC1R OJH
www.serpentstail.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk.
Typeset in Lino Letter and Sun Light to a design by Henry Iles.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
352pp
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1846681950
|
The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061 |
INTRO: CASA BABYLON
PART ONE / LA VIDA TÓMBOLA – THE LIVES OF MANU
1: A Double Life
2: The Rock’n’Roll Flame
3: Hot Pants
4: The Rise of the Black Hand
5: Going South
6: The Fall of the Black Hand
7: Próxima Estación – Violencia
8: The Loco Mosquito
9: Clandestino
10: Dakar, Barca … Insh’allah
11: Shot by Both Sides
PART TWO / OTROS MUNDOS – IN SEARCH OF MANU
12: Barcelona – The Neighbourhood Guy
13: New York – Into the Heart of the Beast
14: Buenos Aires – Tangos and Delirium
15: Sahara Libre! Dakhla, Algeria
16: Mexico – Machetes, Mariachi, Meths
17: Paris–Siberia
18: Brixton Babylon
19: Brazil – An Encounter with the Goddess
OUTRO: FINISTERRE
Discography
Bibliography
Photo credits
Acknowledgements
Index
‘When they look for me I’m not there, When they find me I’m elsewhere’
The Casa Babylon in Córdoba could actually be the perfect venue to catch Manu Chao. I’ve come here with the band, on a twelve-hour bus ride across the pampas from Buenos Aires to a boliche – a club that has a cartoonish ambience somewhere between a large village hall and a bar from the Wild West, complete with buxom bar-girls and security guys frisking for guns. The sun’s going down but it’s still over 100 degrees and sweat is pouring from the crowd. ‘¡Que Calor!’ is the first thing anyone says to you.
Manu is performing with a street band called Roots Radio, whom he first played with three days ago in Buenos Aires. ‘I like the challenge of putting a new band together fast,’ he says in the tiny furnace of a dressing room. Roots Radio’s members include a percussionist called Kichi, who Manu met busking in Barcelona. Kichi was an economic refugee from the Argentine economic collapse of 2001 but he has now returned to his homeland and is living in the barrio of San Telmo.
The show has only been announced earlier in the day, but it’s rammed with a thousand or more fans. It’s so hot that the guitars drift out of tune mid-number. Manu shouts, ‘Apocalyptic!’ The music whirs again and one of the bar-girls with particularly vertiginous curves and a low-cut T-shirt dances on the bar, rivalling the action onstage.
Everyone knows the words to the old numbers like “Clan-destino” and “Welcome To Tijuana”. What’s surprising is that everyone knows the newer numbers, too. Manu’s latest album La Radiolina is only just out, but the audience sing along to “Me Llaman Calle”, about the prostitutes in Madrid who’ll rent out their bodies even if their hearts aren’t for sale, and “La Vida Tómbola”, a song about the damaged Argentine demigod Diego Maradona.
Manu is properly famous in Argentina. He can’t walk a block without being stopped, although he says his fame is nothing compared to Maradona. But even in the case of Manu, who could have filled a stadium tonight, there’s a certain craziness in the way people react when they meet him. Manu’s last-minute, improvised gigs, like this benefit, are one way to keep things scaled down and real. ‘It’s normal when you are …’ Manu tries to explain, struggling for the word, ‘… famous … You’re maybe too much like a god, or maybe too much like an asshole.’
Here in Córdoba, as far as the lottery of life is concerned – the ‘tombola’ of Manu’s song – many of the local kids seem to have drawn the short straw, born and raised in tough neighbourhoods, the villa miserias or shanty towns where there are few jobs and little welfare. But plenty of them get in free tonight thanks to La Luciérnaga (‘The Firefly’), a street kids’ charity. The rest of the audience pay 15 pesos (about $5) with all the proceeds of the concert going to La Luciérnaga.
Many of the crowd are hard-core Manuistas. Even the name of the club, Casa Babylon, is derived from the title of Manu’s last album with Mano Negra, his previous band, who became legendary in these parts after a TV host asked them the meaning of anarchy and they proceeded to trash the studio, live on air. Mano Negra’s logo of a black hand over a red star is tattooed on a few shoulders and arms. I make a new friend of a huge security guy, nearly seven feet tall and built like a walk-in fridge. He’s covered in tattoos and introduces a sweet, delicate, petite girl as his novia.
The audience are ecstatic that their hero has beamed down for a night. The moment Manu steps out to face the audience, the reaction is so intense it’s like standing next to a jet as it’s taking off. Later, when local street rapper Negro Chetto (‘Black Snob’) leaps onstage and improvises over a Manu track, the place goes delirious.
We’d met Negro Chetto earlier, over lunch at the headquarters of La Luciérnaga. The association was set-up by a man called Oscar Arias, who explains that when he started his project, around sixty percent of the under-20s in Córdoba were living in poverty, many of them selling things like candies and flowers in the street, washing car windows at traffic lights, or drifting in and out of crime or prostitution. The organisation is funded like the UK’s Big Issue, from sales of a magazine, so Manu gives it an interview, ignoring all the other local media requests. Why help La Luciérnaga rather than anyone else? ‘I don’t really choose the projects, they choose me,’ Manu answers. ‘We met them touring in 2000 and the idea of the newspaper was good. You look into someone like Oscar’s eyes and you think you can trust him. Sometimes you are wrong. But now we have a strong relation.’
