Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  As the film demonstrates, too, the ‘Mustang-turned-Ferrari’ Mano Negra were now inducing pogo hysteria on a regular basis. Manu had become an accomplished showman, a passionate, charismatic frontman who timed his crowd surfing to perfection, diving into the seething mob right at the start of the sixteen-bar instrumental breaks in tracks like “Magic Dice” and climbing back onstage just in time to resume singing at the start of the next verse.

  Mano Negra seemed unstoppable. Their debut gig in New York carved out what appeared to be promising foothold in North America. Another blazing gig took place at the industry showcase South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The organiser, Brent Grulze, told Batzen in 2010 that it was still perhaps the best of the many thousands of performances that he had witnessed there.

  After that initial show in New York, Virgin were keen to test Mano Negra’s impact in the United States. The band had reservations, muttering about the cultural imperialism of the Great Satan, but then again The Clash had sung “I’m so Bored of the USA” all those years ago and ended up playing stadiums there. So when the offer came of a tour supporting Iggy Pop, who had been a longstanding hero of Manu’s, and the inspiration behind his stage diving antics, it seemed the perfect way in.

  In fact, the experience left the band hugely disillusioned. In contrast to the habitually friendly chaos of their shows, Mano Negra were exposed to the well-oiled machine of the American music industry, with its semi-industrial methods and rigid chains of command. ‘Things were different than they were in France,’ Manu commented. ‘There was a terrible hierarchy between the technicians, the musicians, the star singer and his manager. It was the mentality of an army. Iggy had been important to me for fifteen years. I was looking forward to meeting the guy who did Raw Power. Instead, I met a sergeant-major.’

  Mano Negra felt they were subjected to all the dirty little tricks that a headliner can use to undermine their support band. They weren’t allowed to change the lights or the sound set-up onstage. The overall PA volume was lowered while they were performing, to reduce their impact. Their fans weren’t allowed to dance onstage. Mano Negra’s habit of treating sound, lighting guys and roadies as equals was utterly alien. When the band wanted to do an Iggy cover, they were forbidden to do so. Iggy himself turned up just before each gig and disappeared immediately afterwards, without making the slightest effort to socialise.

  Once, Tom did a stage dive into the audience and Iggy’s tour manager threatened to confiscate his backstage pass if he repeated the offence. Tom threw it at him, and the rest of the band went backstage and threw their passes at him too, in solidarity. Manu wasn’t sure whether to blame Iggy for all of the things that had gone wrong. ‘But, on the other hand, it was his tour,’ he adds. ‘He should take responsibility for it.’ Since then, Manu says he has avoided meeting his heroes.

  Mano Negra take on the streets of New York for the first time, from left: Jo Dahan, Pierre Gauthé, Santi, Tom Darnal, Philippe Teboul, Manu Chao, Antoine Chao, Jako (stage manager) and Daniel Jamet.

  Thanks to the incredible reaction they had received in South America, even if things were more chaotic and dangerous there, Mano Negra were more attracted to the southern half of the Americas. They never went back to the States. ‘We just played the wrong venues,’ thinks Tom Darnal. ‘If we had played places where there was a more mixed audience, especially of Hispanics, many of whom had already discovered us, places like Brooklyn, the tour would have gone a lot better.’

  Frank Mahaut, the lighting manager, added, ‘To really crack it in the States you had to put in an enormous amount of time. After that experience, we found it easier to make the choice between North and South America. We knew which one we identified with.’ Their belief that they were the best live band in the world at the time wasn’t so far-fetched and, when they decided to boycott the States, Manu just said it was ‘their loss’. The Anglo-Saxon world would have to live without them.

  For Bernard Batzen, the whole episode and the decision that was taken by the band on their return to France remains a disappointment. ‘By then I’d been booking bands for years, and have done ever since then. There has never been any other band to touch Mano Negra. If they had persevered in the States, I really believe they would have been as big as U2. Imagine that – a French band! But it wasn’t to be.’

