This is a soldier's tale and an eight-minute anti-war statement by cult Irish band The Pogues. Their style veers between shambolic pub riots and heart-rending ballads of joy, sadness and loss.
This one we shall file amongst the latter. It's off their 1985 album Rum, Sodomy And The Lash. There songs are often heavy on Irish nationalism, but this one told from an Australian's perspective. We had goosebumbs the whole way through it.
Pogues singer Shane McGowan also deserves special mention for being one of the greatest caners in rock history and yet remaining gloriously, effortlessly still alive. The pic at right is of him as a young man, when he still had his good looks.
The song itself was written by Eric Bogle, as has been brought to my attention by my friend the urbane internationalist Lance Dodd. Bogle is a Scottish-born singer-songwriter who moved to Australia and become one of Australia's most loved songwrights.
The Australasian Performing Rights Association named The Band Played Waltzing Matilda one of the Top 30 Australian songs in 2001.
It's a speeded-up version of Imagine versing a slowed-up version of Band On The Run from McCartney's Wings outfit. Similar chord structures, it turns out. And similar mindset and heritage, one "imagines".
Jesus, how bewitching is this video, by the equally beguiling Johannesburg songwriter Nechama Brodie! The video is for her song Cold, which will appear on a forthcoming EP out later this year.
It says here that the video is based on Lauren Beukes's latest novel, The Shining Girls, which is about a time-travelling serial killer. We guess that is the role played in this by 88 Kilos Of Sunshine, a purveyor of deeply intense yet topical gloom rock from some godforsaken corner of the very same Johannesburg.
88 produced the track, replete with electronic flourishes and all and all and all, making it contemporary as well as timeless.
The history of South African music begins with the release of Hlokoloza by Arthur in September 2011. I’ve only been doing my research on Twitter so far, so I might be wrong. Let me just check some other sources…
Oh, right. It turns out SA music started when Fokofpolisiekar did Hemel Op Die Platteland, at least that’s what I learnt from watching MK.
Or maybe SA music starts with the first time Bed On Bricks played Rocking The Daisies. Or is the 0AD of South African Music the moment Krushed & Sorted first played the Zula Bar?
Maybe South African music started with a shamanic San chant around a fire in the Kalahari…
It’s probably all of the above. For many of us, our love for SA music begins with our first live show. Maybe we heard a song we liked on the radio, and were stunned to be told that, no, the band’s actually South African. And what’s more they’re playing a show in our town.
It’s Living Legend Day at Sheer Sound. Zimbabwean chimurenga master Thomas Mapfumo arrives in a funky pinstriped business suit to discuss his deal, while his countryman and fellow national treasure Oliver Mtukudzi holds a series of media interviews.
There’s a bizarre moment in the corridors of the record company as a label staffer asks Oliver, “Would you like to say hi to Thomas?” and Tuku is ushered towards a back office where the Lion Of Zimbabwe is no doubt cloistered with his accountants haggling over royalties.
So do the paths of Zim’s musical superstars cross sometimes these strange days, at a converted home-office in suburban Randburg.
Their first musical meeting came in 1977, when the 25-year-old Mtukudzi joined Mapfumo, seven years his senior, in the Wagon Wheels band, which released the gold-selling Dzandimomotera single. Their paths soon diverged, and what was in retrospect a Zimbabwean supergroup broke up, with Mapfumo going on to form Blacks Unlimited, and Tuku launching The Black Spirits.
Today’s encounter is like Lennon and McCartney bumping into each other in the Apple Records corridors, or Marley and Tosh giving each other a low five by the Island Records water cooler.
Despite their achievements, though, Zimbabwe’s greatest living musicians each cut a slightly weary figure. Mapfumo, in his incongruous grey zoot suit, here to make sure he gets what he is due after near forty years as a prolific recording artist, and Tuku enduring the merry-go-round of press interviews to promote his latest album, Sarawoga.
It’s a merry-go-round Mtukudzi has ridden before. At least 60 times, if his catalogue of album releases is anything to go by. That’s 61 albums in a 35-year recording career, plus several theatrical movies and music DVDs.
