Ian Cuthbertson | May 07, 2009 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25438932-5013575,00.html
SOUTH African crossover musician Johnny Clegg, known for the colourful Zulu dance aspect of his music as much as his songwriting, has sold more than five million albums over three decades.
His unique blend of Western pop, Celtic spirit and Zulu rhythms has proved infectious globally, especially in France, where he is known affectionately as Le Zoulou Blanc: the White Zulu. The world music pioneer, set to tour Australia later this month, is also an anthropologist, with published academic papers to his credit, and an activist.
Growing up with musical and academic interests in a racially divided country made it more or less impossible not to become an anti-apartheid campaigner. No surprise, then, that his hero is Nelson Mandela, whose harsh treatment at the hands of the apartheid regime haunted and inspired Clegg.
Speaking from South Africa, Clegg tells how Mandela's surprise appearance on stage during a performance of Asimbonanga, perhaps his most identifiable song, was the pinnacle of his life. The title means "we have not seen him" and it is, of course, about Mandela. "In 1999 I was the entertainment for an international (non-governmental organisation) conference on Africa in Germany, and Mandela was the guest speaker," he says.
"He had spoken the day before, and we were wrapping up the event. I had no idea that he would walk onstage, singing the song with us, and it totally blew me away."
It had a similar effect on the audience. The moment, captured on video, is widely available on YouTube.
"I wrote that song in the state of emergency in 1986," Clegg says. "The army was in the street, terrible things were happening in the country. At that time we had no idea Mandela would be released four years later."
Born in England in 1953, Clegg lived in Zimbabwe until he was seven. At that time his mother, a cabaret and jazz singer, married a South African crime reporter, and the new family moved to Zambia for two years before returning to South Africa. With life in three countries under his belt before he was 12, Clegg was perhaps better prepared than most to see through the racial smokescreen of apartheid in the South Africa of the late 1960s and early '70s.
At 13 he took to the guitar like a waterbird to the wetlands. It was also at this time that he saw traditional Zulu Inhlangwini dancers for the first time. Fascinated, and in the company of a new guitar-playing mate, a Zulu house cleaner who played street music near Clegg's home, the young musician began illegally hanging out, playing and learning in the black migrant labour haunts around Johannesburg.
Though he was arrested several times for contravening the Group Areas Act, an apartheid law forcing different races to keep to their own residential and recreational areas, Clegg nevertheless developed a reputation as a competent Zulu guitarist in the Masikande tradition. ("The thumb plays every beat in the song on the lower three strings and the other four fingers pick against it. And then you sing a different melody over the top.")
"The street musicians I admired all played a hardy, cello-shaped steel string guitar called a Bellini," Clegg says.
"They were tinny little things, manufactured cheaply in Pinetown, south of Durban. But they sounded great and were perfect for the unique finger-picking style the Zulus had developed. So you had a Western instrument that had been completely Africanised: restrung, retuned and reconceptualised."
A bit like Clegg himself. Though fascinated by the African musicians and dancers around him, Clegg still listened to a lot of Celtic folk music. "I was listening to Scottish, Irish and English folk music at a very early age", he says. "And there were certain echoes of it that I heard in Zulu street guitar music."
Clegg also remembers being strongly influenced by Jethro Tull, learning from the band's singer, Ian Anderson, that you could cross over styles - such as jazz, folk and rock - in the same piece.
The Zulu street dancing Clegg fell in love with as a teenager remains an important part of his live shows. "In any case I come from an African entertainment aesthetic," he says. "In Africa, people don't come to listen to your music, they come to see your music."
These live shows began in earnest when migrant Zulu worker Sipho Mchunu, who considered himself a Zulu guitar whiz, not to mention a sensational dancer, heard about this white kid who played guitar and danced like a native. The two met, hit it off and in the mid-'70s formed the influential early world music band Juluka, in contravention of the cultural segregation laws of the time.
"We were never played on the radio. So we had to develop a really killer show. That was the way we built up a fan base," Clegg says.
Somehow, Clegg found the time to finish a degree in social anthropology. He pursued an academic career for four years, publishing papers in journals and lecturing at universities in Johannesburg and Durban. "Obviously, having a multi-racial band in South Africa during apartheid wasn't really going to pay the rent," he says.
But it was through his academic engagements that Clegg met South African producer and label owner Hilton Rosenthal, who fell in love with Clegg's concept of blending English lyrics and Western melodies with Zulu musical structures. Rosenthal signed Juluka at a time a time when mixed-race bands were unprofitable because of radio and performance bans.
His faith paid off. By the '80s, Savuka, the successor band to Juluka, was the leading world music group touring Francophone countries. By the end of 1989, Savuka had sold more than one million copies of its debut album, Third World Child, and 700,000 of its second, Shadow Man, and the stage was set for an enduring global musical career.
Johnny Clegg's Australian tour begins in Perth on May 21.
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