Mano Negra were polarising French public opinion. For all those supportive fans and fellow believers who thought the UNESCO gig was a high-spirited event that just got a little out of control, there were plenty of others who increasingly saw the band as their worst nightmare: a bunch of highly undesirable anarchists, subversives, disrespecters of property and friends of dirty immigrants. The racist anti-immigrant Front National party of Jean-Marie Le Pen were in the ascendant and Mano Negra made excellent hate figures for the rabid right.
This feverish atmosphere formed the backdrop to a veritable media storm that engulfed Mano Negra’s huge outdoor concert at La Défense, the largest purpose-built business district in Europe, full of shiny mirrored office blocks, that had been built in the 1970s and 1980s at the end of a grand axis that started in Palais du Louvre and joined up the Place de La Concorde, the Champs-Elysée and the Arc de Triomphe in one straight line of urban pomp and circumstance. The cité at La Défense was named after the iconic statue built in 1883 commemorating the resistance of Parisians in the Franco-Prussian War.
The concert became a hot political story. The right-wing mayor of the district, Charles Ceccaldi Peynaud, tried and failed to get the concert banned before announcing he would be hiring a riot squad and 750 extra police. He then appeared on TV to announce that his measures were ‘the victory of order over the possibility of disorder’. Peynaud also claimed that Jack Lang, President Mitterrand’s controversially flamboyant culture minister, who had sanctioned the show, was someone that ‘prefers chaos’. Lang shot back with the argument that many similar concerts had taken place all over France without incident. Manu also said his piece on TV: ‘the bigger show of strength from the authorities and the more cops there are, the more likely they are to provoke violence,’ a view he would later take about other risky ventures.
Santi recalls that the La Défense concert was on the TV news every fifteen minutes. ‘There can’t have been anyone in the backwoods of France who didn’t know we were putting on a concert. We were working with Royal de Luxe and wanted fireworks and a circus aspect to the show. We wanted it to be huge.’
And it was. When Mano Negra hit the immense stage, there were 20,000 people on the steps of La Défense and about 35,000 behind them, further down the esplanade. Despite the media hysteria, everything went peacefully. As they were about to board a boat for South America, the band knew that it would be their last concert for several months in Europe. What they didn’t know was that it would also be also Mano Negra’s last ever major gig in France.
If the band was in danger of becoming ‘normal’ and stuck on the album–tour–album–tour treadmill, their next move – the Cargo Tour – threw all such thoughts overboard. Instead of setting out on the long, hard slog of international promotion in the capital cities of Europe and America following the release of King Of Bongo – as their manager, label and agent were demanding of them – Mano Negra decided to disappear on a boat to South America for four and a half months.
By getting away from the intense routine they had slipped into, Manu also hoped that the trip might help heal whatever tensions were simmering between band members. That first trip to South America had been an inspiration to Manu, a personal El Dorado. The continent had become – as one of Manu’s French biographers, Souad Belhaddad, put it – ‘his box of tricks’, a richly fertile source of ideas.
As well as the flourishing of alternative rock, the 1980s had seen a parallel blossoming in France of other unorthodox art forms, especially alternative circus and performance. The French group Archaos were close friends of Mano Negra and had been re-inventing the moribund arts of the circus with their juggling chainsaws, motorbike and punk aesthetics. There was a parallel scene in Barcelona, spearheaded by the radical theatre group La Fura dels Baus, who were breaking down barriers between performer and audience with verve and frequent violence – throwing flour, water, offal or fireworks into the crowd with nerve-fraying frequency. Another theatre company posed as tourist guides and took unwary punters around the local laundrettes and slums in a glossy bus. It was subversive, funny and often spectacular.
For Manu, these new anarchic performance troupes challenged the staid conventions of live rock music. However radical your rhetoric, and even if you allowed fans onstage or dropped slogans like ‘No more heroes’ in interviews, rock itself was in many ways reactionary and conservative, both in the fossilised separation of star and audience and in terms of its sound. Of course, Mano Negra had come up with fertile variations on the usual rock recipe, with their spiced-up Latino percussion and brass, but that alone wasn’t enough.
