LA Weekly

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.

L.A. WEEKLY: When Mano Negra played Hollywood in 1989, was that the first time you’d been in Los Angeles?

MANU CHAO: Yeah. If I remember, I think we played with No Doubt . . . It was not a big place. But it was a long time ago.


When you were growing up, did you see American films and culture as something you loved or something you wanted to rebel against?

When I was a kid, I didn’t think about these things. I’d watch the movies and point. When I was a teenager, we already had in France enough things to get in rebellion against, so we didn’t think about the rest. Our problem was the neighborhood and the authorities in France, and our fight was that, no? We were not thinking, “Ah, what is Hollywood and not Hollywood?” Afterwards, of course. Later, we started understanding what was America, what was this kind of cultural imperialism. We started to think about that.


You didn’t come back here for 10 years. Was there a conscious decision to avoid the United States because of President Bush or the war?

No, no, the first thing I want to stay: We don’t tour like machines . . . Now, actually, it’s four or five years that I haven’t played in my own country. So it’s not that we don’t play here more than there; the problem is that the world is big, and we don’t work like other bands that tour, tour, tour. So it takes time to come back to countries. But, for sure, for USA it was a long time that we didn’t come. But they tell me the same thing in France. Because I take my time, more than everything. And, from our experiences with Mano Negra here, this was not the best country to come for touring. [There were] a lot of things I didn’t like too much. Like the way of working in the rock & roll business. Very . . . kind of . . . I don’t know . . . It was very strange for us to get the habits to work like people work here. They tried to [teach] us how to work in rock & roll, but we didn’t want to learn that at all. [It was] kind of very professional, maybe, but for me not in the way we like it. A lot of hierarchy, even in bands. We watched the way the technicians worked here [and were treated], because a band is a band, but a technician is part of the show too . . . A lot of competition also between bands. It was very strange for us. It was not our way to work. When we work with other bands in Europe, it’s friendship, it’s not a competition, you know? . . . Clubs close very early, you know, one minute to go . . . so it’s all very . . . it’s not very rock & roll at the end . . . It’s very cold: “It’s 11:30, everything is finished.” Opening band is opening band, and big band is big band, not a lot of gear onstage between . . . It was quite new for us.