Negro Chetto was a squeegee merchant at traffic lights for years before coming into contact with Oscar and his organisation. At the time they were setting up a company called Luci Vid, who now have contracts to wash windows at places like Córdoba’s business park. As well as holding down a job, Negro Chetto has been recording an album. He doesn’t have enough money to press up any CDs, but Pocho, Manu’s record company guy in Argentina, says he’ll try and sort something out for him. ‘Music and Jesus saved me,’ sighs Chetto, crossing himself.
Tonight at Casa Babylon, everything is chaotic, last-minute and under the mainstream media radar. ‘We raised some money, but the best thing was the energy,’ Manu says after the show, sopping with sweat and elation. ‘Regenerating energy! The kids went back out of there with strong energy – and so did I.’ He mentions the guy who was following us on his motorbike from La Luciérnaga earlier. ‘That was Pedro; he was a street kid in 2000, now he’s a father.’
I sleep like a baby on the tour bus that night, full of music and alcohol, and wake up to find that we’re already half way back to Buenos Aires. ‘The bus rocks you like your mother,’ Manu says. A metal cup with straw full of the pungent local herb tea known as maté is being passed around, as the white light of the sun bleaches the landscape and the bus speeds along the flat plains.
What happened in Córdoba was a Manu Chao moment; an unscripted happening, a spontaneous fiesta that somehow managed to change someone’s life. It was 2007 and I’d met Manu a few times before, starting with an interview on the release of his second solo album Próxima Estación: Esperanza in 2001. But some time after that trip to Córdoba I resolved to find out more about him, to attempt to answer the question ‘Who the hell was this guy?’ … to write this book.
Manu kindly agreed – or at least tolerated the idea – and allowed me to follow him through four continents over the next few years. But this was no rockstar-authorised biography. Manu was often reluctant to talk about himself. His story only slowly came into focus as he lived up to his own lyrical self-portrait as el desaparecido, ‘the disappearing one’. What he did want to do, though – and this, I realised, was the root of his involvement – was to broadcast the causes and people he associates himself with: water rights in Bolivia, indigneous revolution in Mexico, mental patients in Buenos Aires, prostitutes’ rights in Spain, refugees in the Western Sahara. He was the guy siding with the dispossessed of this world, Don Quixote tilting at all the mad windmills. I was to be his Sancho Panza, getting to see the realities firsthand, in the slipstream of Manu and his band, Radio Bemba.
When I first set out to meet Manu Chao in 2001 I had been told the man I was looking for had a small pied à terre in Barcelona with no outside space, because the ‘street is my courtyard’. He could, when in town, be found busking in his local bar. He owned bees but no mobile phone or watch. He was always on the move, addicted to travel, never able to spend more than a few weeks in the same place, never planning more than three months ahead. He was – as the line goes in “Desaparecido” – ‘the disappearing one … hurry[ing] down the lost highway … When they look for me I’m not there, When they find me, I’m elsewhere.’
I couldn’t complain I hadn’t been warned. But nor could I resist the impulse. Like so many others, I had sensed on Clandestino, Manu’s first solo album, a passion and directness in those pared-down tunes that I hadn’t come across since Bob Marley. Sometimes, music makes you rethink the world. Clandestino seemed to look both backwards to a time when songs meant something, when people thought music could change the world, and forwards to a new globalised pop. At the cross-fade of the millennium, it sounded perfect – a creation that united, irresistibly, a European and South American perspective, a radical pop masterpiece that just happened to sell millions.
If I’d been more up to speed on French rock music, I would have been less surprised. Manu Chao’s previous outfit, Mano Negra, had been the biggest band in the history of French rock, with legions of followers in Europe and in South America, where they still have a mythic status. Plenty of people agree with their manager Bernard Batzen when he claims that, had the band actually promoted their albums properly, instead of going off on quixotic missions like a four-month boat trip around Latin America, or a rail trip through the guerrilla chaos of Colombia, had they not broken up before their bestselling album, Casa Babylon, was released, they would have been as big as U2 or Coldplay. But if they had, would Manu Chao’s story have been so compelling?
Manu’s reputation was one of fierce honesty and integrity. The word was that, unlike most other activist rock stars with their jet-set compassion and five-star lives, he actually walked his talk, lived with scarcely any possessions, a musical nomad. But surely no one could have that kind of purity his fans ascribed to him?
His musical style – a mix of punk, latin, ska and reggae – was an inventive global cross-pollination and the more he found his own voice, the more his audience grew. For legions of misfits who don’t accept the world as it is, and for the marginalised he supports, Manu represents a beacon of hope. Beyond that lay a string of barely tenable contradictions: a self-confessed ‘shy guy’ who sung to crowds of 100,000 in places like Mexico City, a worldwide star who fights against globalisation, a man-of-the-people backpacker who has made millions, a propagandist who turns down most interviews. Even his name and his origins – French? Spanish? Basque? – seemed peculiarly opaque.
