Listening to your new album, one quickly comes to realise that your musical influences go way beyond simple salsa and raggamuffin… Yes, that's true. I think this stems from the fact that people play a lot of different music in the Caribbean. There's reggae, salsa and raggamuffin, of course, but there's also a lot of funk and black music from Africa. Basically, what I was trying to do with Sin Fronteras was mix all that up with African influences, salsa and flamenco melodies.

You're of Spanish origin and I know that in several interviews you've spoken about the fact that in Spain this kind of music was kept underground for a long time…
Well, you have to remember that Spain's a country where people lived under Franco for 40 years and when the nation finally emerged from his dictatorship people threw themselves into rock. I think they really needed the spirit of energy and revolt associated with rock. Needless to say, under Franco's dictatorship no-one listened to Cuban salsa - you only heard that kind of music in 'progressive' milieus.

So how did you come to discover Cuban music?
It was all thanks to my parents really. They used to play a lot of Latin music at home. I got quite into it when I was young but you know how it is, when you're 15 years old you need to define your own identity by having completely opposite tastes to your parents. So I went out and bought my first punk and rock records instead - I was into bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Then I got together with a bunch of friends and we formed our own group, Ludwig Von 88. Around the same time as Ludwig I was also starting to work with rap outfits like Timide et Sans Complexe and a couple of reggae groups as well.
So in a way I was gradually working back towards the roots of Cuban music and in the process I re-discovered salsa, in fact. It was around that time that I got interested in getting in touch with my Hispanic origins and I started getting involved with a scene which was pretty underground in Paris back then, hanging out with salsa groups and listening to specialist radio programmes… Listening to salsa I came to realise that there are an enormous amount of fusion possibilities. You can mix all kinds of different music up together, stuff like American music and jazz influences, African music and funk rhythms and Spanish music, which is so amazingly rich in melody. They all fit amazingly well together! And believe me, once you start getting interested in the fusion side of things, there's no stopping you - you're hooked for good!

It has to be said that Latino music has enjoyed phenomenal international success in recent years. I mean, these days Ricky Martin even gets played in nightclubs in Japan!
Well, one of the things we wanted to do with the group was to show that in between Compay Segundo at one end of the spectrum and Ricky Martin at the other, there's a whole world of different artists who've been inspired by Latino sounds - what's known as 'fusion' in Cuba. There are an increasing number of musicians in France right now, people like Manu (Chao), P18 and myself who're into the idea of using Latin sounds. And it's the same in Spain with groups like Paranoïa. We're all involved in the same basic movement.
We're not playing straightforward Cuban music, but mixing it up with all the different sounds you find on the French music scene right now. I know that's been very much the case with my own generation - and it's even more the case with the young generation who've grown up listening to music from Asia, Africa and South America, to Rai groups and the Haïdouk Tarafs for example. Right now we're living in a society which is undergoing some very profound changes. We're a generation whose parents came to settle in France from the four corners of the world. We've grown up with our parents' cultural and musical heritage and over the years we've come to mix it with the stuff our mates from Romania, Kabylia, Georgia or Chile inherited from their parents too. We've grown up with this specific kind of 'double culture' and come to make it our own.

What about your vocals - how did you manage to make the radical transition from Ludwig's loud bawling rock style Sergent Garcia's rhythmic flow?
(Laughs). I think my vocal style obviously grew out of the sound systems. It stems from the work I was doing with groups like Bawawa Sound System and Timide et Sans complexe. That's what basically inspired me to start singing over salsa rhythms. I really started out doing ragga over a salsa base and then went on to mix the two styles together. It's like with punk we started out pogo-ing (Sergent Garcia gives a quick on-the-spot demonstration at this point) and then with salsa we moved on to swaying your hips and dancing like this (laughs). But, it's the same basic energy no matter how you dance!

On your new album Sin Fronteras there's a track which features a brilliant trio between yourself and the Malian duo Amadou & Mariam…
Well, I'd heard Amadou & Mariam's album and I really liked their singing style - it's really simple but amazingly haunting and evocative at the same time! They've got a sort of blues/rock feel to their music which is quite incredible coming from an African group. Anyway, I met up with Amadou & Mariam at the "Printemps de Bourges" festival in France and we talked about the idea of working together at some point. We tried out a number of different things and discovered that a number of children's songs that my Cuban musicians used to sing all the time were also really popular in Bamako. It all dates back to the slavery era, you see - those melodies crossed the Atlantic with the slaves. But it's funny to hear a Cuban singing exactly the same song as a Malian musician. It's so weird when you think that these guys live thousands of miles apart, they've never met before in their lives and yet here they are singing exactly the same song!
Sin Fronteras also features a heavily flamenco-influenced track recorded with a guitarist I know you're very close to…
Resiste me is a song I recorded with Balbino, a Gypsy musician who taught me to play guitar. The idea was to do a sort of Gypsy-style rumba - there are a lot of Gypsy influences in Cuban culture actually. There's a Catalan rumba singer called Peret who's a big star in Cuba. Everyone knows his music. In fact, you hear people singing his songs on street corners all the time! Anyway, what I wanted to do with Resiste me was to record a song inspired by that and mix it with other rhythms like son, ragga and Gypsy rumba.

You recently performed in Miami, a town with a large Cuban community. Isn't there something a bit paradoxical about playing to Cubans who were forced to emigrate from their homeland?
You know, the way I see it, when we play our music we're playing for all Cubans, whether they're actually living in Cuba or somewhere outside the country. When we play we play for the people not for some political system! Besides, I don't think we in the West are in any position to comment or pass judgement on what's going on in Cuba right now. And when you sit down and speak to people in Cuba about the situation you realise that opinion is actually very divided over there too.
It's the same with Africa really. After the things we did in our former colonies we're not in any position to criticise the political systems in Africa countries right now. I think we have to weigh our words very carefully and consider exactly what we mean. When I sing I sing for human dignity and freedom for all. Our music is very much about bringing people joy and happiness through our concerts, of course. But it's also a vital means of letting off some of our internal anger and frustration too. And I think that's a universal fact about music. It's great to go on tour in France and other countries and know we're not alone in that. The problem is Babylon is in Cuba, but it's in a lot of other places right now too!

Sergent Garcia Sin Fronteras (Labels)