2023-10-19 14:00:01
Musician Manu Chao, in Greece, in September 2017. KLELIA RENESSI
The Kilowatt is a marquee erected since 2018 in Vitry-sur-Seine, a town in Val-de-Marne whose town hall has been communist since 1925. The place owes its name to a former power station in the Ardoines district, a wasteland area. industrial and railway integrated into the Grand Paris project. Still using the EDF metaphor, this alternative place presents itself as a “generator of festivities” vibrating until 2 a.m., sometimes beyond.
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Which also generated complaints from the neighborhood, and even a temporary administrative closure. In June, the marquee was swept away by a storm. It was able to be reborn thanks to that brought and left by the group Les Ogres de Barback for a show for young audiences. An altruistic gesture which allows us to host for three evenings, on October 13, 17 and 20, the “clandestine” concerts of an internationally renowned colleague, Manu Chao, a nomad who has sold several million albums around the world.
The latest ones are not recent, The Radio (2007, all the same), followed by the live of Bayonne (2009) recorded at the Bayonne arenas in 2008. This is because the former leader of Mano Negra acts at a distance from the music industry. His new songs are offered directly on his site. Official tours have long been replaced by impromptu concerts, according to the wanderings of the Barcelonan – recently Mediterranean and Balkan Europe – and in capacity not exceeding a thousand seats. Those in Vitry, at the militant price of 25 euros, were only announced on the Kilowatt website and were sold out even before the rest of the country heard about them.
« I am global »
Manu Chao knows the place well having already passed there over the last two springs, each time for three evenings as well. The caravan which serves as reception and, dominating the square, the mechanical mandrill, a souvenir of the musician’s collaboration with the Royal de Luxe theater company. For almost three hours, he invites you to participate in a joyful reunion between friends, like when you take guitars out of their cases after a good meal.
With his eternal cap and his Garibaldian red shirt, he is, at 62, as we continue to imagine him. Sitting with his Spanish guitar alongside two accomplices, the Argentinian Lucky Salvadori, another guitarist, and the Spanish percussionist Miguel Rumbao Serrano. A trombonist, who is difficult to hear in the fervor, joins the trio. Later, Martinique dance-hall singer Yaniss Odua and chaabi singer Karim Chaya, of Kabyle origin, will come. This “global sound system” that Manu Chao brilliantly popularized is thus reconstituted.
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