Manu saw a kindred soul in the alternative street theatre troupe Royal de Luxe. After starting life in 1979 in a squat in Aix-en-Provence, in 1984 Royal de Luxe moved to Nantes, where they performed in markets and train stations, doing shows like J’ai Fait de la Publicité Urbaine, a grotesque parody of the banality and excesses of advertising. They would build giant puppets and perform shows to a soundtrack of old washing machines, Hoovers and breaking crockery or homemade fireworks. They generally amazed and provoked passing members of the public, eliciting interest and horrified fascination among sections of the population usually untouched by the more conventional arts. Royal de Luxe’s visionary founder, Jean-Luc ‘Coco’ Courcoult, was someone Manu regarded highly: ‘Of all the people, artists or groups we met on our long tours, Royal de Luxe were the ones we felt closest to and the ones we envied the most.’
While on tour in the south of France, on a particularly insane night, Manu and the band hooked up with the theatre company at the Feria de Nîmes. ‘The security guys were complete fascists,’ Manu recalls. ‘We were at the soundcheck and one guy with a dog said to me, “Tomorrow you are going to be the breakfast of my dog.” That was my welcome onstage.’ Manu complained to the promoters about the aggression of the security staff, telling them that they had to cancel the show or find another security crew, otherwise there would be a fight. ‘They answered that there would be no problem. Of course, there was a big fight. There were 30,000 people in the audience, most of them drunk. Bottles were smashed; it was a mess, a real riot. There were only ten of us but some others helped out. It was like in a film.’
Afterwards, surprisingly unscathed, the band went to a party downtown, where they met up with the members of Royal de Luxe. ‘One guy, really tough, an anarchist, smashed a girl’s camera because she was filming and Garbancito saw what happened. He got upset because you don’t smash a lady and there was another fight between us and the theatre guys, which ended up on the street. In the end we met Coco in a bar at six in the morning, completely drunk and said to him, “We should do things together,” and he said “Bullshit! You have no imagination.”’
Coco waxed lyrical about his latest, greatest project, to adapt an old cargo boat, sail in it to South America and play in ports, presenting Royal de Luxe’s vision of the entire history of France, to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Manu was suitably impressed with the lunacy and ambition of this grandiose scheme: ‘About a year later, Coco got in touch and asked, “Are you ready for the story of the boat?” I said, “Of course.” Coco is totally crazy, but he’s a genius.’
Having spent over a decade living in a squat and producing shows for nothing, Coco had managed, after several years of cajoling and charm, and a brilliant media campaign, to persuade public bodies in France to back his scheme to the tune of several million francs. The Mayor of Nantes provided a 10,000-square-metre hangar and there was substantial backing from the Agence Française d’Action Artistique (AFAA). The company started to adapt the cargo ship, building, as if on a film lot, a life size facsimile of an entire Nantes street, complete with a boulangerie, tabac, boucherie and café, in the bowels of the boat’s cargo hold. Mano Negra came and helped out with the building, having fun driving tanks and yielding flame-throwers. This was the heyday of generous and grandiose state sponsorship of the arts in France, before the rise of the he
alth and safety culture and men with clipboards, who would have taken one look at the whole mad enterprise and closed it down.
The show, modestly entitled La Véritable Histoire de France (The Real History of France), featured a series of vignettes which included Roman centurions and Gallic peasants, Norman adventurers, Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in simulated snow, and excerpts from both world wars. There were moments of poetry too: a Montgolfier hot-air balloon and cannons which fired off thousands of love letters.
The plan was for the boat to dock in Caracas, Cartagena, Santa Domingo, Havana, Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, before ending up with a big parade in Buenos Aires. Bernard Batzen, who felt the tour could be disastrous for Mano Negra’s career prospects, wasn’t keen at all and negotiated a compromise. The band would play at the main cities of the tour and fly back in between for a series of shows he had setup, with considerable difficulty, in assorted bullrings around Europe, a concept both he and the band thought sufficiently unorthodox. His Plaza de Toros tour would promote the album and launch the band up onto the next level.
The Real History of France, presented by Royal de Luxe.