Does it ever become a bit of a chore, this marketing aspect of his career, with the schmoozing, the meeting with execs, the interviewers asking the same questions, the posing for photographs? Surely Mtukudzi would rather be writing songs, recording or even better, performing on stage, where the energy of this whole industry really resides?
“It’s all part of what we need to do as musicians,” he considers, engaging despite his obvious fatigue. “Our job is to touch people’s hearts with our music, and all of this,” he gestures around the record-company boardroom, “All of this helps us to do that.”
How does he feel about the business side of music?
“As musicians we are already business people. And the key to having a good business is to have a good product – something that touches people. But despite that, I don’t believe that musicians are about getting paid. We get appreciated.”
And he smiles that broad, infectious, Tuku smile.
He is tall, his whip-thin body toned by swimming lengths in his guitar-shaped swimming pool back home. Even at ease, Tuku is a powerful, intense presence. He wears a miniature homburg hat, and a powder-blue T-shirt advertising Rume Rimwe, an album by his late son, Sam Mtukudzi, killed in a road accident two years ago, aged just 21.
Sam was already an established musician at the time of his death. He began accompanying his father on world tours as a teenager. At a show in Birmingham, where Sam’s ability, stage presence and youthful good looks had the crowd in raptures, Oliver introduced him as “the future”.
Now that future is lost, replaced by a gaping void in his father’s life. But – and this is the measure of the man – Oliver Mtukudzi has returned to his calling as musician, and channeled his grief into another magnificent album.
The title, Sarawoga, means “left alone” and it opens with a haunting lament, Tuku’s agonised voice conveying every grain of his heartbreak.
“These were songs we played when we were touring before he died,” says Tuku. “This is the first recording after the loss,” he says in the liner notes. “God made it possible for me to have the time, talent and chance to offer you Sarawoga.”
It is music of sorrow, and of gratitude, from a man whose relationship with music runs so deep and long that it became his shoulder to cry on during these two years of grief.
It’s hard to reconcile the humility of the man with his status as one of Africa’s musical greats, but you soon get the picture when Tuku begins sharing his personal philosophy.
This isn’t a man with a complex series of insights on each of life’s mysteries. He has boiled his learnings on his role in society down to a handful of aphorisms, all eloquent in their all-encompassing simplicity.
Ask questions as deep and circuitous as you like, the elegant explanations remain the same. Like an African Zen master, Oliver Mtukudzi has meditated on the nature of music, but at the same time he refuses to do so. He knows music. He is music. The roles of music and the musician are what they are, and it’s pointless probing any deeper than their essential nature.
“Music is a feeling. Our purpose as musicians is to give life and help people heal. To touch their hearts. That is why we were given talent.”
How does he approach his compositions? Does a song like Todii start with the words or the music? “Always the words first. That is the most important. Then we find a tune for the song so people can hear we mean what we are saying. That way we can touch their hearts.”
This “touching of hearts” is intrinsic to Tuku music, that genre of African music that he has created basically single-handedly. It’s as powerful, but subtler than the music of Thomas Mapfumo, with whom he is often compared.
Where the outspoken Mapfumo has had to go into exile in the USA for spelling out too clearly his concerns about his country and its government, Tuku still lives in the small town of Norton 40km west of Harare that he moved to 1996.
Indeed, Tuku has committed his personal fortune to developing the Pakare Paye Arts Centre in the town. The centre boasts music, dance, drama, poetry and martial arts facilities, shops, editing suites, stages, a restaurant and the Sam Mtukudzi conference centre.
But does Oliver ever feel he should have been more militant? Doesn’t he see a responsibility to call out the Zimbabwean government on their shortcomings?
“No. As artists, we are above the politicians. When you make political statements, you become a politician. And whenever you say something political, you alienate people who disagree with you. A political message will divide people. We speak to every person. We try to heal their hearts.”
Of those healing songs, which does he feel was his best? What is his favourite song of all his 61 albums?
