Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  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.

  Anoth
er 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.