Manu Chao Concert Cochabamba

When I heard that Manu Chao was going to perform in Cochabamba, I knew there was no way I am going to miss this life time opportunity to see my favourite musician. Manu Chao shirts were being sold at the concert, so I bought two, one for me and one for Mauge, they were out of black and red shirts so we choose green, the show started with warm up performances by two Bolivian bands, the first played a Andean, Brazilian and African music, with only drums and vocals, which I thought was a very spirited performance, the second was an amusing Aymara hip hop duo, who also took the time to give a very angry political speech, something about justice.


Then came the Manu Chao performance, with his current group Radio Bemba, a fantastic and mesmerizing performance, but I expected no less, one of the first things I notices was what a small guy he was, we started standing quite close to the stage at the beginning, but things got rough there very quickly, with marijuana smoking youth, jumping around pushing each other, anyway things calmed down as we distanced our selves a bit more from the stage. The performance consisted of some of his best hits, interrupted by intervals of energetic dancing music, to satisfy the young crowds eager to dance. One of my favourites of the show was ¨Boby Marly sing something good to me", which he played two versions of, one similar to the recorded version, the other slower, more vocal accompanied only by a guitar. Most of the songs were performed differently to the recorded version, in a more ¨fun¨and loose manner, it just seemed that Manu to have fun doing his performance, and jumped around quite a lot on the stage, he was also amazing in how he got in touch, energized and mastered the crowds.