Clandestino by Peter Culshaw

Author:Peter Culshaw [Culshaw, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2013-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Manu plots his next move.

The news was astounding. Despite the seemingly wild and fanciful predictions of Emmanuel de Buretel, Manu had been convinced that Clandestino’s intimate acoustic sound would confine its appeal to a cult singer-songwriter fan base and Mano Negra diehards. He was wrong. The word-of-mouth excitement generated by the album was extraordinary. The album seemed to gain its first international audience among backpacking and globetrotting types, who were cast in much the same mould as Manu himself, and in that summer of 1998 it became the soundtrack of choice in hip beach destinations from Koh Samui to Puerto Escondido to Ibiza. Travellers would come back with fond memories of their summer adventures and turn their friends on to the music in their heads, namely Clandestino. Its power lay partly in its malegría, that Manu Chao neologism that mixes the words ‘mala’ (‘bad’) and ‘alegría’ (‘happiness’) and expresses a happy-sad bitter-sweet quality in both life and music. It was a soundtrack to the moment when the sun goes down, echoing the transitory nature of life, reflecting the truth that sadness and loneliness exist even in paradise.

By pure chance, Virgin’s modest and low-key marketing approach, with its anti-consumerist aura, proved to be perfect. Clandestino was something that people discovered for themselves, through their network of friends, rather than on an advertising hoarding or in a TV commercial, and it was appreciated all the more for it. The trajectory of the album was most unusual. In 1998, the year of its release, it sold 300,000, the nineteenth best seller of the year in France; in 1999, it sold 500,000 and was the fifth best seller. It was only in March 1999, almost a year after its release, that Clandestino entered the top 10 of the French album charts, where it stayed for the entire summer. But then, rather than slipping away, Clandestino just carried on selling and never left the charts for the next four years. The same pattern played out internationally, and the album ended up selling more than five million copies worldwide. No doubt the real figure was double that, if you include all the pirated copies.

Only in the Anglophone world did the album remain something of a cult success, popular among a smallish audience with an ear tuned in to what was happening in France, Spain and the rest of the world. And this was despite the fact that Manu had signed to the prestigious UK label Palm Pictures, set-up by Chris Blackwell, the man who had previously founded Island Records and ‘discovered’ Bob Marley. In the rest of the world, despite a slow start, Clandestino’s eventual success was simply immense.

Even though Clandestino didn’t fit into any existing genre or format, a relatively new and growing interest in the catch-all cubbyhole of ‘world music’ put some wind in its sails. It’s an artificial marketing category that Manu rejects as absurd, though he has benefited from its existence. There was at the time a growing interest in music from

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