However, Manu eventually came to see Batzen to say the band wanted to stay on the boat for the entire four-and-a-half-month tour. Batzen found himself in an impossible position and decided to resign as manager. ‘As an experience, as individuals, I understood why they wanted to do it,’ Batzen reminisced in a coffee shop in London in autumn 2010. ‘But I was their manager and I thought that the whole thing was commercial suicide. I thought I had better bow out before I fell out with them. I left on good terms and I still see most of the band socially, and sometimes even work with them.’
King Of Bongo had sold around 350,000 copies, which was respectable enough, but Batzen was sure it would have been a million-seller if they had been willing to promote it by touring in Europe. However, he adds, ruefully, that it was possible that he and Virgin were wrong about the whole idea. By following his instinct, Manu and the band became figures of legend in South America and built up a huge audience that was to stand Manu in good stead in his later solo career. This fame and success also meant that Manu didn’t have to slog around the States when he finally decided to go back there. In places with a large Hispanic population, like Brooklyn, Texas or the West Coast, Mano Negra’s fame in Latin America meant there was a ready-made audience. And, in countries like Mexico, Colombia and Argentina in particular, Manu still has a fanatical following dating back to his Mano Negra days.
When they got to Nantes, the band spent time working as dockers and navvies rather than musicians, loading the boat, painting, fixing things up. For some this was a welcome respite from non-stop touring. Antoine in particular, who as a teenager loved nothing better than taking apart motorbikes and putting them back together, enjoyed the change. The cargo ship was loaded with its own stage and lighting equipment, so that the tour would enjoy maximum autonomy and shows could be performed almost anywhere.
Mano Negra and Royal de Luxe were joined by the dance company of Philippe Découflé and the marionnettes of Philippe Genty. A Grand Parade in Nantes was planned to give the whole nautical caravan an extraordinary send-off. Tom, Philippe, Manu and Jo dressed up as First World War foot soldiers and had prepared some military songs to perform during the parade. Coco’s critique of this initiative was blunt: ‘I loved your drive and the effort you put in – but you guys really sucked. We’ll have to rework it.’
The Cargo ship set sail one bright morning in April 1992. It had been christened Melquiades, after the gypsy-magician character in One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the novel by the great Colombian author, and Chao family friend, Gabriel García Márquez. Melquiades, with his restless travelling and hustling and mysticism, has more than a little in common with Manu. Márquez wrote that his hero had ‘an Asiatic look that seemed to know what was on the other side of things’.
The boat steamed westwards and the band relaxed for the first time in years, watching the flying fish and dolphins, drinking cachaça (sugar-cane spirit) and smoking joints. After the manic speed of touring, they were happy enough to be trapped on the boat as it crossed the Atlantic at a stately pace. A couple of weeks later they sailed into Caracas, Venezuela, for the start of the adventure. A massive crowd of 120,000 attended the spectacle and goggled at the theatrics, the dancers, the puppets and, last but not least, Mano Negra, who finished the evening playing to their biggest crowd yet. And Jo got promoted to General in Coco’s show.
The ten-day stopover in Caracas gave Manu time to wander about town, talk to locals in the barrios and get a feel of the place and its people. Often, a few of the band would give impromptu concerts in the poorer neighbourhoods, either unplugged and acoustic or hooked up to portable amplifiers. ‘A Bob Marley song was like a passport,’ Manu observed. ‘Play something by him and the energy changes. They treat you differently.’ At the next stop, Cartagena, on the Atlantic Coast of Colombia, the first person on board to welcome the band was Gabriel García Márquez himself, who marvelled aloud at how brilliant it was to bring an entire street from Nantes across the Atlantic, and then commented to Manu: ‘You were a pain in the neck at the age of four, and you still are.’
With no European tour to fly back to, the band took advantage of the ship’s stopovers to do concerts further inland:
Bogotá in Colombia, Mexico City, and Belo Horizonte in the fertile centre of Brazil. If anything, it was those gigs without the spectacular theatrics of the full-blown Cargo performance, and the numerous impromptu performances in the unlikeliest corners of South America’s cities, that built up an enormous capital of goodwill for the band and for Manu himself.