The lives of Manu Chao, from his teenage years as a Parisian rock’n’roller, through assorted underground French bands, to explosive global success, followed by some kind of mental breakdown and then rebirth with Clandestino, seemed a story worth telling. So here, five years on from that memorable hot night in Casa Babylon in Córdoba, is the result. It’s a book in two parts, which begins with the Manu Chao story – the early years in Paris, the rise and fall of Mano Negra, and his spectacular reinvention with a string of multi-million-selling albums. And then I meet Manu in Barcelona and we’re off on the road for Part Two, blazing a trail through New York, Buenos Aires, Western Sahara, Mexico, Paris, Barcelona, Brixton and Brazil …
The lives of Manu
‘He was a pain in the neck aged four – and he still is!’
José-Manuel Thomas Arthur Chao was born in Paris on 21 June 1961. He attributes his love of the sun to this midsummer’s day arrival. His birthday also coincides with the annual Fête de la Musique, the day on which the whole of France surrenders itself to music in all its miraculous forms. So, the Manu Chao story begins with sun and music.
Manu’s parents were both Spaniards – and first generation Parisians. His mother Felisa’s family was from Bilbao in the Basque country, his father Ramón’s from Vilalba, in the northwest province of Galicia. Both places are on the edges of Spain. The Basque character is supposedly stubborn, proud and fundamentally self-respecting, while Spaniards regard Galicians as melancholic and inscrutable. Or, as Ramón tells it, ‘They say that if you meet us Galicians on the stairs, you never know if we’re going up or down. We are quite subtle in our movements.’
Felisa’s father, Tomás Ortega, was a champion at pelota – one of the Basques’ odd, insular sports – and became a communications expert for the Repúblicans in the civil war against Franco. His speciality was blowing up the telephone systems of towns that were about to fall to Franco’s forces. One day, not long into the civil war, Tomás happened to hear a radio broadcast from Seville in which a leading Françoist general vowed to kill him. Choosing life and exile over death and homeland, he fled on the last boat out of Valencia to Algeria, where the authorities sent him to an internment camp.
The Spanish refugee camps in Algeria were often situated in the arid fringes of the Sahara desert and, after the Vichy government took over, they were essentially forced labour camps. Inmates regularly died of thirst, disease, overwork and torture. Tomás came from tough Basque stock, the kind that sailed wooden tubs across the Atlantic to fish for cod off the Grand Banks before Columbus was even born. He survived. Meanwhile, his wife, daughter Felisa and her sister were sent to a camp for refugees in the Roussillon region of southern France. The family were eventually reunited in Algeria, before settling, a decade later, in Paris.
Tomás was an important figure for Manu: ‘When I was young my grandfather use to tell me all about his adventures in great detail: the civil war, his exile from Spain, Algeria. He never wanted to go back to Spain, even after Franco died. I was greatly influenced by him, the fighter against injustice who defended his ideals to the end of his days. He was a great person, very rude but very honest.‘
Baby Manu with his Basque-exile grandparents, Tomás and Felisa.
Manu’s paternal grandfather, José, ran the Gran Hotel Chao in Vilalba, a small Galician town set in the fertile valleys of the province of Lugo, with a medieval tower and a rich tradition of independent newspapers. Galicia is full of people with the Chao family name, and their ancestral seat is in the town of Ribadavia, about 170 km south of Vilalba. José came back to his motherland from Cuba, the country of his birth, at the age of twenty. He had six children. One, José Chao Rego, became a well-known author and theologian. Another, Ramón, became an internationally renowned journalist – and the father of Manu Chao.
Journalism, however, was not part of the map that José, a patriarch of the old school, had drawn out for Ramón. Back in Cuba, José had developed a passion for the opera and when his young son began to demonstrate sparkling musical gifts, José indulged the idea that his offspring could be a Galician Chopin. Ramón excelled at the piano from an early age, and used to perform on demand for the Hotel Chao’s many distinguished guests, including the artist Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, who gave the boy an original drawing dedicated ‘to the precocious artist’. At the age of ten, Ramón gave his first public concert at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Lugo and, shortly afterward, the mayor of Vilalba awarded him a bursary to study piano, harmony and composition in Madrid. There he managed to win a prestigious national music prize but also spent much of his time playing truant and bunking off to the National Library or the Prado to follow other passions.
In 1956, at the age of twenty-one, Ramón was favoured by a fellow native of Vilalba, the eminent Spanish politician Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who persuaded the Françoist Commissariat of Popular Education to send this rising star of Spanish classical music to study in Paris. It’s an irony that Ramón, who holds stalwart left-wing views, has often reflected upon; how he arrived in the French capital thanks to a man who became Franco’s last, heavy-handed interior minister.
The scholarship was an opportunity for advancement but also, in the end, a chance for Ramón to escape the mental manacles of his overbearing father. He studied hard for four years, under two of the most famous music teachers in France at the time, Lazare Lévy and Magda Tagliaferro, putting in ten-hour days of practice, and it seemed that a bright future in the classical concert halls of the world was beckoning. But Ramón grew steadily disillusioned with the path that his father had chosen for him. Living in Paris, which in the 1950s was a great Byzantium of ideas and radicalism with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Juliette Gréco holding court, Ramón would hang out in existentialist cafés with Spanish-speaking students, many of them with communist affiliations. He felt ashamed that his musical career was being propped by Spain’s fascist government and in 1960 he found the courage to give it up, answering a newspaper advert seeking ‘someone who knows music, Spanish and Portuguese’. He didn’t touch a piano for the next sixteen years. Instead, he swapped his piano for a typewriter and started a long career in the Latin American service of RFI, the French equivalent of the BBC World Service. A few months after Ramón rejected his own musical destiny, Manu Chao was born.
