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There’s no avoiding trouble on Barcelona’s narrow El Gotico thoroughfare. So
when a tipsy, pink-faced character emerges from a bar and yells something at
an advancing Manu Chao, you sense trouble – at least you do until Chao
points out that the pink-faced man owns the bar. “Follow me,” says the
46-year-old singer. The two men embrace and walk inside.
Noticing that I’m fighting off something noisy and bronchial, Chao says
something to his friend, who reaches for a bottle of green liquid. “They
make it here,” smiles Chao, as a glass of lemon-flavoured rocket fuel is
thrust my way. “You came to the right place tonight.”
It just so happens that “the right place” is also a pretty good duplication of
the inside of Chao’s head. Painted on the bare walls of the bar, La
Mariatchi, perhaps with a child’s hand, are naive desert scenes. Because
somewhere in the world a football match is always being televised, the TV is
always on. The colours of the Jamaican flag are prevalent. Upturned beer
kegs double up as seats. In the far corner, two of Chao’s mates pick out
sad, simple chords that turn into songs when the chatter between them dries
up. If Chao isn’t on tour, this is where you’ll find him most nights, he
says.
La Mariatchi is also the place where Chao’s new album, La Radiolina, was
road-tested. Much as he may deny the fact, Chao’s sad, sweet protest songs
have made him a global – or, more pertinently, antiglobal – music icon. His
two previous solo albums have racked up more than three million sales
apiece. While new material by comparably successful artists is shrouded in
secrecy and distributed ahead of release on traceable, watermarked CDs, Chao
says that the street musicians of Barcelona have been playing his new songs
such as Mala Fama and Mundorévès for months. They are helping him to do his
job, he says. Chao doesn’t know what a focus group is, but then he doesn’t
need to. “Before I put out a CD, I listen to it with my friends, because
that’s where you feel more ashamed, you know? You put the CD on in a bar
without saying it’s your CD, so maybe one of your friends say: ‘Change the
record! This is s***!’ ” Clearly, it’s a method that works. A fortnight
after its release, La Radiolinais outselling every other album across
Europe. As with its predecessors, Clandestino and Proxima Estación:
Esperanza, it isn’t hard to see why. Fragments of songs thread into other
musical sketches which in turn recur on some other plaintive politicised
chanson. Among songs about lost love (Bleedin’ Heart) and Diego Maradona (La
Vida Tombola), a prevalent theme is the human cost of war. The effect of a
Chao album is akin to taking a 4am bus journey through Latin America while
three equally wonderful short-wave stations compete for the same frequency.
Along with Gogol Bordello and Rachid Taha, it’s Chao’s music you’ll most
commonly find on the iPods of travelling antiglobalists and backpackers
seeking to lay down roots in the West.
Their experiences, he says, mirror those of his own parents – a left-wing
Galician radio journalist and Basque mother – who fled Franco’s Spain for
Paris months before Chao was born. He says his first childhood memory was
the Ché Guevara poster on the living room wall. Activists from Spain,
Argentina, Brazil and Chile would come to visit on weekends, “talking about
very serious things I couldn’t understand at the time”. He says that these
experiences form the basis of keynote songs such as Desaparecido and
Malegria, the latter a term coined by Chao to describe “a kind of sadness
that combats with laughter, a painful happiness”.
The longer you talk to him, the clearer it seems that he seeks experiences
that fuel that precise feeling. It strikes him as amusing that talking to
child prostitutes in São Paulo might be seen as an unusual thing for a
visting musician to do. “I am not a journalist. I wasn’t there to find out
about their work. And they didn’t ask me about my music either. First, they
thought I wanted to” – he pauses to emphasise the insinuation – “go up with
them. But we shared a beer, a cigarette. It was a little moment of ‘street’,
nothing serious.”
Not least because his son is being raised there, Chao’s love affair with South
America seems to be the only thing that threatens to undermine his life in
Barcelona. Fifteen years ago, as the frontman of his old band Mano Negra, he
worked out that “the real big borders in the world are not between one
country and another, but between the big city and the countryside”.
Eager to connect with audiences that no other recording artist had reached,
Chao and a loose collective of fellow musicians embarked on one of the most
brave – or foolish – mystery tours in rock. Chao’s odyssey through the
lawless backwaters of rural Colombia has long since acquired mythical
status. But it’s worth dwelling on one more time, if only because of the
means of transport by which they elected to conduct it – Colombia isn’t
known for the efficiency of its rail network.
