Manu Chao Learned Every Language in a Paris Subway

Manu Chao has said the Paris subway was his school. With his band Mano Negra he started out playing for a living on the metro, where commuters came from many countries and cultures, so the musicians had to be ready to play all kinds of music. It is hard to imagine a better training for an artist who now sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Arabic, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Greek and more.

His roots explain some of that. His mother, Felisa Ortega, is from Bilbao and his father, the writer Ramón Chao, from Vilalba in Galicia. They left Spain for Paris to escape Franco's dictatorship, and Manu's grandfather had been sentenced to death. Born in 1961, he grew up on the outskirts of Paris surrounded by artists and intellectuals his father knew.

Heavily influenced by The Clash, The Jam and Dr. Feelgood, he formed the rockabilly group Hot Pants in the mid-1980s, and with his brother Antoine and friends, the side project Los Carayos. In 1987 the Chao brothers and their cousin Santiago Casariego founded Mano Negra. A reworked “Mala Vida” became a French hit in 1988, Patchanka followed on Virgin Records in 1989, and the group reached the top five in the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.

The band's travels were as daring as its sound. In 1992 the Cargo Tour played port cities across South America from a stage built into the hold of its ship, and the next year they toured Colombia in a retired train. Rifts grew among the members, many left by the end of 1994, and after Casa Babylon legal problems led Chao to dissolve Mano Negra in 1995. He has since toured regularly with his live band, Radio Bemba Sound System, and songs like “Me Gustas Tu” show what that subway apprenticeship became: a simple melody that sounds at home in any language.