I can’t claim to have heard of “the Blind couple from Mali” much earlier, but I was banging on about their breakthrough Dimanche A Bamako to anyone who would listen a few years ago. With Manu Chao at the helm, his nose for a raucous cosmopolitan good time and their pulsating beats combined to form a largely ecstatic album full of many WOMAD-pop style floor-fillers. And despite being billed for years under that lazy, almost novelty, tag line Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia are, as they say themselves, “musicians first, blind second”. Continue Reading

When so many musicians dabble in activist chic when it suits their current publicity campaign, it’s refreshing to highlight someone whose credentials are indisputable and whose stance is both long term and consistent. These re-releases come as Manu Chao features in several festivals across the country touring last years La Radiolina, and indeed he was about the only invigorating thing about (my admittedly armchair and BBC controlled viewing of) this year’s Glastonbury. He was born politicised as his parents were forced émigrés from Franco’s Spain, and early influences for his first bands spawned from the multi-cultural Parisian suburbs included, as you might have guessed, the Clash and Bob Marley. Later Chao became a friend of Joe Strummer, in itself a rarity as he usually shuns hob-knobbing with the famous. Initial big European success came with the lively French punk of Mano Negra in the late eighties, but they split largely under the strain imposed by Chao’s uncompromising attitude - touring South America by specially converted ship-cum-performance-space and specially converted train. Continue Reading