I quite like Mano Negra.  That is "quite like" in the sense of having all their albums, a few singles and EPs, a VHS tape (which is SECAM so I can't play it and in French anyway so I can't understand it), and fond memories of seeing them play at the Forum and wearing the resulting t-shirt until it wore out completely.

Until tonight, when I started watching the Mano Negra DVD set I bought in France, I didn't realise how little I knew about the band.  Or to put it another way I didn't realise how much there was to know about them.

I intended to pass 20 minutes or so before Mastermind having a quick scan through the two discs to see what they were like and ended up watching the whole 96-minute documentary before skipping through some of the highlights of the 32 live tracks from various concerts on the same disc.

The documentary is in widescreen format with a DTS 5.1 mix and the option of English subtitles which was a real bonus and saved me from having to just pick up theodd word here and there.

What I knew before tonight was that Mano Negra were a decent rock band with a mixture of punk, rock & roll and latin sounds who put on a really good live show and disappeared from the scene after heading for South America on a boat.

The full story is so much more fun than that.

At the end of the 70s/start of the 80s there were loads of bands living in squats in Paris and the banlieues, all overlapping with some musicians belonging to several of them.  It was a very fluid scene, and the first incarnation of Mano Negra ended up hanging out with another band, busking in Metro trains with them and eventually absorbing them. 

The band picked up a reputation from its live shows and at the point where they started getting a lot of interest in Europe they packed up and toured South America for a while.  Some concerts were at such a high altitude they had to have oxygen cylinders between songs just to keep going.

When they returned they did a tour of Pigalle.  Pigalle is still a slightly seedy area of Paris, but at the time it was a lot worse.  In interviews they said that they could easily have played at somewhere like the Zenith (a 6,000 capacity venue) but instead they played in small venues which normally hosted 'erotic entertainment' – beautiful old halls which had never had rock & roll played in them before.

And then they went off to Japan, touring the country and recording a live album. 

After that they could have taken the traditional route to fame and fortune but instead toured the banlieues, playing in places like Elancourt and Ris-Orangis where bands would not normally go and where rap and rai is normally listened to, and with security provided by the French equivalent of the black panthers.  In all these shows the band actively encouraged the audience up onto the stage with them, only asking them to get off if it got too crowded to play or if anyone interfered with the equipment.  The banlieues are those suburbs where all the riots took place recently.  Not the most welcoming of places normally.

At this point the band was asked to play a concert in support of some housing campaign, to which they agreed.  For some reason UNESCO let them use their main chamber for a show. As a result of all the dancing  there was a bit of damage to the furniture and the UN did its nut – there was a meeting of heads of state two days later. The top brass at the UN were reined in by the UNESCO top brass who had seen the concert and rather enjoyed it.

To follow that up, Mano Negra played a free concert for 15,000 people at La Defense, which became a feature of the national news for days with the local mayor calling it off and then allowing it again and getting into rows with the culture minister (Jack Lang at that time).  The concert went ahead but wth 25,000 watching and another 35,000 just round the corner or over the hill.

Mano Negra had been to the US and loved New York, but made a conscious decision not to try and crack the US market.  They figured it was such a big place they would have to spend too much time touring it and would rather go to South America where they found a greater affinity with the population.

So they packed themselves into a cargo ship with the street theatre group Royale de Luxe (the same group who did the Sultan's Elephant in London last year), a choreographer and a puppeteer and headed for Latin America.  One of the ship's cargo holds was full of containers full of all their gear, including generators.  The idea was to be self-sufficient so that if they decided to hold a concert somewhere they could just do it.  The other hold contained a replica of a street in Nantes.

Seriously. The theatre group's artists created a lifelike replica of a French street inside the ship.  I think the Nantes council had part-funded the trip or something.

When they got to South America they met Gabriel García Márquez, who came on board and was gobsmacked by the French street scene.  They played all over the continent, sometimes playing to 120,000 people at a time in town squares.  When they got to Sao Paulo there was some sort of eco summit going on and they met Jello Biafra there – so there was a nice clip of him joining them onstage for a jam session of Too Drunk To Fuck.

As if that was not enough they then hired a train to take the band through the heart of Colombia, stopping at towns and villages playing concerts.  This was a tour too much for most of the musicians ans the band really disintegrated during the tour. 

They really could have made a very comfortable living staying in Europe and recording and touring in some sort of luxury, but chose to travel through the jungle by rail, sleeping in the train and enjoying very few creature comforts, but having a hell of a time.

By the end of all that I just had to stop and wonder what it must be like to have memories like that.   Just imagine all those experiences across four continents to look back on…  

Amongst all that there was an old interview where Manu Chao explained the lyrics to King of Bongo, which turn out to be not quite as nonsensical as I has always thought.

And I still have disc 2 to look forward to!  Another documentary, from 1989,  a complete concert from 1990, which is about the time I saw them, clips of 10 songs, and a load of extras including 17 audio tracks of extra songs which never made it onto the albums.