Ramón Chao, aged ten, around the time of his first public concert.
In his book The Train Of Fire and Ice, about Mano Negra’s mad, epic train journey across Colombia, Ramón claims that Manu’s connection with Latin America is genetic. His own grandmother, Dolores, left Galicia for Cuba, fleeing her drunken, quarrelsome husband. There, through the network of Galician émigrés, she managed to find work as a maid in the house of Mario García Kohly, a minister in Cuba’s first independent government, and a part-time poet. Ramón believes that Kohly’s poem “Tu”, which became a famous habanera set to music by the composer Sánchez de Fuentes, was about Dolores: ‘adorable brunette, of all the flowers, the queen is you.’
Furthermore, Ramón is convinced that his father was Kohly’s son. José was conceived after Dolores left Spain, and when the cuckolded husband followed her to Havana he was found murdered in a backstreet the day after he had found her. Ramón believes José had a strong resemblance to Kohly. All of which ‘leaves my detective thesis in no doubt’: Manu Chao is the great-grandson of a great Cuban poet.
The tale elicits a wry raise from Manu’s eyebrows. ‘Only half of what my father says is true. But it’s always beautiful. He is a writer and a musician, so you cannot expect him to be precise with reality. I have heard so many stories about Cuba from my father. It’s the same for all the Galician families who emigrated to Cuba. Nobody knows what happened there, whether it’s all legend. But if I have Cuban blood I am very proud.’
The DNA of Manu’s creative and yearning spirit could be traced back to the tragic hope, desperate courage and lethal adventures of his immediate forebears. That stubborn streak of uncompromising rebelliousness was present in the rude and sincere life of his grandfather, Tomás Ortega. A sharp and precisely enquiring mind is the gift of his mother Felisa, a scientific researcher with an impressively abstruse list of publications to her name (one such is ‘The successive action of oxidations and electrochemical reductions on the superficial structure of electrodes of polycrystalline gold’). To his father, Manu owes a gift for music and words. But that’s not all. Ramón’s decision to break free from both his ambitious father and his backward homeland betrays stubborn courage and a refusal to succumb to clan pressure.
Manu has a good relationship with his parents: ‘They are my friends. The most important education I got from them was about honesty. They’re honest people and they never tried to fool others about money or things like that. It’s not very easy to be honest in this world, because if you are honest you are always fucked. But I prefer to be fucked than have a bad conscience.’
Boulogne-Billancourt, the Parisian suburb to which the Chaos moved in the early 1960s, was less than 10km southwest of the Eiffel Tower but a world apart. The gilded life of Paris’s west end, with its luxury apartments and starched brasseries, petered out just beyond Porte St Cloud and the orbital péripherique motorway. Whilst the avenues and squares of the northern part of the Boulogne-Billancourt are full of elegant art deco urban architecture, to its south is a sump of heavy industry where, on the Île Seguin, Louis Renault built his huge automobile plant, on the mass-production lines of his American rival Henry Ford, turning this backwater into a smoking, clanking, industrial city. The factory was a perennial focus of serious unrest, with a major strike in 1936 bringing down the government and another in May 1968 almost repeating history. It closed in 1992 and is today a wasteland in the midst of the Seine.
Thanks to its cheap rents, proximity to central Paris and a mix of cultured bourgeois and raw working-class culture, Boulogne-Billancourt became a favoured bolthole of artists, writers and filmmakers. The French film industry was based there until the 1990s and artists like Marc Chagall and Juan Gris found the bohemian atmosphere congenial. It was this milieu that attracted a left-leaning intellectual family like the Chaos to Boulogne-Billancourt and later to its neighbour, Sèvres, just across the Seine, where Manu Chao spent most of his childhood and adolescence.
The blend of working-class culture and intellectual bourgeois idealism that characterised Sèvres in the 1960s was to provide both the physical and mental landscape in which Manu Chao’s adolescent battles were fought. It’s hard to imagine how marginal the French provinces and suburbs were in the postwar decades, before the DIY punk scene and Mitterrand’s reforms came to the rescue and spread cultural activity beyond the Paris péripherique and the centres of a few other major French cities. In the 1970s, places like Sèvres were bombshells of boredom waiting to explode.
Manu (left) and cousin Santi, around 1972.
Inside the cosy Chao apartment, however, Manu and his younger brother Antoine could bathe in the love, cultured passions and intellectual curiosity of their parents. There were mountains of books and a steady flow of great music pouring from the record player. Manu’s young ears unfurled to the sounds of the Latin world: son, rumba, cha cha cha, boleros, flamenco, sevillanas, cante jondo and, when Chile plunged into political darkness in the early 1970s, the protest music of Victor Jara and Cuban nueva trova singers like Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. The gay black Cuban bolero singer Bola de Nieve (‘Snowball’) was one of Ramón’s favourites and Manu still listens to him with pleasure. Despite the traumas of his own musical journey, Ramón also remained devoted to classical music. Felisa and Ramón loved listening to Mozart’s Italian operas, like The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, and the piano music of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. The first guitar piece Manu learned was by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer.