  At least Manu could tell his mother that he’d finally made it, admittedly a few years after his self-imposed deadline. The rest of the world, or mainland Europe, South America and Japan at the very least, had taken the band to their hearts. The next year things would get even more intense and the first cracks in this tight-knit group of friends began to appear. A slow-burning fuse had been lit and it was fizzling slowly towards a spectacular implosion.

  But all of that happened after two of the most extraordinary tours in rock history: the first round the ports of South America in a cargo boat, and the second by train across the badlands of Colombia, through territories controlled by guerrillas and narco-traficantes.

  CHAPTER 6:

  THE FALL OF THE BLACK HAND

  ‘Tomorrow you are going to be the breakfast of my dog.’

  Security guard, Nîmes, to Manu Chao

  The Mano Negra bandwagon was burning up the mileposts with well over a hundred official concerts in 1990. But for each one of those, there were nearly as many spontaneous improvised shows. ‘We’d meet a guy at a gig’, Jo recalls, ‘who owned a bar, a club or came from a squat and we’d end up playing another show there later.’ Like in the old black and white movies, the banner headlines were spinning into view as the road signs zoomed by and the pages of the calendar were torn off one by one in quick succession: Finland, Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Japan … the pace was dizzying and relentless.

  The trusty Iveco van was put out to grass in favour of sleeker, air-conditioned tour buses, large enough to host jam sessions from which new ideas would emerge. Manu has a rule that every idea should be recorded or jotted down before it disappears. As the Chinese say, if you don’t write an idea down, you write it on water.

  Some nights were more memorable than others. The Olympia in Paris was a milestone for Manu. The venue, which had been opened in the 1930s by the renowned impresario Bruno Coquatrix, was another pillar of the Parisian music scene, where everyone from the Beatles to the Stones and Bob Dylan to James Brown had given unforgettable performances. ‘There was a giant black hand on the hoarding outside,’ Manu remembers. ‘It was the band’s symbol and logo, which I’d stencilled back in Sèvres, using my own hand as a model. My most far-fetched dreams had come true.’ It was at the Olympia that Ramón finally understood that his son was really something, ‘When I’d met Ramón at the time of Hot Pants, I told him I thought Manu was a great talent,’ Batzen remembers. ‘He replied that he only knew about classical music and so was no judge. But after the Olympia concert, he came up to me, shouting, “You were right! You were right!”’

  The black hand takes Olympia – the gig that convinced Manu’s father, Ramón.

  In November 1990, Mano Negra travelled to Japan for the first time. ‘We’d heard the Japanese fans tended to be well mannered and reserved, but they went insane for Mano Negra,’ says Bernard Batzen. The band were highly amused by Yogogi Park, where different youth cults – rockabilly, teds and punks – would dress to impress with impeccably observed detail every weekend. The Japanese couldn’t get the hang of Manu’s stage-diving antics, however. At one gig, the audience, seemingly as frenzied as any in Europe, politely parted when Manu launched himself from the stage and he ended up on the floor with a broken collarbone.

  During the Japanese tour, Mano Negra were given use of a mobile studio truck and they decided to record a live album, In The Hell Of Patchinko, in Kawasaki. ‘Pachinko’ is the name of the zombifying slot-machine game that the Japanese love, and a convenient play on Patchanka, the band’s patented name for their sound. ‘It sounded cool to record a live album in Japan,’ is the way Jo put it, ‘and everyo
ne was telling us how we were a great live band.’ Recorded in a couple of days and mixed back in Paris, the album captures the white-hot intensity of the Mano Negra at their peak.

  Thanks to the non-stop touring, Mano Negra had only fragments of songs which they had worked up on the bus, when they went in to record their next studio album King Of Bongo, at the famous Conny Plank studios in Cologne, where influential discs by the likes of Kraftwerk and Can had been created. Most of the album emerged from jam sessions, with Manu (as ever) providing the lyrics. A reworked version of “Ronde De Nuit” from Patchanka ended up as “Paris La Nuit” (Paris By Night). It was another early example of Manu’s penchant for refurbishing and recycling songs. The lyrics, however, remained unchanged: Paris was still dying of boredom, Chirac was still immersed in political corruption and skulduggery in the mayor’s office and the Apaches were still in prison.

