Album review

Manu Chao

New Live Album from the Musical Globe-trotter

Paris 

06/09/2002 - 

Manu Chao has built up an impressive CV over the past few years, releasing two phenomenally successful solo albums (which sold over 2 million copies each) and performing a three-year tour which took him across three different continents! With Manu’s first live album, Radio Bemba Sound System, due for release on 10 September we focus on the Chao phenomenon with a mini-interview and a sneak preview of his new live album.

On Friday 5 July Manu Chao brought the house down when he ended his international tour with a final French date in Marseilles (the only gig in his homeland in 2002). After the concert the singer reminisced about his extensive international tour in the company of a band of journalists which included Alain Pilot, the presenter of La Bande Passante. Listeners can enjoy Pilot’s full interview with Chao on the airwaves of Radio France Internationale on 11 September¹, but before that we bring you a sneak extract:

What made you want to do a live album in the first place?
Well, Radio Bemba's very much a temporary outfit - every six months or so things come to an end. And then so long as everything's still going well and there's still a good vibe we go together again with a new line-up. So given our temporary structure we record every tour because we always feel it might be the last! But whatever happens in the future I know I'll always be out on the road, whether I'm out there on tour with a group or it's just me up on stage with a guitar. Right now I have to say I'm really happy playing with the group because everyone in it is really prepared to give 100% - and if they weren't there'd never have been a tour! There's a lot more pressure for me to play in Marseilles than in Japan, you know. But I like that - it's a healthy kind of pressure!

Why did you choose to use your two Paris dates for the live album?
Basically, that choice was down to technical reasons we played in Paris on two consecutive nights. We wanted to have the best possible sound on the new album. But fans can get all the concerts of our most recent tour on the Net. There's all pirate sounds, of course - the concert we played in Genoa has been circulating like crazy on the Net!

What do you think of pirates recordings?
Great!

Is Marseilles the only town in France you'd consider living up?
Yes, absolutly! I'm based in Barcelona right now but I hesitated for a long time over where to live. And in the end it could have swung either way really. At the time Martha, a woman who was looking after the whole organisational side of things - because frankly I'm not very organised kind of guy! - Martha was based in Barcelona so it was easier for me to go and set myself up there too. But it's only a temporary arrangement - I'd love to go and live in Marseilles at some point of my life!

¹ La Bande Passante, Sept. 11 at 13h40 TU.
MANU CHAO, A CREOLE MUSICIAN

“En algun lugar de la planeta Trampa, Radio Bemba Supersonica grabado en vivo” (From somewhere on the Planet Trampa, Radio Bemba Supersonica recorded live!”) The sub-title of Manu Chao’s new live album says it all really. This is music from nowhere in particular which manages to resonate everywhere at the same time. What’s more, the mention of Planet Trampa (Spanish for “cheating” or “fraud”) implies that these are sounds from the underground which have emerged on the scene via some secret contraband route rather than the normal mainstream channels. The birth of the Radio Bemba Sound System on the Planet Trampa is also shrouded in a certain mystery. We know that the group exploded onto the international music scene in 2001-2002 following the release of Chao’s last studio album Proxima Estaçion Esperanza and embarked upon one of the most exciting tours of the past few years.

But one of the most striking features of the Radio Bemba Sound System is that they remain an alien life-form previously unknown on the Planet Music. Music fans are, of course, used to groups with multi-cultural line-ups bringing together musicians from different races, nationalities and backgrounds. But most of the time these so-called multi-cultural outfits serve up nothing more than middle-of-the-road listening – e.g. simple African percussion and rock guitars – which is designed to appeal to the widest possible international audience. The novelty of Manu Chao’s RBSS is that the group defy all attempts at categorisation – they are neither rock band, Latin outfit or ska group but al of these rolled into one with a heavy dose of rub-a-dub, cumbia and raggamuffin thrown in for good measure. The group’s other radical difference is that they do not correspond to a formula dreamt up by some wily old tour manager with his heart set on commercial profit. RBSS are more of a roving Gypsy caravan whose line-up and musical philosophy has been shaped by experiences and chance meetings accumulated en route.