The Chao household was also a focus of Franco-Hispanic intellectual life. In his role as a reporter for RFI’s Latin American section and roving Spanish freelance journalist, Ramón came into contact with many of the leading writers and thinkers in contemporary France, and exiles from revolutions and dictatorships in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and other Latin American political hot spots would drop by the apartment in Sèvres for company and stimulation. Manu might return from school to find the Uruguayan author and Nobel Laureate Juan Carlos Onetti, who had been imprisoned in a mental asylum in Montevideo, lounging on the sitting-room sofa shooting the breeze; or another, even more famous Nobel prize-winning author, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, having tea with his parents.
Years later, Manu would refer to passages in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude when he was planning Mano Negra’s fabled train trip across Colombia. The train carried a gigantic ice sculpture which was inspired by the opening sequence of Márquez’s classic, in which José Arcadio Buendía takes his children to a tent at a fair, guarded by a giant with a hairy torso and a copper ring in his nose, and touches ice for the first time. The band’s train tour finally disintegrated in the coastal town of Aracataca, Márquez’s ancestral home and the inspiration for the Buendías’ hometown of Macondo in the novel.
Another regular at casa Chao was the Cuban novelist and philosopher of music Alejo Carpentier. It was he who minted the phrase ‘lo real maravilloso’ – ‘magical realism’ – which was to become the name of an entire literary universe. Carpentier also wrote the definitive work on Cuban music, La Música en Cuba, as well as a novel called Lost Steps, which features a New York musicologist who travels to the jungle of Orinoco looking for lost instruments only to find the origins of music instead. Ramón and Carpentier became very good friends and Ramón later published a book of conversations with the great Cuban writer. When Manu was four years old, Carpentier gave him a pair of maracas, a simple gesture with more than a fair share of symbolic resonance.
Ramón also makes a startling claim that it was that Roland Barthes, a philosopher who achieved the kind of fashionable intellectual superstardom only possible in France, who was responsible for the existence of Mano Negra. One afternoon, Ramón went to interview him for El Triunfo magazine and, after discussing their hobbyhorses of semiotics and politics, Barthes began to play his piano and Ramón joined in. As the great philosopher and the delighted journalist coursed like wood sprites through a four-handed étude by Schubert, Barthes was astonished by Ramón’s extraordinary virtuosity and insisted that he should buy a piano, reminding Ramón that all ‘men of the mind’ should have a pastime to release the mental pressure. On his way home, Ramón went into an instrument shop and ordered a mini-grand.
The children were apparently unaware that their father was a highly accomplished pianist, and their reaction of wonder when the piano arrived a week later and their father revealed his closet talent, remains one of Ramón’s most precious memories of their childhood. ‘Their mouths were open in amazement,’ he recalls. ‘It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.’
After his startling revelation, Ramón attempted to drum some knowledge of musical notation and scales into Manu and Antoine, until, about a year later, Felisa took him to one side and said ‘Be careful, because you are turning into your father, who was a dictator.’ So Ramón desisted with good grace but on the proviso that the boys go to the Conservatoire and carry on learning the instrument of their choice. For Manu it was guitar, and for Antoine, the drums.
Manu calls Ramón ‘my professor of craziness.’ He was an unorthodox, nurturing dad, congenial and sociable, a free and independent thinker, a motorbike fiend and a highly rated creative artist in his own right. Ramón’s body is covered with tattoos – one for each of the books he has written. One of them, A Secret Guide to Paris, published in 1974, featured ‘everything forbidden by the fascists in Spain’: brothels, swingers clubs, radical cafés, anarchist bookshops, publishers and communist meeting points. Another, a novel called Le Lac de Côme (Lake Como) is a thinly veiled autobiographical account of Ramón’s childhood in Vilalba, with its menagerie of strange characters. The book was banned by the local library in Vilalba and Ramón was told that, if he ever were to entertain thoughts of returning to the place of his birth for any length of time, not to bother.
The milestones of history came and went. France exploded with revolutionary fervour in May 1968 and Manu remembers his father waiting at the front door, wearing his journalist’s armband whilst his mother stood there crying and pleading with him not to go and cover the riots in the centre of Paris. In 1969, Manu and Antoine were woken up in the middle of the night to watch Neil Armstrong landing on the moon on a fuzzy old black and white TV. Later, in 1975, champagne corks were popped when Franco died.
By the age of fourteen, Manu was fed up with the dull conformity of his music lessons at the Conservatoire de Chaville. He told his father he wanted to stop. He was already tinkering around the notion of forming a band with his brother Antoine and his cousin Santiago ‘Santi’ Casariego. Manu and Santi were the same age, and soulmates, with a fascination for rock’n’roll. Manu spent many hours round at the Casariego house listening to his uncle Adrian singing Cuban and Spanish songs with his Spanish guitar, and joining in the choruses with Santi and his sister Marina.