“Well, that would be for the people to say. We make music for the people. I believe it is a mistake to write a song in order to create a good composition. If a song is a good composition, but it fails to give life, that is not a good song.”
It’s all about touching their hearts, right?
“Exactly! It’s for the people to judge. And they always surprise you. Neria, for instance,” he says of the 1991 film he acted in and composed for. “It took a year before they came to like those songs.”
Mtukudzi agrees that the true essence, the spirit of song lives in sharing them, live, with an audience. The songs on Sarawoga, for instance, had been played live for years already before being committed to record.
Not for Tuku the western pop model of an artist unveiling their latest album of fresh material and then embarking on a tour to familiarise audiences with the new songs. “These songs have been road tested,” he says, tapping the CD on the boardroom table, “and only the songs that the people enjoy go on the album.”
But what about when the shoe’s on the other foot? When he is listening to music, who does Oliver Mtukudzi listen to, for inspiration and for pleasure?
“There is no competition in art,” he says, and you can almost sense the conversation returning to the same set of Zen principles that have served him so well. “If a song touches my heart, I enjoy it. It need not be a song by a famous artist. In fact, sometimes a well-known musician will produce a good composition, but the simple song by an amateur musician will touch me more.”
Was he always destined to be a musician? Can he remember a time before music?
“Well, my mother would tell me that me first cry as a newborn was very melodic, so perhaps it was meant. I am self-taught. As a youngster I bought myself a ‘teach-yourself-guitar’ book for 90c. It showed you how to tune a guitar, and how to play three chords. That book has served me very well.”
And his influences?
“Well, I grew up in the city, but my family is from the rural areas, so I came to know both styles, both cultures. Some say that I play the guitar in the mbira style.”
So Tuku music is a kind of fusion of the contemporary and the traditional? Modern and ancient?
“You could say it’s a kind of fusion. We just try to write songs that touch people’s universal humanness.”
And with that, Oliver Mtukudzi politely takes his leave. After a quick cellphone photo or two, with the receptionist playing photographer. We couldn’t resist. The man touches people’s hearts.
It’s living legend day at the record company.
This piece first appeared in Afropolitan magazine.
It's Jacko's Human Nature vs Fela's Me No Get Eye For Back. The King of Pop and the President of the Kalakuta Republic.
And what's best is it's a sound and video mashup featuring some footage from MJ's This Is It funeral doccie and a live performance of Anikulapo with the most otherworldly dancers we've seen since that opening sequence of When We Were Kings featuring Miriam Makeba. Fela liked to call his stage show The Underground Spiritual Game, and you can see why.
Fela's endless afrobeat jams lend themselves to modern-day mashups, and indeed the person who put this thing together has a site at mjfela.com ("The King Meets The President In Africa") with dozens of Fela-Michael mash-ups.
Another noted Fela fan is producer J.Period, who released a free mixtape through his website featuring rhymes by Somali/Canadian rapper K'Naan over Fela tunes. It's called The Messengers and comes in a set of three with tracks by Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and Fela.
Behold these young men! A sweet band of melodic invention – after all what writing music is about. We Set Sail are out of Cape Town, with my old homie and one-time bandmate Richard Brunyee on keys and awesomeness.
Here they are with an eight and a half-minute instrumental tour de force. We always wanted to use that in a sentence, "tour de force". So we looked it up, just to make sure. It means, "a feat of strength" in French, but in English is has come to mean, "a feat demonstrating brilliance or mastery in a field", according to Wiktionary. So ja, a tour de force.
If you're based in Sandton, Johannesburg, the commercial centre of the African continent, Bohemian self-expression is seldom on the menu.
For artsy escapism and self-expression, you might try karaoke night at the Colony Arms, or some random stand-up at a place like Metro. But since the demise of the Blues Room, a proper live performance venues have been like hen's teeth in Sandton Central.
So to discover that a neglected back room of your local pub has been turned into a performance venue is a lot like finding a forgotten Christmas present behind the bookcase in March.