  There were journeys into ska on “It’s My Heart” and dub on “The Fool”, a borrowed Stooges riff on “Letter To The Censors” and an affectionate French chanson on “Madame Oscar”, the name that Anouk, as partner of Manu’s alter ego Oscar Tramor, had chosen as her guest pseudonym.

  The album, while polished, sounds laboured and lacks the furious energy of the first two records. It wasn’t the radical fiesta and creative leap forward that was expected, and both fans and critics were decidedly lukewarm. Le Monde, a centre-right national French paper that can hardly be considered a barometer of cool, wrote that King Of Bongo was ‘un disque normal’ (‘a normal record’) and they missed the ‘joyeux désordre’ (‘joyous chaos’) of the two earlier albums. Mano Negra being called ordinary by an establishment paper? That hurt. ‘We had started out with ideals about being a really alternative band,’ Tom says. ‘But somehow, on the treadmill of touring and releasing albums, we had gradually become a normal band.’

  King Of Bongo did produce a couple of highly distinctive songs, which became Mano Negra’s two biggest singles. “Out Of Time Man” explores Manu’s neurosis about time (he still doesn’t wear a watch), and was enduring enough to get a 2007 reworking by Nick Cave’s associate Mick Harvey that surfaced on the cult TV series Breaking Bad. Another number which has stayed the course was the title track “King Of Bongo”, a surreal tale of a bongo-playing monkey who feels alienated in the big city. In a later version, renamed “Bongo Bong”, it became one of the biggest hits on Manu’s solo album Clandestino, fitting nicely into the outsider theme of that masterpiece. ‘It was about an idiot who everyone is a fan of, out in the bush,’ Manu said at the time, ‘but in the city everyone loves house and disco so he’s lost. But he’s still “King Of The Bongo”.

  By the end of 1990, the atmosphere in and around the band had become darker. Antoine tried to pinpoint the reasons for this shift in mood in an interview that was filmed years later for the Pura Vida! DVD, which the band put together without Manu and released in 2005. He said that it was partly the global situation, especially the Gulf War, but also the increasing commercialisation of the music business. ‘They privatised the channel TF1 [whose music division Santi, ironically, ended up running] and M6 – the French equivalent of MTV – arrived with its endless music videos. So you had to fit the mould and make videos that cost a fortune. Little by little the dynamics of the music business took over and changed what we were doing. We fought against it the best we could and negotiated a little freedom, but the industry was stronger than us.’

  For the next two years, in a constant effort to prove that they were never going to fit the increasingly sclerotic mould of the music industry, Mano Negra undertook a trio of remarkable tours whilst they disintegrated like the tail end of a mad firework display. In fact, the word ‘tour’ hardly does justice to the lunatic schemes they undertook.

  Their first notable and marvellous folly was a musical assault on les banlieues, the outlying suburbs of Paris, which are perennially stigmatised for their social dysfunction and high crime rate. As a consequence, their marginalised neighbourhoods are generally avoided like the plague by big rock stars who prefer to stick to safe, prestigious venues in the centre of the city. Mano Negra had already done their central Paris tour in the red-light district of Pigalle. Now they would play the suburbs, where rents are cheap and the poor and dispossessed immigrants, mainly of African and North African origins, are forced to live.

  The ghettoisation of outlying neighbourhoods is an acute problem in Paris, especially compared to a city like London, where there is more of mix of ethnicities and a greater variety of social backgrounds in the centre of the city. Partly thanks to the policies of Chirac (who was mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995 – and was still being pursued in the courts for corrupt deals two decades later) and his property magnate cronies, ‘undesirable’ social groups had been edged out to the margins of the metropolis. For Manu, it was a European version of apartheid. Apartheid-lite.