Despite the intellectual riches foisted on the young boy by his unorthodox parents, despite the boyish conversations with giants of modern literature, the feeling began to grow deep inside Manu that he had to find something else – let’s call it a passion – that wasn’t Ramón’s or Felisa’s, but his and only his. That passion had to be instinctive, not intellectual, something conjured up by the danger that rode on the opening riffs of songs by Chuck Berry or Little Richard, that lurked in the streets outside the warm and welcoming family flat, in the grey boredom of the squares, parks and avenues of Sèvres and Boulogne-Billancourt, in the grating argot of the local roughnecks and rude boys, in the butt-strewn bars and caged football pitches of the neighbourhood, in the tawdry shopping centres and amusement parks under the cold dull skies of suburban Paris.
He began to lead a double life. At home, at school and in the staid corridors of the Conservatoire, Manu was close to a perfect student – obedient and shy. After the school bell had rung, Manu would hit the pavements and his world would change. Out there it was all football, girls, spliff and rock’n’roll. ‘Sèvres was not a dangerous place but it had its delinquents,’ Ramón remembers. ‘At home Manu was very sweet and loving, and would meet intellectuals. But the minute he would walk out the door, he would hang out with a lot of low life.’
As a young teenager, Manu began to frequent a famous squat in the nearby rue des Caves, where the old hippies taught him and his gang a thing or two about life and ways to live it differently, often getting little thanks and some petty destruction in return. ‘There were devils amongst us,’ Manu confesses. Hippy activists from rue des Caves once invaded Manu’s school and imprisoned his teacher in a cupboard. Manu even went on a few big demos. He joined the Sèvres branch of the Communist Youth League, though he claims that was only ‘for love, not for the love of communism, but for the love of a beautiful blonde’ who was branch secretary.
At fifteen, Manu’s musical dabblings began to solidify into the idea of actually forming a band. Santi and Antoine were obvious bandmates – fellow travellers, bedroom buddies and intimates – and Manu bought himself a transparent bass and stuck an advert up for other band members in his local greengrocers. ‘I came into their world as a bassist,’ Manu recalls. ‘That’s how my life changed completely.’ Through that advert he met a teenage guitarist called Fredo – and, through him, encountered for the first time the appeal of the street, or caillera.
La caillera was Manu’s name for his local street posse of working-class French, Spanish, Portuguese, Armenian and North African kids, whose dads often worked in the Renault factory. The more benign and legal pastimes of these suburban gangs were playing football, chasing girls, flipping pinball or table footie at the Café de la Mairie, their local HQ. Then there was dope smoking, shoplifting and maybe robbing a petrol station or a bit of night-time breaking and entering. The diminutive Manu was adopted as the gang mascot: ‘They wanted me around. I think they thought I was lucky for them. I never got involved in their violent stuff, but I was I there.’ Although he was scared at times, Manu surveyed all this delicious delinquency with a kind of ‘morbid curiosity’. And it meant he was protected in the barrio. ‘They never broke into my parents’ house.’
For Manu, this street life just outside the front door of his apartment block was his passport to freedom, both physically and mentally. All those Spanish and Cuban songs, that French crooning, those classical arias, arpeggios and glissandos were all well and good, but Manu was a white boy who needed a riot of his own. It was a bid for freedom and it wasn’t without risks. By all accounts Manu was a conscientious, hard-working student at school, and one of his teachers was moved to declare to his parents that he could become anything he wanted to. The future for other members of the Sèvres massive was less rosy, especially when heroin and cocaine arrived on the scene. ‘Of all my friends, I was the lucky one. I won the lotto,’ Manu told me. ‘I’ve made a living from my passion for music. The moment I began to make music, I was never bored again.’
Fredo’s parents were a lovely couple who ran a launderette, and Manu, Santi and Fredo would rehearse in the kitchen of their flat in lower Sèvres, standing in plastic bowls to avoid the very real chance of electrocution. The trio pumped out rude and crude versions of the classics: “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Louie Louie”, “Tutti Frutti”, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Memphis Tennessee”. To begin with they didn’t have a singer, and a favourite ruse was to invite singers to come and audition so that the trio could laugh at them. One of them was a punk, the first that Manu had ever seen. The louder the trio played, the louder this punk would sing. So he was invited back two or three times to see just how dark a shade of purple his face could become when he reached inhuman decibel levels. ‘We were stupid,’ admits Manu.
There were little gigs about the neighbourhood. Sometimes la caillera would come along and wreck the place. That made finding more gigs harder. After a while the trio got themselves a name, Joint de Culasse, which means ‘head gasket’ in French. It was suggested by Antoine. Manu remembers that his brother had a passion for all things mechanical and would spend hours mending old motorbikes, especially English models like Norton or Triumph. It was, in any case, a suitable name for a band formed in the shadow of the Renault factory. But ‘Joint de Culasse’ also zings with jokey puns. ‘Joint’ makes an obvious reference to the beloved weed. ‘Culasse’ could be interpreted as a fragrant blend of the French words for ‘arse’ (cul) and ‘tart’ (pétasse). Whatever the meaning, the mission was clear: loud, fast, raw no-nonsense rock’n’roll powerful enough to blow both your head-gasket and your mind.
