Mano a Manu Chao

{mosimage} Time means nothing to Manu Chao,who’s become a superstar in much of the world and increasingly popular here by doing things in the least traditional way possible. “Time don’t fool me no more/I throw my watch to the floor,” he sang in “Out of Time Man,” a song by his old band Mano Negra. He’s the kind of artist who prefers playing far off the beaten track — whether it’s in small rural towns in South America or for squatters protesting at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 — instead of the usual major media markets. Mano Negra performed just once in Hollywood back in the late ’80s, and Chao had played only two solo concerts in L.A. since then (at the Palace in 2000 and last year at the Shrine Auditorium, each of which sold out in about two seconds) before he helped close down the last night of this year’s Coachella Festival.

The 45-year-old French singer-guitarist is one of the few musicians whose range is broad enough to appeal to both hardcore punks and the gentle souls who listen to KCRW by combining the uplifting idealism of Bob Marley and the surreal poetry of Bob Dylan with the frenetic energy of the Clash. While there have been a zillion bands that share those influences, there’s something uniquely enchanting in the way Chao blends rock, ska, funk, rap, punk, salsa, folk, heavy metal, cabaret and Gypsy styles on his two studio albums: 1998’s Clandestino and 2001’s Próxima Estación . . . Esperanza. There’s never been a song quite like Clandestino’s haunting “Welcome to Tijuana,” a lilting, loping slice of magical realism that subverts the border town’s seedy sex-and-drugs image with a dublike collision of yearning melodies, febrile reggae guitar, subterranean bass and a psychedelic montage of sound effects, disembodied voices, speeches and clips from movies.

One of Chao’s trademarks is the way he layers his tunes with such lost-and-found sounds, creating a hypnotic running dialogue with the ghosts in his head. You can hear his mark in the music of NYC Gypsy-punks Gogol Bordello (who covered Mano Negra’s “Mala Vida”) and in the disparate groups he’s produced, including the late, great Mexican ska-punk revolutionaries Tijuana No! and, more recently, the subtly mesmerizing blind Malian husband-and-wife duo Amadou & Mariam. At an interview over breakfast at Musso & Frank a few days after his breakout Coachella appearance, the Out of Time Man discussed his long-awaited new album (La Radiolina), this weekend’s big show at the Sports Arena with backup band Radio Bemba Sound System, and hanging out with his pals Diego Maradona and Subcomandante Marcos.

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