Mano Negra set sail for South America on the Cargo Tour
It was also a very rich experience. Manu and the band were picking up musical ideas but also expanding their minds politically and socially. Their subversive reputation preceded them and fellow radicals were always sure to seek them out. Tom recalls activists working for the rights of indigenous Indians coming to visit Mano Negra in their hotel in Mexico City. The meeting had an enormous impact. When the Zapatista movement emerged over the next couple of years, with its ‘spokesperson’, the charismatic and masked Subcomandante Marcos, Manu became one of its most famous supporters.
That was all in the future, but an important seed had been planted. The opening track on the next – and last – Mano Negra studio album, Casa Babylon, which eventually came out in 1994, was called “Viva Zapata” and was to feature the chant ‘El pueblo, unido, jamas seras vencido’ (‘The people united, can never be defeated’) over a funky groove.
The boat stopped on Cuba at Havana and Santiago de Cuba. It was the first time any of Mano Negra had ever visited the island and the experience proved significant for several members of the band, especially Manu. Jo recalls Jako hiring a car, scoring some magic mushrooms and smooching by the sea with ‘a Secret Service chick’. Tom met the musicians who were to become the core of his adventurous post-Mano Negra electro-latino band P18. Antoine built some links that he developed in his later career as a producer with Radio Latina and Radio Ciudad Havana.
Manu had finally reached the country which he had often heard his communist-leaning parents speaking about, and where, according to his father Ramón, he had ancestral links. At the time Cuba was in the worst of the so-called ‘Special Period’. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians, who had been supporting the country with subsidised oil and other essentials for the past two decades, pulled the plug and Cuba found itself on the verge of collapse. At one point the entire country ran out of money. Even in good hotels there was often hardly any food – a ham and cheese toasted sandwich if you were lucky – though Manu still found much to admire there.
Manu is less partisan to any particular ideology, and more pragmatic, than his father, but having seen the tough barrios of Colombia, he found that Cuba, in comparison, had much to be said for it. ‘Go to another country in South America first, so you can compare
it,’ he suggests. ‘Live for a month in the favelas of Havana and then live for a month in the favelas of Bogotá and see which you prefer.’ He claims that he’s not a Fidelista, and, in his view, the Castro regime has made plenty of mistakes. ‘But also victories,’ he adds by way of qualification, ‘and you can’t ignore that part. There isn’t free expression but you risk jail or being killed if you oppose the government in Colombia. There are no paramilitary groups in Cuba. They don’t kill street children, or throw you out of hospitals if you can’t pay.’
The free education system, and particularly the generous free courses for foreign medical students, impressed him. So did his visit to the Film School set-up outside Havana by Gabriel García Márquez. ‘He is considered the best writer in South America,’ Manu explains, ‘and he supports the regime. He set-up his school in Cuba, which is one of the best cinema schools in the world, because if he had set it up in Colombia it would only be for rich people. In Cuba it’s all free.’
Manu also encountered the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria, a hybrid system of worship and belief that mixed African gods or orishas with Catholicism. Nearly all the musicians Manu met wore beads of different colours, which showed their allegiance to one orisha or another. Because the slaves were forbidden to worship their African deities, they would find their equivalent Catholic saints, and so these two disparate religions became entwined. The fearsome African god of healing, Babalu Aye, for example, became associated with San Lazaro or Lazarus, who rose from the dead. Lazaro’s saint’s day, on 17 December, is also the day of Babalu Aye, when thousands of followers walk or sometimes crawl to the El Rincon church outside Havana in penitience, offering rums or cigars to Lazaro.
Santeria is a very musical religion. Each orisha has its own rhythm that is played on the sacred bata drums, and devotees will be more susceptible to the rhythms of their own orisha than that of any other deity. Sometimes they go into a healing trance, triggered by those rhythms. Generally, the religion is favoured by Cuba’s poor black population but many musicians, notably the much-loved diva Celina González, are followers, as are a number of intellectuals. The Communist Party in Cuba had discouraged Santeria, but at the time of Manu’s visit there was something of a thaw in its anti-religious position.
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