This crew of sound specialists has launched an events arm called Swamp Events, and The Library at The Brazen Head is their flagship venue.
This was a welcome surprise, not least because yours truly is a veteran of the capricious Joburg open-mic scene. We've "graced" stages from the old Bassline to Cool Runnings to House of Nsako and Pata-Pata just now, but this is a nice one close to home.
With their sound and video expertise, Swamp deliver a rare standard of sonic excellence, and every performance is filmed, and available for purchase. And lo and behold, The Library at The Brazen Head delivers a cosy ambience previously unfathomable in the capitalist heartland.
That vid up the top is a clip of this week's performances. Look out for Inspector Ras on voice and guitar in the beginning there...
They will be hosting proper shows by the likes of Josie Field too, some comedy nights, and posting info on their Facebook page over here. And of course, if the artsiness clashes with your Sandton sensibilities, you can always pop next door to the main pub and catch the end of the cricket. We only played kak that night, though, hey. Yussis.
This video was so much fun, we had goosebumps of joy going from about three seconds in! City Bowl Mizers are a rockabilly-ska-punk-rock-whatever band out of Durban. Their live shows are every bit as fun as this video suggests and their recorded output same.
It’s weird how broad-mindedness can backfire on you. On morning this week, I was at work early, getting into a few chores, and embracing the opportunity to rock the office stereo. Like everyone on earth, I believe myself to have catholic tastes in music. Ask me what I listen to, and I’ll answer, “Oh, a bit of everything”. And so will you. In the same way that no one realises they’re a bigot, absolutely nobody will concede that they’re a narrow-minded music listener. Guys will be like, “Everything. I listen to everything. Slipknot, 36 Crazyfists, Mudvayne, Disturbed…” Meanwhile they’re only listening to contemporary American metal. So anyway, there I am. It’s 8am on a Monday morning, and I’m experiencing the open-mindedness of my music collection. I’ve just got a whole bunch of CDs from Reliable. Aretha Sings The Blues, Hugh Masekela, Harari’s greatest hits, Pops Mohamed and, rather incongruously, Bok van Blerk. I’d never heard Bok’s De La Rey album. It’s been accused of stirring up extreme Afrikaner nationalism, of pandering to latent white racism, of harking back to the days of Boer freedom fighters, of polarizing the nation. I quite liked the video, with its Boer war imagery and the song’s haunting chorus, “De La Rey, De La Rey, sal jy die boer kom lei...” bemoaning the lack of a strong modern Afrikaans leader. I never got around to listening to the album during the initial controversy, but that weekend at Reliable Music, I chanced upon it and thought, ja, let’s give the oke a chance. As luck would have it, that Monday, a TV crew was coming to our offices to film an insert for some show. So I’m sitting there alone in the office, blasting De La Rey at full taps when the TV producer walks into the office with our PR manager. He’s an Indian guy, and he looks slightly stunned as we’re introduced to the roaring strains of Bok’s paean to the fallen Afrikaner leader. I’m a bit taken aback myself. My first instinct is to point out that I hardly ever play Afrikaans music, let alone De La Rey. I’m just curious to hear the album, and the fact is, I have extremely broad music tastes. I was listening to Hugh Masekela just now. I’m really not a right-wing apologist. My wife is black! I’m far more English than Afrikaans! But apologizing for my music would only have made it worse, so I said nothing. We grimly shook hands, the PR guy dying a thousand deaths as the song got to the part about “Die leeu van die Wes Transvaal” Then the producer rushed off to begin filming, while I dived into my iTunes and played kwaito and 1950s township swing jazz for the rest of the day. I was not interviewed for the TV insert. When I eventually got around to listening to the rest of the album, I was dismayed to find I didn’t like it at all. However, in the eyes of one guy at least, I’m still chairman of the De La Rey fan club. That’ll teach me to be open-minded.
This is a soldier's tale and an eight-minute anti-war statement by cult Irish band The Pogues. Their style veers between shambolic pub riots and heart-rending ballads of joy, sadness and loss.