In the pre-punk France of the 1970s, you were either a sad conformist lover of French chanson and variété, or you were a rocker. To rock‘n’roll purists like Manu and Joint de Culasse, nothing good ever came out of France, musically at least. When rock‘n’roll appeared with the arrival of Bill Haley and Elvis in the 1950s, it was packaged by the French music business as Music hall des jeunes. Rock’n’roll numbers were translated and the backing tracks watered down to suit French tastes, often to the great frustration of the artists themselves. Consequently, as far as the purists were concerned, French rock idols like Johnny Hallyday were a pathetic joke, as were popular groups like Les Chats Sauvages and Les Chaussettes Noires. A bare handful of figures – Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Dutronc, Françoise Hardy, Alain Bashung – had any real sense of rock spirit.
In the early 1970s, there were a few French bands – Gong, Magma, Heldon – who tried to do something original and interesting. But the dreadful and all-pervasive feeling that no great rock music could be sung in any language other than English put a severe dragnet on the creative potential of the local French music scene. Magma actually went as far as inventing their own language, which they called Kobaïan. ‘French just didn’t sound suitable for our music,’ said Magma’s leader, Christian Vander. When punk arrived, there were a couple of French hits, by Telephone and Plastic Bertrand (who was actually from Belgium), but they were treated as novelties rather than anything else. “God Save The Queen” or “Ça Plane Pour Moi”, anybody?
‘Singing rock in French seemed like singing Flamenco in German! It just didn’t make sense,’ quips Jean-Yves Prieur, aka Kid Bravo or Kid Loco, founder of the seminal French alternative label Bondage. ‘It wasn’t visceral and rock is by nature visceral and dangerous. Take Chuck Berry, or the Sex Pistols or the Rolling Stones … they trailed real revolution in their wake. Telephone was kids’ music. They weren’t a threat to anyone. In the late 1970s our eyes were riveted on what was happening in London.’
For Manu and la caillera, salvation came from over the channel, across the Atlantic, or nowhere at all. ‘I think the first globalisation that happened on this planet was English music,’ Manu says. ‘The Stones and the Beatles conquered the world. We were French kids and we didn’t have the opportunity to listen to anything except English music. The only music which could reach young people was in English, not French, not Spanish, nothing else.’
The required playlist of the suburban rockeur usually depended on skin colour and background. Manu and his white mates shared their tastes with hundreds and thousands of leather-jacketed wannabe rock’n’roll rebels across the land: Elvis before the draft, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, The Rolling Stones, The Who and Otis Redding. The Arab kids in the neighbourhood preferred Earth, Wind and Fire or Maze, a tribal distinction that led to plenty of arguments. It was only Bob Marley and James Brown that offered common ground.
Rock’n’roll gave Manu a licence to think for himself. ‘I thank music for being my school,’ he says with gratitude. Was he a rebel? ‘Personally I never had any rebellion with my parents,’ Manu asserts. ‘I’ve been lucky with them.’ Nonetheless, conflict loomed, both internally, and with his family.
At the age of sixteen Manu underwent a crisis, almost a breakdown. ‘I would think of death all the time and get this strange feeling like vertigo,’ he remembers. ‘I’d be completely paralysed.’ As a student, Manu said he was quiet, to the point of being almost mute. ‘All year I only spoke two words.’ That summer, Manu went on holiday in Greece with some friends, but this failed to shake him from his taciturn terror. ‘I didn’t talk for one month. It wasn’t their fault.’
Ramón and Felisa were already well aware of Manu and Antoine’s musical ambitions, and they went to see Joint de Culasse play a few times. Ramón was fairly relaxed about it all, insisting only that both his boys finish their baccalaureate exams. But Felisa wasn’t so sure. ‘I can understand why,’ says Manu. ‘She came from nowhere. Her grandfather was imprisoned and the family was left with nothing. So for my mother, studying was essential.’
As the baccalaureate loomed, Manu became more and more withdrawn at school. There was only one person who could pierce his gloom and engage his mind, and that was a young philosophy teacher by the name of Henri Peña-Ruiz. Manu felt that Peña-Ruiz respected him and his talent. Thirty years later, France’s Philosophie magazine organised a reunion between them. The young philosophy teacher had become a renowned thinker, writer and authoritative defender of secularism in education and public life. ‘I remember philosophy classes,’ Manu says in the interview. ‘They were a breath of fresh air for me, and I swallowed them like pink milk. But, in truth, at that time, it was as if I was no longer at school. I’d met other people, who weren’t in education, and I hung out with them at night. I was also half autistic. I had no friends in my class and I spoke very little, maybe a few words the whole year. That’s why those philosophy classes were a real discovery for me. They showed me that it could be interesting to talk and that words could have meaning.’
Henri Peña-Ruiz remembered a shy student with shining eyes and all the talent necessary to pursue a career in philosophy or teaching. He enrolled Manu into the Hypokâghne, a two-year preparatory course for entry into one of les grandes écoles, France’s elite higher learning institutions. But Manu was already elsewhere in mind and spirit. His baccalaureate results were terrible. His instinct was calling him to music.
