The Manu elixir

Manu Chao and the Radio Bemba Sound System
Hootananay, Brixton, 19 July 2008

‘La lucha sigue!’ It is 3am on a Saturday night and Manu Chao is in a Scottish pub in London, dedicating a Mexican song to the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America. The struggle continues, he says. But it is rare to hear those words spoken in an atmosphere of such collective joy.

You expect a degree of intensity when a band that could fill stadiums is packed into a pub, but it wasn’t so much the venue as the Radio Bemba spirit that gave this show a feeling of intimacy. From the opening strains of ‘El Hoyo’, the crowd – a mix of the Latino regulars of Movimientos (a politically-conscious London club night) and a fair few Brixton locals – pogoed uncontrollably to the band’s ska-punk rhythms.

Even the slower songs like ‘Clandestino’, Manu’s testament to the lives of migrant workers declared ‘illegal’, and ‘Mr Bobby’, his reggae-tinged tribute to Bob Marley, were super-charged. It was as though they had bottled the energy from the band’s headline set at the Lovebox festival earlier that evening and concentrated it. The resulting elixir was willingly consumed by 500 or so South London punters, with intoxicating effects.

Intensity alone doesn’t explain the experience, but repetition might help to do so. When Manu Chao and Radio Bemba play live, you don’t so much expect a setlist as a series of melodies, chants and rhythms that escalate and evolve. This then builds into a mania, as songs are spliced together, breaking into a crescendo of fast-paced percussion and frantic, rhythmic guitars, until you’re released, without warning, into a new melody and the process starts over.

For the audience, this means you rarely have time to catch onto one tune when you’re bouncing in the air to the next one, arms flailing. Then before you know it, that tune is gone again, only to reprise later and at double pace. The effect can be delirious, and even a little over-whelming. But that night in Brixton it was rarely less than electrifying, as for an hour and a half Manu bounded around the stage, guitarist Madjid Fahim struck outrageous rock poses, and the rest of the Radio Bemba Sound System played and sweated out every beat. By the time the show drew to a close, Manu was pounding the microphone on his chest and head, reproducing through our ears the heartbeat we could all feel coursing through our veins.

This may not be the classical sense of ‘playing from the heart’, but there’s more than a chance that the causes behind the Brixton gig – a fundraiser for the Native Spirit Foundation - gave it extra bite. The organisation is currently gearing up for an Indiginous Peoples’ film festival in London this October, which will focus on the environment and climate change. It also funds a number of autonomous educational projects for children in Indigenous Wayuu and Mapuche communities in Venezuela, Chile and Argentina.

Manu Chao’s affinity with Latin America is well known, but the central importance of education to his political activism may be less appreciated. ‘The priority is children’ he told me at Glastonbury a few weeks previously, in an interview conducted at the same campfire where the plan for the secret Brixton benefit gig was hatched. ‘I’m really scared of the education we give to the children in neighbourhoods all over the world … because they’re not educated anymore by the family, they’re not educated anymore by school, they’re totally educated by television. And television doesn’t respect anything, so there are a lot of kids growing respecting nothing.’

‘I think the emergency,’ Manu continued, with fervent passion, ‘is to start working with the little kids now, so that there another two or three generations totally brainwashed by television – all quick money, a lot of violence, everything must be easy, everything new, no work ethic, anyone who works is an arsehole. That’s very dangerous, and if it continues the end of it’s going to be a lot of violence.’

That may sound an apocalyptic political outlook, but it is one that is offset by his unerring sense of how change at a neighbourhood level can empower broader social change. ‘I don’t believe any more in one big revolution that’s going to change everything. I believe in thousands and thousands of little neighbourhood revolutions – that’s my hope.’

And for as long as Manu Chao can muster the unerring hope and hedonistic abandon that he brought to Brixton, these revolutions have also found their perfect soundtrack. La lucha sigue!


For more details of Movimientos and the Native Spirit Foundation, see www.movimientos.org.uk and www.nativespiritfestival.com

The voice of Palestine

Reem Kelani filled Sheffield's Memorial Hall on 17 October, with her presence, her music and her voice that ranged further than the hills of Palestine and the Mediterranean sea bordering the Gaza Strip. Her band of top class jazz musicians, renowned in their own right, provided vibrant improvisation to support her voice and the adaptation of traditional Arabic rhythms and melodies to modern interpretations of classical Arabic poetry and songs.

Reem has collected traditional folk songs from Palestinian women around the world. The women she has met have inspired her to sing, to portray their struggle through the celebration of Palestinian musical heritage. She told the story of how she learnt a wedding song in the bedroom of a Palestinian woman in a Syrian refugee camp - how that woman had held onto her songs and memories despite having left her land over 60 years ago.

Her passion for the voice of women through song echoes the tribulations of Palestinian life through the centuries through to the modern day. It belies the propaganda which denies the Palestinians their past and their culture. It belies the notion that Palestinian women (or any Arab women) are not a central element of creating and maintaining the strong sense of Palestinian life, culture and society which has enabled them to carry on their national struggle.

As Reem explains: 'I care about the land, but without Palestinian culture it's meaningless. Turning my nation into refugees has meant that we have lost, and continue to lose, our cultural heritage, but what is worse is Israeli cultural appropriation. We can't access many of the manuscripts of our poets and musicians because they are held by the Israeli government, and you need a permit to visit the archives.'

Born in Manchester, raised in Kuwait and now living in London, Reem has worked to bring Arab and Non-Arab musical traditions together. Her use of a jazz section as a backing band, allows her the flexibility of improvisations whilst she maintains the conventions of classical Arabic singing. The power of her voice to ring clear on the lowest softest notes through to ululating during a wedding song, and threatening to break the windows in the hall, captivated the audience.

With the sublime accompaniment of Zoe Rahman on piano, Samy Bashai on violin, Ian East on saxophones & flute, Patrick Illingworth on drums and Oli Hayhurst on double bass, Reem sang wedding songs, songs of return, of labourers and of the harvest. She had adapted traditional and modern poetry into song. Her poignant rendition of Mahmoud Salim al-Hout’s poem, Yafa, left the audience holding its breath as the last note rang out across the concert hall. It tells of the poet having to flee his home when Israel was established, how he walked away never to return.

Reem explains to the non-Arabic speakers, the meanings and sometimes the literal translation of the lyrics, and why and where they were sung. One song that dates back to the Ottoman period (14th – 19th century) tells of a woman wishing her husband soldier to return safely.

Reem was able to convey the Palestinian woman's soul and the Palestinians’ claim to identity and rights far more effectively than weeks of leafleting streets or holding vigils and marches. There were no need for slogans, no need to push the message home, the beauty of her voice, her presence and of the women who have sung the songs over centuries was captured for us in that concert in Sheffield.

The concert was jointly organised by Yorkshire Palestine Cultural Exchange, Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign and concert4palestine, as a fund-raiser for children’s projects in Gaza Strip. For more information, see http://www.sheffieldpsc.org/

Reem Kelani’s 2006 album, Sprinting Gazelle is available via her website: http://www.blogger.com/www.reemkelani.com , priced £14.99