root salad f20 Moussu T
Marseille’s Occitan blues misfits may have just made their best album so far. Colin Randall goes in search.
T
he Mistral has been blowing, leaving the streets of Marseille strewn with papers, discarded food packaging and leaves. In the
narrow streets around the Ostau Dau País Marselhés, a dark little cultural centre where the exuberant French/ Occitan band Moussu T E Lei Jovents are due to showcase their new CD Putan De Cançon, shop and restaurant signs bear witness to the quarter’s cosmopolitan ambience. Greece, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Egypt – among others – jostle with the countries of the Maghreb in a United Nations assembly of petit commerçants. There’s a thriving, multicultural market, irreverent graffiti and, on a cafe’s big screen, live English football.
This assertive, pulsating port, France’s second city and so unlike the smart resorts stretching along the Mediterranean coast towards Italy, serves up a succulent cultural
Marseille’s finest hobos – Blu and Tatou
melange. It is volatile enough for people on the wrong side of the law to settle scores at gunpoint, and has a spirit of defi- ance that produced France’s stiffest oppo- sition to President Sarkozy’s pension reforms. But despite a historical far right presence, community relations are pretty good; Marseille was remarkably untrou- bled by the countrywide riots of 2005.
Finally the band and followers, delayed by an accident and traffic heading to the night’s big Olympique De Marseille football game, start arriving from the neighbouring towns of La Ciotat and Avignon. No airs and graces. Everyone is casually dressed in denim and jerkins; François Ridel, alias Monsieur Tatou – or using the slang Occitan honorific Moussu T – is chain-smoking and keeps disappearing to greet familiar faces.
Moussu T are known best for their fantastic 2005 debut Mademoiselle Mar- seille. The follow ups, Forever Polida, Inventé À La Ciotat and Home Sweet Home, were warmly received but suffered from comparison. Yet even those mildly dis- appointed by them are purring contentedly at the arrival of Putan De Cançon (broadly Occi- tan for ‘Helluva Song’). The infectious melodies make it supremely accessible, despite the French and Occitan lyrics, and lis- teners may detect traces of all of the cul- tures found or adopt- ed in Marseille: the Maghreb and Black Africa, the Caribbean, blues, easy-listening variété française and the Occitan heritage of the surrounding area. The banjo-play- ing of Blu injects strik- ing riffs that linger in the head for hours, but it is Tatou’s warm, if slightly unruly vocals that establish the album’s character.
Once I pin Tatou down, he has plenty to say. I mention the impression Marseille has always made on me and show him a quote attributed to a Cameroonian goal-
keeper, Joseph-Antoine Bell, in a pocket- book of things said about its football club: "When we score, blacks, Jews, Arabs and everyone else rises to their feet at the same time.”
Tatou laughs off much that is written about Marseille – even the tit-for-tat gang- land shootings become glamourised, he says, inspiring the idiotic notion that ordi- nary people experience such events daily – but he identifies with the goalkeeper’s words. “That sums up this city,” he says, “but it hasn’t come by accident. We’ve had to work to counter the racism of the extreme right.”
He talks about the “bigger cultural basket” from which the band has drawn influences for Putan De Cançon. “I think our sound is more together now, more orchestrated,” says Tatou, founder of Mar- seille’s noted Occitan/ reggae mix, the Massilia Sound System. “We also concen- trated more on rhythm.”
The album is a treasure, living up to M
Jamie Renton’s plaudits in his fRoots review. But I have a confession: though I live just along the coast, I had missed their cover feature in fR269 and, shamefully, had to be alerted to Moussu T by a former colleague living in the Gulf. He’d caught them at some ungodly hour on the BBC World Service. My ignorance probably stemmed from the ubiquitous nature of a French musical mainstream driven by an unshiftable obsession with Anglo-Saxon pop and home-grown standards.
oussu T play to anything from 400 people in smallish venues to many thousands at festivals and there are hopes of building on the cultish acclaim their music attracts away from France’s borders. Manue Tirmarche, who manages the band and the Manivette label, has been busy looking for agents overseas. Britain, where admirers are impatient for a second tour, was a tough nut to crack but Manue reports progress: “It is looking better; we have hopes of a tour in 2011.”
To my intense regret, the afternoon has dragged on too long already. A moun- tain of packing and imminent departure for London loom, and I haven’t the time to stay to hear a few songs from the album, not least because it is unclear when the band will get round to putting on the mini-show. My consolation is an umpteenth listen to Putan De Cançon’s jumble of charms as we weave through the Vieux Port and out of the city, and plenty of time, too, on the Calais-bound autoroute to do some belated cramming with dips into its predecessors.
http://moussut.ohaime.com F
Photo: Colin Randall
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