Manu’s mother was horrified by his career choice. She went to the school to talk to Peña-Ruiz, who, true to his vocation, had taken a philosophical view of the crisis. ‘He wants to make music? But that’s great,’ he reassured Felisa. ‘Your son is an artist. You must on no account contradict his vocation.’ Felisa remained unconvinced.
As the end of school approached, the turmoil created by Manu’s choice only grew deeper, and more emotional. But he stuck to his guns with a stubborn conviction that was to re-emerge at almost every pivotal moment of his life. ‘The choice was hard,’ he told Philosophie magazine. ‘And my mother suffered because of it for the next ten years. But when you have a passion, you can’t share it with anything else. I love philosophy and it wouldn’t have bothered me to devote myself to it. On the other hand, my street mates were also a wonderful and fascinating education for me. So I threw myself into a career as a singer.’
The decision felt right, and that was the most important thing about it. Patient, diligent study in order to achieve betterment and intellectual peers had lost out to risk, uncertainty, the street and rock’n’roll. ‘One thing you don’t learn at school is to trust your instincts,’ says Manu. ‘In class we must be rational and think with our heads and not our guts. For me, when I mentally map out my plans, things always go wrong. But when I trust my instinct, I score much better.’ And his instinct was music, nothing else.
Manu made one concession to his distraught mother. He promised her that if he wasn’t earning a decent living from music by the age of twenty-five, then he would give it all up and live a ‘normal’ life. ‘When you’re eighteen, twenty-five seems old,’ he says. ‘But twenty-five arrived and I had nothing … not a dime.’
‘Some people had Mecca; we had Canvey island!’
Aged eighteen, living with his parents on the margins of Paris, musical success was for Manu a dream and a decade away. He was still a quiffedup rocker and Joint de Culasse true keepers of the rock’n’roll flame. Every rehearsal, every gig, was a ritual offering to the gods of shake, rattle‘n’roll. Manu and his pals were so in thrall to Chuck Berry and others in the rock’n’roll pantheon that they saw no need to write their own songs. There were so many classics to cover. Cousin Santi, the drummer, puts another more prosaic spin on their music repertoire; ‘We would have quite liked to play like Santana as well, but we weren’t good enough.’ According to Manu, Joint de Culasse would occasionally throw in a couple of Stooges numbers, but they never went down too well.
Sèvres was rocker territory. Punks who floated into the suburb were either given the rockabilly psycho stare or welcomed with the blunt fist of some sauced-up member of la caillera. Inter-tribal music warfare had recently been imported to Paris from London, along with other more constructive aspects of the punk revolution. The punks, les keupons in Parisian slang, went about their business in fear not only of les rockeurs but, even worse, les skins. Manu Chao spent most of the late 1970s and early-1980s in the relatively safe confines of Sèvres, hanging out with his rocker crew. But he wasn’t always just the innocent mascot of the gang. He well remembers being in the audience when a punk band called Cain and Abel came to play in nearby Issy-les-Moulineaux and got thumped for their pains. Years later, when he started busking in the Metro with Daniel Jamet, Cain and Abel’s guitarist, who eventually joined Mano Negra, Manu had a little explaining to do. Jamet remembers being genuinely frightened for his life.
But Manu Chao would never remain happy banging out cover versions of “Blues Suede Shoes” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” for the rest of his life. He had the kind of curiosity that needed to explore the musical zeitgeist. Punk was one strand, though he was on his own. ‘The gang in Sèvres listened to rockabilly and some black music,’ he remembers. ‘James Brown was acceptable. But nothing after 1962, really. All the guys were tough rockabillies, a lot of them immigrants from Portugal and Spain. They were kind of rebels who weren’t rebels. Punk started and the big guys sent us to fight the punks. When I bought the first punk album to the neighbourhood, I was risking my life. It was Inflammable Material, the first album by Stiff Little Fingers. But Dr Feelgood was OK for us, because they were still a little rock’n’roll.’
Manu’s love of the English rhythm’n’blues scene, which emerged in the mid-1970s in Canvey Island and Southend, was intense. ‘Dr Feelgood is the only band I’ve ever really been a fan of, because I fell in love with them when I was a teenager.’ Wilko Johnson was Dr Feelgood’s guitarist, whose criminal fraternity suits, jerky duck walk and plugged-into-the-mains guitar style made him look like he was on speed on day release from an asylum; ‘He was a Martian, totally a Martian – I saw hundreds of shows of him.’ (Wilko, incidentally, was not the Canvey Island hard-drinking macho guy as you might imagine from songs like “Roxette”. He is a complex character – a medieval literature graduate, able to read Icelandic sagas in the original, and a keen astronomer, who installed a giant, possibly illegal telescope for star gazing on the roof of his house in Canvey Island.)
When Manu was still in thrall to Dr Feelgood, Joint de Culasse was looking for a bassist. ‘So like stupids we went to Canvey Island to try and find one. We went to all the pubs asking if anybody knew of a bass player, and everybody said, “OK, little guys, go home.” We slept outside, on buses, in the subway. It was like a pèlerinage – a pilgrimage – for us to go to Canvey Island. Some people have Mecca; we had Canvey Island.’
But Manu’s greatest hero of them all was Lew Lewis, an obscure but brilliant figure in the Essex r’n’b scene: ‘A crazy guy who played harmonica librio
