Viva Tu

It has been 17 years since Manu Chao’s last studio album, 2007’s La Radiolina – but then he has never been one to measure his creative life in conventional record releases. Indeed, at the time of La Radiolina, he told this writer that he didn’t recognise the concept of a definitive ‘album’ at all, finding the idea far too limiting and finite. Rather, he insisted, he was giving us merely a snapshot of a bunch of songs that possessed a mutable life of their own and which would go on evolving and changing, both as he played them live and as he tinkered with the tracks on his laptop, posting new and updated versions online as he thought fit.

So before we deal with Viva Tu, the first task is to try to map what our elusive champion has been up to since he disappeared from mainstream view. The answer, it seems, is pretty much what he’s always done since he disbanded Mano Negra in 1995 – crossing continents, travelling light and recording songs on his laptop, the same nomadic and unorthodox process that led to Chao’s 1998 masterpiece Clandestino.

Under the name El Chapulín Solo – actually an acoustic trio with a couple of his closest comrades – there have been sessions in bars and on street corners from Barcelona and Bosnia to Argentina and Brazil. In his endless campaigning for social and environmental justice, Chao has done benefits to protect the land of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and to provide underprivileged kids in India access to a hip-hop school, while giving away new songs for free on his website.

To hail Viva Tu as his return, then, is somewhat misleading. As Chao would tell it, he has never left us – or he was never here in the first place, if ‘here’ means the commodification of music and the established mainstream of capitalist record companies, release schedules, marketing and promotion. He might have been flying under the commercial radar, but he’s been sprinkling his magic dust freely and generously to those who need it and to anyone prepared to seek him out. It was no coincidence that sometime Songlines contributor Peter Culshaw subtitled his brilliant 2013 biography of our enigmatic anti-celebrity In Search of Manu Chao.

On Viva Tu, we get 13 new compositions sung variously in Spanish, French, Portuguese and English and inspired by Chao’s travels, the daily lives and struggles of the people he has met along the way and his concern at the current parlous state of the world.

One suspects he’s been storing up these songs for some time – the anthemic, reggae-lite ‘Tantas Tierras’, which borrows the chord sequence of ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, for example, was previously recorded in a different version with strings and mariachi trumpets for the Playing for Change project.

Happily, the familiar Chao tropes are all here – the simple sing-along melodies played on his chiming mini-guitar, the mercurial collision of rumba, chanson, cumbia and dub, the nursery rhymes, the polyglot vocals, the utopian naiveté, the beguiling juxtaposition of innocence, stoned hi-jinx and serious social concern, the lo-fi production and engagingly primitive laptop electronics. The high-pitched siren on the opener ‘Vecinos en el Mar’ sounds like the noise an old-fashioned landline telephone used to make when you left the receiver off the hook.

There are some surprises, though, such as his duet with Willie Nelson on ‘Heaven’s Bad Day’, a feral country hoedown that stays just the fun side of pastiche, and ‘Tu Te Vas’, on which he duets with the smoky-voiced French rapper Laeti. Elsewhere, ‘Lonely Night’ is a roots reggae tune and ‘River Why’ is simply a great infectious pop song, albeit given the customary surreal Chao twist. Neither would have sounded out of place on Clandestino.

In short, Manu Chao hasn’t changed one bit since that sainted album. He hasn’t lost his cheek, his chutzpah, his curiosity, his compassion - or his Pied Piper ability to conjure the most memorable songs from the simplest ingredients. And for that, we should all thank Pachamama or whatever gods you care to invoke.