  Mano Negra’s idea was a simple one but it had enormous resonance, not least in the media, to whom the Caravane des Quartiers, as they christened the tour, was irresistible. Apart from a genuine desire to go to where their poorest fans were, and to show solidarity with oppressed communities, it was another highly effective alternative marketing strategy, grabbing the headlines and shaking up public opinion.

  A TV announcer on a news clip included in the Pura Vida! DVD nailed it, in a statement that might have been scripted by the band, when he said, ‘some groups await their audience in big venues like the Zenith, but Mano Negra prefer to go to their fans. The band has refused to give in to showbiz, and they were welcomed in the banlieues like prodigal sons. The concerts were sold out and the organisers had never seen such success. There was no trouble, and soon there was no stage or audience, just one big huge fiesta. They are anti-stars who don’t chase fame. They may be news in New York and Tokyo, but they remember their friends in the suburbs.’

  As happened on the South American tour, the eclectic mix of influences in Mano Negra’s music was one of the reasons for the success of their invasion of the banlieues, which a close friend of the band called Walli was heavily involved in organising. The overall tour coordinator, Madani Kherfi, later commented on the difficulty of organising rock gigs in the suburbs; ‘The audience here is more into rap and rai, but although Mano Negra played rock there was such a mix of rhythms and styles that they found a way in that no other rock band could have found.’

  The tour hit fifteen different venues, starting at Nanterre in April 1991, and then moving on to Saint-Denis, Créteil, Champs-Sur-Marne and Montreuil. The whole project was a palpable hit and, as the TV announcer noted, the stage was invaded every night by the audience, encouraged by Manu who seemed hell-bent on breaking down the barriers between the band and their fans. ‘When people rushed the stage it was the best,’ recalls trombonist Pierre ‘Krøpöl’ Gauthé. ‘It was a blast, a huge party.’ He was glad he wasn’t a guitarist, who needs to keep a constant eye on his calibrated pedal positions. ‘It was OK with a trombone. It’s easy to move and, if anything happens, it doesn’t cost much, anyway.’

  The increasing mayhem at Mano Negra shows did encourage the band to hire their own security outfit, as conventional security firms were unused or unwilling to deal with the chaos (or the Chaos). They found a bunch of Parisian ex-Black Panthers dubbed Les Buffalos who proved adept at light-touch crowd control. ‘We have no problem mixing it up,’ Manu said at the time. ‘We want to get in the audience, we want them onstage and all that we ask is that people respect our gear.’ It was the opposite extreme to the hard-nosed military control of the Iggy Pop tour and, if some equipment was occasionally trashed, then Manu and the band considered it worth the aggravation.

  A reflective Manu, on tour in 1990.

  With their policy of constantly jamming and giving improvised performances, anywhere and everywhere, Mano Negra were adept at playing with almost anyone. A month after the Caravane des Quartiers, they found themselves playing with the Urban Dance Squad at the Transbordeur Festival in Lyons. Silvano Matadin of th
e Urban Dance Squad captures something of the long-lost, almost millennial fervour of the times: ‘We were dreaming of bringing different cultures together, a new generation, a new energy. La Mano was the only European band who could express this kind of energy. It was something really positive. We were busy with the revolution and I was standing on the barricades.’

  The band also played plenty of benefit gigs during this period, the most memorable in May 1991, when they were asked to support a large group of homeless people who were camped out on Place de le Réunion in the 20th arrondissement, after being evicted from nearby houses. Someone at UNESCO, the United Nations cultural wing, recklessly offered the band their grand and bureaucratically drab Parisian conference space for the show. Beforehand, there was a plea from the stage not to damage the hall, which was stuffed with desks, tables and assorted electronic equipment. But in vain: 2,500 Mano fans pogoing like dervishes were never going to leave a place like that untouched. It looked like it had witnessed the passage of a tornado, much to the consternation of the well-meaning but naïve employees of UNESCO.