RFI Musique - - Interview - Manu Chao's major French tour

Manu Chao's major French tour

Inventing the future day by day

Paris

10/06/2008 -

It has been seven years since that globe-trotting activist Manu Chao embarked on a major French tour. True, Mr. Chao has sporadically popped up at local bars, music festivals and various anti-globalisation forums around the world. But this is the first time for a long time that the singer has toured across France with a number of French songs in his repertoire. Chao kicked off his current French tour in Toulouse on 29 May and will be playing 17 dates across the country, ending up at the Roman amphitheatre in Bayonne (on 30 & 31 July), after hopping across the border to appear at the Paléo festival in Nyon, Switzerland (on 24 July). RFI Musique hooks up with Manu Chao to talk about web pages, record contracts and the future of the music business.

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RFI Musique: Interestingly enough, you chose to release your latest album on Because, a new record label set up by Emmanuel de Buretel, your old "boss" at Virgin-EMI. Why was that?
Manu Chao: I quit EMI for trade-union reasons. Basically, EMI were in the process of sacking all the people I knew there while at the same time insisting that I was their "international priority!" I couldn't stay there with all that going on. Things have been going really well with Because. We signed a contract whereby I get to choose which distributors we use in each country. In some countries we still use Warner as a distributor because we haven't been able to find a local network there. But in Spain, for instance, we went through a small independent company, K Industria. And we’re gradually building up our own network now. The other great thing about Because is that I sign a new contract for each new record. That means I'm currently not under contract with anyone - although having said that I've no desire to switch labels and sign with anyone else. But don't you think it's a bit archaic to be talking about CD releases here? My latest album, La Radiolina, was an intermediary step for me. We're basically making things up as we go along, inventing new approaches day by day.

And what direction are you moving in right now?
Well, according to our latest wild imaginings, it's just possible that my next album won't exist in CD format at all. It could well be presented as a sort of radio on my web page and maybe there'll be a direct sales point so that people can buy it over the Internet. One thing's for sure and that is that my next album may not be a physical object at all. My record label is thinking along the same lines as me and they're actively encouraging me to put a lot of time and energy into my web page and make it as artistic as possible.

Given the current crisis in the record industry, how do you see the future of the music business?
We're not living in the same world these days! It's obvious that, in the more or less long term, recorded music is going to end up being free. And that means that musicians aren’t going to be able to rely on recorded music as a source of income. That's not too much of a problem for me, but it is going to make things complicated for a lot of groups. Basically from now on, musicians are going to have to make their living from live performances. I'm not too bothered if people download my songs from the Internet. I'm comfortably off and I don't need to have a lot of money coming in. But it's a hard blow for bands starting out now!

Do you think that in economic and artistic terms the current state of music corresponds to what indie artists dreamt of back in the alternative days of the '80s?
The thing is, the world has changed so dramatically since then that the dreams we had back in the ‘80s are completely irrelevant now. It's difficult to hark back to dreams we may have had twenty years ago before the Internet came along. I think there's one group whose sound has withstood the test of time, though, and that's Bérurier Noir. If you didn't know them from the '80s and you discover their music for the first time today, it honestly sounds like it was recorded yesterday. In my opinion, Bérurier Noir are the band who have stayed the most modern, who have weathered the last two decades the best. Somewhere down the line, La Phaze (the band supporting Manu Chao at a number of concerts on his current tour) are really the musical offshoot of Béru.

Besides your own packed touring and recording schedule, you also found time to produce a new album for Smod - a group set up by Sam, the son of the well-known Malian duo Amadou & Mariam. How did that come about?
Well, when I was over in Bamako working with Amadou & Mariam we had our heads down in the studio the whole day. But in the evening I used to go up on the terrace with their son, Sam, and his group and hang out with the local hip-hop and ragga gang. One night, I started recording them as they played and the first thing I did was get Sam's parents to listen to the results. They didn't know what their son was up to at all! Anyway, the long and the short of it is that one of Sam's songs, Politic amagni, ended up on Amadou & Mariam's album and I went back out to Bamako to finish recording Smod's own album.

Your current tour appears to include a lot of stadiums and major music venues, but in the past you've made it clear that you enjoy playing to smaller audiences. Do you feel at all frustrated that you're going to be performing at Bercy Stadium in Paris and other major venues like the Zéniths across France?
To be honest, I'll be alternating between big and small venues this time round. In the autumn and winter of last year we did this pretty mainstream tour of northern Europe, playing 10,000-seater venues in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Great Britain and Ireland. But that didn't stop us from going off and performing elsewhere on our days off. We played our fair share of 'alternative' gigs, performing in this squat in Denmark, for instance. And we got together a concert for a bunch of mates in Liège who used to invite me to play back in the 'heroic' days when I couldn't get a gig in Paris. We ended up playing in this derelict factory to 3,000 people in minus 2°C! When I'm not out on the road on tour I only do gigs like that. What's more, I actually think we're really good when we play in local bars and alternative venues like that. It's a brilliant way of trying out new songs!