“If you tour Colombia,” explains Chao, “you see a lot of railroad tracks, but
you never see a train. We were sent to this big place, perhaps 30 miles from
Bogotá. It was like the biggest field you ever saw, and all the trains of
Colombia were there, abandoned. We went from place to place – driven by a
man called Diablo, who could find you a beer in the middle of a desert –
getting stopped by paramilitaries, having to negotiate for the security of
the train.” Years later, Chao seems to oscillate between nostalgia and a
quiet resolution never to put himself in that position again. “Some people
couldn’t stand it. They got off and left. I asked myself: ‘Oh my God, why
have I put myself in this situation?’ But now, I think maybe it was the best
adventure I ever had.”
The thirst for new escapades accounts for the increasing gaps between albums.
In between this album and the last, Chao could be found producing the blind
Malian duo Amadou & Mariam or helping to raise awareness for Radio
Colifata (“Radio Crazy”), the Buenos Aires radio station run by psychiatric
patients. “My involvement with them was just to help them help themselves,”
explains Chao. “We put together a CD of street musicians from Barcelona in
collaboration with La Colifata. They sold it in Argentina and it got a good
reaction. Then, a couple of years ago, when Radio Bemba [his touring band]
came to Argentina, we played a stadium show, and a different member of the
Colifata came on to play on every song. It became this mythic thing.” It’s
impossible to hear him talk about such episodes without pondering the ironic
chain of events that they trigger. Chao’s instinctive empathy for the
underrepresented makes him more popular, and in doing so, makes him more
famous. The more famous he becomes, the more other famous people are drawn
to him, but over the course of an evening he deems only the overtures of Joe
Strummer and Diego Maradona worthy of mention.
After Chao wrote La Vida Tombola for the troubled footballer, the two struck
up a close friendship. “What I really respect in Diego is that he doesn’t
think about yesterday or the future. Everything he has, he burns it in the
moment. And I respect people like that.”
You could also, of course, ascribe such qualities to Robbie Williams, who
recently recorded a version of Chao’s Bongo Bong for his Rudebox album. But
that isn’t quite enough to prompt anything other than a politely
underwhelmed response when Williams’s tribute is mentioned. Similarly,
recent rumoured overtures from Carlos Santana and Shakira also came to
nothing, perhaps because of Chao’s instinctive mistrust of what he calls
“the ghetto of musicians”.
In July, on the day that the Live Earth shows were broadcast all over the
world, his mother turned on the French coverage, only to hear an
announcement that Chao wouldn’t be turning up for his scheduled appearance.
“She called me and said: ‘Manu, where are you?’ The reason was very simple.
They never asked me to come, and when they did ask me, it was not possible –
but they made their publicity saying that I was coming. I don’t think that’s
fair.”
But would Chao ever really having willingly committed to such a high-profile
pan-celebrity event? When pressed, he seems to think not. “I need to be
hanging around people who don’t do the same job as me. In everyday life, you
cannot surround yourself with musicians. I need to be with taxi drivers,
fishermen, students, mechanics.” He waves his hand around the bar – where,
indeed, his presence attracts barely a whiff of interest. “These are the
people who tell me if my songs are rubbish, or if they are good. Some
nights, we get up and we play them together.”
And tonight? Is tonight one of those nights? “If magic comes,” appears to be
Chao’s response. At least, I think that’s what he said. In fact, he’s
talking about his bass player, Madjid. “If Madjid comes,” he laughs. “But
yes, the magic too! For sure!” La Radiolina is released by Because.
— Manu Chao’s UK tour begins with three nights at Brixton Academy on Oct 2, 4
and 5. www.manuchao.net
Argh why did you get the job of interviewing manu! i could have done a better job, at least i know that majhid is infact is guitarist... don't get me wrong, it was a good article, just next time your interviewing manu get in touch with me, =]
Lorcan gray, Dundrum, Dublin
I enjoyed Manu Chao's gig at the Brixton Academy on 2 October absolutely not at all – in fact I’d go as far as to say it was the most disapointing gig I’ve ever been to. I adore Clandestino and Proxima Estacion:Esperanza, but this live performance didn’t do Chao’s songwriting skills any justice. Almost every song, how ever tuneful it started, eventually morphed into the most appallingly lazy punk tune ever. Two notes on the bass, and the most simple of thumping drumbeats. It did my head in – and no matter how much they jumped around, waved their arms in the air and shouted, the band couldn’t entice me to stay for the whole set. By 10.15 surrounded by 16 year olds so busy trying to surreptitiously smoke weed they couldn’t be bothered to look up at the stage, I was done. Manu, next time can you please just turn up alone with your acoustic guitar and play some songs?
Erica Herrero-Martinez, London,