World Pioneer: Manu Chao

Manu Chao is a one-off, full of contradictions, a shy and private person who loves playing to thousands of people.

As a solo artist, Manu broke through worldwide around the turn of the millennium, his debut album and acknowledged masterpiece Clandestino (1998) seemed everywhere. Its songs were written while on a three-year ‘lost weekend’ travelling mainly around South America. He had been heartbroken, at times suicidal, after the acrimonious break up of his previous band, Mano Negra.

When he returned to Paris after years away, he holed up in his parents’ garage with co-producer Renaud Letang. The album’s sound was an accident when an audio bug silenced the electronic drums, leaving the music spare and beautiful, sounding like nothing else. “We felt like we had given birth to a UFO,” says Letang. Manu tested the mixes on the neighbours’ children and went with the ones they liked best.

Mano Negra were essentially a punk-Latin band, and both Manu and his record company thought the new sound would likely alienate most of the fans of the band. No one expected much from the release. Virgin put almost no promotion or advertising behind it. References to marijuana put off mainstream radio. It crawled into the French charts at number 19 before stalling, which was somewhat humiliating as one of the ex-members of Mano Negra had a top-ten hit the same week.

The album slipped out of the charts. Manu, thinking his career was over, travelled to Senegal, planning to become a social worker. It was a full year after Clandestino’s release that it finally reached the top ten, where it stayed for a couple of years, not just in France but throughout Europe and South America. It ended up selling millions.

It turned out that the slow burn on the album was an accidental moment of marketing genius, making it a word-of-mouth hit. This was helped by the subject material – about clandestine illegal immigration – and Manu’s persona – a man of mystery and a moving target, ‘correr es mi destino’ (to run is my destiny), he sings on the title-track.

The follow-up, Proxima Estación: Esperanza (2001) was also co-produced by Manu and Letang but this time, it was given a huge marketing push, and soon Manu was playing to 80,000 in the main square of Mexico City, returning to a Latin America that had been where Mano Negra had found their audience and inspiration. My book, Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao (2013) documents some of Manu’s most maverick tours, Mano Negra’s epic boat trip around the ports of South America, and, most notoriously, a rail trip across war-torn Colombia, which was described by Nigel Williamson in Songlines as ‘less like a rock’n’roll tour and more like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.’ Manu’s father, the late journalist and pianist Ramón Chao, wrote a book about that trip, where they thought clowns on board would protect them against guerrilla fighters. It proved to be the final nail in the coffin for Mano Negra.

Looking back, he was ahead of the game in talking about the problems of illegal immigrants and the dangers of globalisation for the working class (and warning how the right wing would weaponise these issues). He even included the voice of the mysterious Subcommandante Marcos, spokesperson for the Zapatistas Indigenous rebels in Mexico, on Clandestino. This was another contradiction of Manu: a global star who sings in multiple languages (French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Greek, Galician, Arabic…) sounding the alarm about globalisation.

His own politics are, I would hazard to say, more humanist than obviously socialist. I spent a week in South America’s biggest mental hospital in Buenos Aires, where Manu produced a radio show called La Colifata (The Crazy Ones) which featured inmates performing. It became popular in Argentina and seemed to prove therapeutic for the patients. I also travelled with him as he supported a land rights movement in Mexico, and in the Algerian Sahara at a refugee camp with exiles from the conflict with Morocco.

After Próxima Estación: Esperanza (taken from a metro message in Madrid) he consciously began to dial down the levels of fame he had acquired. There was a more introspective and poetic French-language album, Sibérie M’Était Contéee (2004), and La Radiolina (2007), with standout track ‘Me Llaman Calle’, a sympathetic song about Madrid prostitutes. Although he occasionally posted tracks on the internet, there was a big gap until this year’s Viva Tu, an enjoyable musical diary from his travels in São Paulo, Greece and elsewhere. It was a small selection of songs from the many he has written – he once played me numerous Portuñol (Spanish-Portuguese mix) songs written in Brazil, which would make a great album. I once annoyed him by saying that, he isn’t the best solo producer for his own work, as highlighted by the fact two of his biggest records were co-produced, though he is a brilliant producer for other artists.

That has been his other big impact, for example, on Calypso Rose’s Far From Home (2016), which was co-produced by Ivan Duran (a great producer himself, check out Wátina by Andy Palacio & The Garifuna Collective). Duran told me how, having already worked on the album for months, Manu came in for a few weeks and with “amazing clarity and direction,” began chopping and editing the songs. The result was Calypso Rose’s first hit record in Europe at the advanced age of 76.

Another big success was his production work on Amadou & Mariam’s Dimanche à Bamako (2004). To Manu’s credit, not many would have thought a blind middle-aged couple from Mali would be candidates for a hit record, but Manu realised there was something universal about their music, about their combination of sad lyrics about the state of the world with uplifting tunes.

He can be generous to other artists, encouraging me to record my own music, for example, and he continues to support new artists, working with Laeti, Sofia Kourtesis, Bomba Estéreo, Chalart58, BaianaSystem, Dubioza Kolektiv and many other artists from around the world, no matter their current popularity. Yet, he can also be difficult and stubborn, as many people who have worked with him, such as his managers, attest. Manu made me think of Shakespeare’s ‘to thine own self be true.’ While many musicians can be accused of co-opting their style – jazzers trying to be Coltrane, punk bands aping The Clash – within a chord or two you know a song is by Manu.

He is a maverick, a visionary and the nearest thing to Bob Marley we have today, owing to his music’s deceptive simplicity and empathy for the dispossessed. He has produced classic songs for the ages, and continues to make music on his own terms, suggesting an alternative model of performing music, one based on connections made locally but with the potential to reach across the globe.

+ Peter Culshaw’s Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao (Serpent’s Tail) is published in ten languages