From Mano to Cubano

>> >> Tom Darnal's P18 has one foot in Paris, one in Havana and a fist up in the air

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It's one thing to call your band Boston or Chicago, a little hometown pride, but better yet to be more specific. Take Tom Darnal, who used to play keys in a band called Mano Negra back at the turn of the '90s. Their blend of rock, rap, rai and reggae hardly reflected the crabby, LePen-votin' pains blancs of suburban Paris, any more than Darnal's current project does. It's called P18, after the 18th arrondissement of the City of Lights, and P18 is what it was initially about.

"I've lived there 12 years," says Darnal. "It's in the north of Paris, and it's well-known because Pigalle and Montmartre are part of it, but only a small part. It's a large area, with many immigrants from north and west Africa, eastern Europe, all over the place--there are 72 countries represented there, and you can tell from all the record and cassette stores. I like it, music from everywhere, and likewise for the restaurants and the clothes people wear.

"We took the name, though, because we have a basement locale there, which we called P18, and we felt it was a name destined for a band. At first it was just three of us doing electronic music there, and 'P18' is what we wrote on the cassettes we kept."

Rumours of more

After Mano Negra had played its hand, Darnal detoured into the tough urban club sounds that were seizing the day. "At the beginning we had no intention of making it a band, or anything too defined. We did a 12" of some electro, then some drum & bass with DJ Sree, and soon we were going off in all directions. Some of what we did became a rather politicized drum & bass compilation, called Rumours of War. There were two tracks from P18 and various electronic artists from the north of Paris. There's a bit of a scene, going from jungle to hardcore techno, and we all know each other, so I tossed the idea out there and everyone was in."

That comp came out in '98, not on a French label but rather on Esan Ozenki, a Basque label run by Negu Gorriak's now-solo frontman Fermin Muguruza, whose multi-culti, poli-sci club-punk mirrors Darnal's efforts. "It wasn't really drum & bass made for the dancefloor," Darnal says of Rumours. "It was a bit out of step, but we sold all the copies we made, so it was reasonably successful. We weren't out for a major international hit--it was more a matter of getting together and making it happen. It was a reflection of the scene, the voice of Paris, those people who are tinkering around and doing something a bit radical."

All in the family

P18's first full album Urban Cuban shows a dramatic leap, from basement noodling to full-on electro-Cuban crossover juggernaut. What the hell happened? Darnal traces it back to '92: "I went down to Cuba to do a show with Mano Negra, and I met trumpeter Barbaro Teuntor and his family, rather by accident. I'd met a relative of his, and we'd gone for a walk through Havana before dropping by his grandmother's. Her place was full of instruments, guitars, photos of musicians--I could tell they were a family of musicians. We struck up a friendship, I stayed 10 days with them, and I'd gone back to see them every year.

"At the same time, Barbaro came to Paris once in a while with Sierra Maestra. He came by our studio and played some trumpet over a drum & bass track. By '95 or '96 we started putting stuff together." The collaboration with Teuntor, and the contributions of junglist DJ Sree, became the axis of P18's evolution into a 30-member band. Touring sees the ranks reduced to 10, though, mostly for geography's sake.

"Some are in Havana, others in New York, others in Paris. But I like this difficulty, everyone in different countries, because that's part of what we're working at. The idea of knocking down barriers, bringing people and countries together without questions of race or colour. That's the essential idea of P18, shortening the distance between people."

An interesting footnote is the track "Le Tour du monde," written by Darnal's own dad, a former chansonnier who never made it much past the local café circuit. "Show business never really interested him. But I always liked that song. It was one of the few I remembered. I sang it in Cuba, and the girls loved it, hearing softly-sung French-- they thought it was totally cute. I put it on the record because it's about travel, about what goes through a traveller's head." By the same token, P18 is about what comes out of a traveller's head--and worth the trip. :

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