This Charming Manu

“Years ago I used to say I feel like a citizen of the world but now I feel like a citizen of the present. I think wherever I am in the present is home. You cannot leave this home.”

Manu Chao likes neighborhoods. It’s in the humble cafés and cantinas of the world that he finds inspiration for his music, in the drunken ramblings of the Jack’s and the Jose’s that sidle up to him to in bars to tell him their stories. The lyrics could end up in French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Arabic, Gallegan or Wolof (from Senegal). Often a mélange. Sometimes his own invented words.

“If tonight I get drunk in Dublin and inspiration comes, it’s really possible that the song’s gonna be in English, or even Irish, because the surroundings are made of these sounds. I travel with my ears and with my nose as well,” says Chao sniffing the Liffey-side air.
When he busks in his local streets in Barcelona people say that he’s not all that bad – “almost as good as the real Manu Chao!” He likes to be anonymous. To be “nobody”. Not because he’s plagued by crazed fans, but because he likes to make music. The fact that he’s made millions from his passion for music is entirely coincidental. He’s still the same Manu – born to Portuguese and Armenian parents 42 years ago and raised in the suburbs of Paris, playing football in the streets and listening to Chuck Berry and Spanish rebel music.
Manu Chao is a veritable superstar in the French and Spanish-speaking world. And when he’s not staging free concerts in prisons and addressing student protests, the five foot odd ‘chanteur globe-trotter’ is playing to stadiums of fans. From Patagonia and Tibet , to the streets of Bolivia and Japan, wherever his records are heard they seem to find resonance. Tonight he’s playing to a sold-out crowd at the Point.
“Six months ago I had a kind of silly dream and I want to make some movie in North Pole. I say in an interview I want to go to North Pole and one week after some guys from an expedition, they call me, and they say, ‘Yeah we go back to North Pole in two months if you wanna come. Last time we went there we only have one record and it was yours.’ So even in North Pole.”
A not-so-outrageous destination: “I’m gonna go next year,” he says matter-of-factly. “You have to go in April because it’s the only period that it’s OK to go there.”
Manu Chao the man, like his music, knows no boundaries.
It seems that for Chao, music and travelling are still his deepest instincts, and each has become a product of the other.
“If I’ve been able to travel in my life it’s thanks to my music,” he says. And with a career that’s spanned almost half his life, he’s seen a lot of the world’s neighborhoods.
Long before he was known on the streets as Manu Chao, he fronted the cult band, Mano Negra, which emerged in the late ’80s. Often described as France’s answer to The Clash, they were hugely popular both for their music and their politics, famously trashing an Argentinian TV station when asked to give a definition of anarchy. In the early ’90s they toured South America in a cargo ship, recruiting local buskers and staging peace concerts in countries torn by domestic war.
In 1994 the group disbanded and Chao continued his travels through Latin America alone, eventually buying an old Colombian train to get from town to town. Before he knew it, his one-man-show had become a veritable travelling circus of musicians, magicians and artists. It was during the nomadic years that followed that Clandestino was born.
With more salsa than ska and more reggae than rock, Chao’s solo creations are recorded on the road, with a simple guitar and a “portable backpack studio”. Clandestino emerged as a multi-layered, multi-lingual affair – a psychedelic mix of recurring motifs over simple, hypnotizing Latin rhythms. Incorporating everything from film excerpts and political broadcasts to the sound of howling wind, Chao captures all the atmospheric sounds of a given moment, creating records that play like audio postcards or ‘carnets de voyages’ (travel journals). Perhaps that’s what makes them the travellers’ music of choice.
“Wherever my records are heard they travel by themselves and I think it’s a wonderful way to distribute your music,” admits Chao. “Clandestino was amazing because there was not so much marketing or nothing. People took it travelling and you could find this record everywhere in all the lost places in the world. And I’m so proud of that. It’s a record that made itself by itself.”
With Clandestino (1998) alone selling more than 3 million copies worldwide, and its 2001 prologue Proxima Estation: Esperanza (Next Station: Hope) embraced with just as much fervour, there is something undeniably, universally fascinating about the music of Manu Chao.
For many people he’s up there – or rather down there – with Bob Marley. He sings to the world’s poorest, to the people living on the margins, and that’s because he’s lived alongside them in his nomadic wonderings. But Manu Chao’s music offers no grand solutions, he sings about what he knows.
“Sometimes they ask me, ‘Manu, what you do to change the world?’ I say I’m not able to change the world. The problem in the world is money. Some people with too much money and some people with no money. To find a solution to change everything in the world you have to be a fucking good economist. I’m not.”
In music and in politics, Chao’s philosophy is “think globally, act locally”. And having been involved heavily with the Spanish anti-war campaigns against “Mr Bush, the number one terrorist”, he believes actions speak louder than words.
“The US government for me is the pain in the arse of the world,” he says. “The only way to stop these crazy guys is to boycott US products, because the only thing they believe in is money. Boycott Nike, boycott McDonald’s, boycott Matrix 2, boycott all these bullshit things, this money for war.
“If you look to the future with lucidity there’s lots of reasons to be very pessimistic,” he continues. “But the more the situation is critical, the more you have to be optimistic. I learned that a lot in South America and in Africa, you learn a lot of optimism from people of the favellas. People with really big problems, they’re more optimistic than anyone. In a favella of Rio when you wake up in the morning if you’re not optimistic, you die.”
Reluctant to collect such labels as ‘le troubadour d’anti-mondialisation’, Chao is determined to separate his art from his politics even if it puts his music career at stake.
Chao doesn’t want to lead the revolution, but he’s happy to offer hope. “To change the world is too big for me. But I’m able to change myself, I’m able to change my family and I’m able to change my neighbourhood.”

Radio Bemba Sound System is out now on EMI.
Check out Manu Chao's virtual neighbourhood http://www.manuchao.net

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Got any weird’n’wonderful recorded sounds you’d like thrown into a Manu Chao medley?
Manu is searching specifically for sounds from the metro and subways of the whole world.

So if you like the idea of the ol' Dublin DART or any other Irish sounds featuring in the next Manu Chao record then get out your backpack studios and get recording!

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