P18 – Biography
March 2002. Andy Morgan.
“There are imaginary countries which no one can ever reach. We had criss-crossed the world
from the distant province of Shaanxi to the banks of the Maroni, from Salvador de Bahia to
Venice, propagating our Latin funk over seas and oceans, looking ceaselessly for our cherished
city. We had come and come in peace, from town to town and from continent to continent. At
times, at a bend in the road some wise man would call out to us, “Are you also looking for
Electropica?” Tom Darnal, Paris, February 2002.
In 1995 the fantastic adventure that was Mano Negra finally hit the buffers and came to a
grinding halt. Keyboardist and graphic designer Tom Darnal retreated to start answering the big
“what next?” question. Armed with hours of video footage and aural ephemera collected on
Mano Negra’s many trips to Latin America together with a sampler and few other essential bits
of equipment, Tom and his crew began to work on new material. In 1996 the collective released
their first œuvre, an break-beat powered hard-step EP called ‘Light And Fire’ on their own label.
They baptised the band ‘P18’ because they are located in the 18th district, the funkiest and
most cosmopolitan part of Paris. That same year Tom travelled to Havana, Cuba, to stay with
the Teuntor family, respected act of the Cuban music scene and fixtures of the lively Centro
Habana ‘hood. One steamy summer night, Tom and friends partook in one of those typically
frenetic Cuban yard rumba parties. Whilst the whole neighbourhood slinked their way through
steamy rumba routines, a ghetto blaster pumped various electronic beats cooked up by the P18
collective and Iré Iré, the Teuntor family’s traditional Cuban rumba group, chanted and partied
over the top. The fire, passion and energy of that night was a revelation to all involved and it
inspired the idea to create a truly epochal hybrid of Latin or rather Cuban sounds and urban
dance electronica.
Between thought and expression lay three years of hard work. Countless trips across the
Atlantic, sessions in Paris 18th and elsewhere, mixes, remixes and the involvement of a whole
tribe of musicians and DJs of every holler and hue eventually produced ‘Urban Cuban’, P18’s
debut platter which came out in 1999. The group played their first concert in front of thousands
at the Transmusicales de Rennes on December 4th 1998, a day sacred to Chango, one of the
many ‘Orishas’ or saints in the Afro-Cuban religion known as santeria. During the two years of
constant touring which followed, the band were moulded into a powerful and combat-ready live
unit, able to bring the primal power of Afro-Cuban music to audiences across the globe and take
no prisoners in the process. “The show was really good,” Tom remembers. “Really wild and
savage, with two percussionists at full throttle and all the machines pumping. I experimented a
lot to get the machines right and fully integrated in the sound. It wasn’t just the energy of
electronic music. It was more primal than that!” The group performed their last concert in
October 2000 in the Chinese city of Xian. It was time to rest and think about the next album.
Tom got to work in his Paris studio. “I wanted to incorporate that incredible feel of the live gigs
because I figured that if you have a unique sound it’s really worth keeping. So I laid down live
recordings that had been made whilst on tour on one track, and since it was machine-driven, I
could synch it up and put other elements on top. That way I always kept that live energy.” Tom
had already recorded some new material in Havana with the Teuntor family and legendary
Cuban afro-rumba crew Clave Y Guaguanco. One day a friend called him and suggested that
he needed the help of a electronic music head and mentioned Laurent Collart, sound engineer
to French Techno guru Laurent Garnier. Tom loved that artist and so Collart seemed heaven
sent. “During two years of touring I listened to loads of things. I think there’s a fantastic scene in
the US…guys like Joe Clausell, François Kervorkian, Body and Soul, Kerri Chandler and I
realised that this was the sound that P18 was looking for. That electronic element is not only a
sound, it’s a culture, a school, a way of doing things. Although I had a feel for it, I didn’t have the
technique whereas a guy like Laurent, he’s been working on it for a long time.
The big challenge was to avoid a cheap and easy ‘Latin House’ type of fusion. “I wanted to
achieve a maximum amount of coherence between the Afro-Cuban and the electronic side of
the project,” says Tom. “I wanted the Cubans to be able to recognise their own music in there
somewhere. So I spent a lot of time talking and explaining how it all works to Laurent. I also
explained the whole story of Santeria and Yoruban mythology because each Orisha is a colour,
a natural element, a personality and more besides. I wanted the listener to feel the Orisha in the
colour and texture of each of the ‘religious’ songs. It was a great exchange because Laurent
also lead me to another planet.
Tom found other collaborators and contributors in the latter day Babel of Paris. Cuban
percussionist and composer Raoul Hernandez was recruited and proceed to contribute the ohso-funky ‘Entre Sol Y Palmeras’ to the new album. Other veterans of the P18 collective like the
drum and bass producer DJ Sree, trumpeter Christian Lechevretel and bassist Gilles Rodriguez
also played their part. Femi Kuti, son of the late great Fela, found time to make a beautiful
contribution with his sax. The luscious fruit of all these collaborations and partings, years of
touring, experimentation, moments of pure dance-fuelled joy and at times harsh frustration is
‘Electropica’. It’s definitely a collective effort, spanning continents and cultures, the work of a
virtual band of like-minded musical fortune-seekers spread out across the globe but united by
the same spirit. “I don’t think we’re a Latin band as such. We’re more to do with funk, Afro-funk,
house, Afro-beat, call it what you will. But there is a certain Latin angle. I don’t know if the
culture adopted me whether I adopted the culture. Everyone is talking about fusions and all that.
It’s a term which is becoming outdated. We’re not at that stage anymore. We’ve already created
the hybrids. They exist and now we’ve got to make them grow.”