While the modern music scene is awash with vague labels and categories – lumping a million and one sounds under the headings ‘world’ and ‘cross-over’ - Manu Chao has taken his own road. And his experiments appear to confirm the Antillais intellectual Edouard Glissant’s theories on ‘Creolisation’ (which predict that Western culture will be increasingly ‘contaminated’ by other cultures and the result will be radical new forms of music, dance etc.) This process of ‘Creolisation’ or cross-pollination has already been at work over the centuries, breeding everything from mintrelsy, zouk and blues to reggae, tango and salsa. The important thing about Manu Chao’s sound is not so much that listeners have the impression that all musics meet in his rich cultural melting-pot – but that his musical fusion is a natural process motivated by the urgency of his own pleasure rather than commercial marketing opportunities.
Listening to Chao’s new live album or reading his biography (penned by Alessandro Robecchi and published by Plon in the spring of this year), one quickly comes to realise that the cultural ‘revolution’ Chao is engaged in is radically different to the one that rocked the music world from the 70s through to the 90s and which consisted of opening the doors of European music to the vibrant sounds issuing from the Third World. Back in the 80s Chao, a French musician with Spanish roots, exploded onto the music scene with La Mano Negra, a radical collective who whipped up a veritable maelstrom of raw salsa, reggae and ska with all the anger and energy of punk. La Mano Negra’s approach to musical fusion was radically different to the gentle forays into other musical cultures which had gone before – c.f. Nino Ferrer and Moustaki’s interest in Brazil, Vassiliu’s passion for the French Antilles and Nougaro’s use of African rhythms. La Mano Negra did not so much borrow politely from other cultures to spice up their own French sound. Their fusion was one motivated by gut instinct where punk and Spanish Republican protest songs collided with Bob Marley and Clash riffs and the crazy dance rhythms of Latin America and pogo from the Paris suburbs!

Following the South American ventures of La Mano Negra – which proved to be the pinnacle of the group’s fame as well as a painful journey of the ‘stations of the cross’ – the end result was that a French band pulled off the extraordinary feat of achieving world fame without passing through the international mainstream. In short, bootleg cassettes blaring out of run-down bars and dilapidated mini-buses in the world’s poorer countries did more to cement La Mano’s reputation than the records played on CD-players of 30-something ‘bobos’ (the traditional target of ‘world’ and cross-over sounds!).

After the demise of La Mano Negra Manu Chao continued his travels, playing with musicians hemet on Brazilian beaches and in Argentine bars and recording the street sounds of the towns he travelled through on a mini tape recorder. Legend has it that Chao’s debut album, Clandestino, was to have been an electronic project. But the programmations that were to have been used in the final mix were wiped off the studio computer, leaving a raw sound pulsing with the ambience of a set played live in a local bar without the benefit of a sound system. Inter-cutting his music with phrases shouted in Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese and English – as well as portunol (a sort of lingua franca understood by all Latin nations) – Chao cooked up a vibrant mix of different dance musics over a catchy ska-rock base.

In a world where people increasingly circulate between one country and another, Chao reminds us that music is increasingly capable of hopping borders too. And given that so many of the people crossing frontiers these days are economic refugees, it is inevitable that ‘poor people’s’ music comes with them. Interestingly enough, Chao’s musical mix, born in the heart of wealthy well-off Europe, surfaced at the same time as the champeta (a fusion which resulted from Colombians borrowing Congolese soukouss) and the rise of cuarteto cordobes in Argentina. Following the phenomenal success of the albums Clandestino and Proxima Estaçion Esperanza, Chao now finds himself the first global star of anti-globalisation – or rather of a different kind of globalisation, one which is taking place from the grass roots up!

Manu’s new album explodes with the joy and vibrant energy of Antillais carnival whistles (Casa Babylon), flamenco rhythms (Rumba de Barcelona), circus music (Pinocchio) and speeded-up calypso (Blood and Fire). With the exuberant cry of “Bob Marley is in the house!” (Bongo Bong), Chao’s live album builds a natural bridge between reggae and hard rock, raggamuffin and cancion campesina – in the same way Jamaican musicians once once brought together soul and mento and Zaireans fused high-life and Cuban rumba. It may well be that in years to come Manu Chao’s music is not considered as the result of simple music crossover, but as the first signs of a new age of ‘Creolisation’.

Manu Chao / Radio Bemba Sound System (Virgin)

Bertrand  Dicale