Johnny Clegg interview with Michael Hunter, September 29, 2005
Johnny Clegg's reputation as one of the foremost South African musicians, if not one of the most important South Africans of his generation, has been won over several decades of struggle and hard work. A cursory glance over his biography will reveal a remarkable story; the formation of multiracial bands Juluka and Savuka in his apartheid-ridden country showed great courage and prices were paid. The incorporation of Zulu lyrics into his songs must have frustrated his government as much as it delighted those with minds open enough to appreciate the cultural subtext, and ears open enough to enjoy the rhythmic and powerful music he has created through the years.
Even in a post-apartheid world, Clegg finds plenty to focus on and sing about,
especially in the field of genetics. For the very first time, Clegg is touring
Australia in late 2005, and the following interview took place to promote the
Adelaide gig.
[Editor's note: Michael Hunter's questions appear in boldface,
Johnny Clegg's responses are unbolded.]
I talked to you nearly ten years ago when there was
the chance of your first Australian tour happening but it fell through.
Johnny Clegg: "Yeah, and also there was a WOMAD thing as well."
You're not tricking us this time?
No no, this is a full-blown one. What normally happens is, I live so far away
from the centre of the universe, I'm at the tip of Africa and if I do a tour
in Europe, I have to do a minimum of like ten or fifteen shows to make it worthwhile.
Otherwise, all the etiquettes of the massive expense and eleven hours of flying
and the hotels and the travelling -- it's not the same as living in France
and doing some shows in England, where you just hop across the road. So if
I come
to Australia, I have to put a much bigger tour together so we've got New Zealand
and Australia and we do like five dates in Australia and two in New Zealand
and maybe double dates if things go really well.
Will the new CD be available in time for the tour?
The new CD will not be available but there is a live CD which will be available
of a previous concert that was recorded in South Africa.
Is that much the same band that you'll be touring with here?
Exactly the same band.
Is it possible to describe the new CD in terms of
previous material -- are there similar themes?
There's about four or five songs tied in, and they are a mixture of rhythmic
hip-hop rhythms but also very much within the traditional music I grew up with
as a war dancer, because we did a lot of call and response singing, and the
harmonies there are always for me very powerful. So those pentatonic or fifth
harmonies are a trademark of the vocal chanting that I use, so there's a lot
of that stuff on the new album as well.
Sounds like quite an intriguing mixture of the ancient and the modern.
What about lyrically, bearing in mind there are plenty of themes to talk
about in
a post-apartheid era...
Sure. There's some nostalgic songs which refer back to a time thirty
years ago when I first went to a place called Makabeleni which is where Sipho
(Mchunu,
co-founder of Juluka) lived, the song will probably be the single off the new
album, all sung entirely in Zulu. It's a song to parents 'cause when I got
there, everybody belonged to everybody. All children belonged to all parents
and it was a wonderful, very connected, networked village. Sipho called everybody
older than him in a certain age "father" and "mother" and
that's all kind of died out in a way in the new South Africa. There's a whole
new modern, urban chic which the young tribesmen when they come to the city,
they want to pass for modern and progressive and sophisticated, so they drop
a lot of the old traditions. So this song is really saying I remember that
I went to Makabeleni and I remember that there were mothers and fathers who
were everybody's mothers and fathers and it is sad for me because I have left
that home, I've left that time behind me. So it's kind of a nostalgic song.
And then there's a song about war children, the child soldier. It's a problem in Africa with using children in political games and in warfare -- and South America, all over. And then just songs about survival, struggling to put bread on the table. We forget that somewhere in Africa, people are getting up and just battling the day to put some bread on the table. So there's another set of realities. So you know really, just a broader not so political, but just songs of the day, simple songs of simple people in the day in the life of somebody living in Africa.
So still very African based?
Oh, yeah.
Because with the world the way it is, there would be plenty to draw from
that too but there's obviously more than enough to draw from in your home country.
Sure. Completely.
Here's my clever question for the interview. If you were writing "Cruel
Crazy Beautiful World" today, would you add any other adjectives to the
title?
[laughs] I'd probably mention environment. I've actually been watching the
environment and if you know from a few lines of songs in the last Savuka album,
it was already appearing, where we're talking about snow in the summer and
all the seasons are upside down. Referring to the fact that there is some hidden
hand which is changing our world but the real problem is that we're the one
driving that hand. It's linked to another song which we're putting on the album
called "Wander As A Nomad" which is a reworking of an old Juluka
song. It's a song about how nature reflects the problems in culture. If we
look at the droughts and the pestilences, it happens in countries where there
is some kind of social injustice.
There's a kind of African idea that 'no rain means no justice' and so we have to reorganise society so that we can bring back the rain. In that very kind of organic way, traditional African sight is: watch very carefully because nature is a barometer of the conduct of people and the maintenance of true social exchange and true social relations. When they become broken down, then nature basically punishes us with locusts or floods or whatever. So that song is on the album, so there is quite a strong environmental component in two or three songs as well.
I still really enjoy the Live And More DVD. Was a lot of it hard
to source, particularly the earlier material?
I didn't do that. It was in my producer's archives, he was jealously guarding
it. It's like a time release capsule, they'll come out every two or three years.
I was never able to see some of the earlier clips like "December African Rain" on whatever TV show they may be from.
Oh that's, what, 1982 or something. God. That was ABC, like a $300...
(laughs)... We didn't really understand what videos were in those days, you know.
There
was no format, we didn't know what you had to do. We just knew you had to
make pictures with music.
I love the energy and the enthusiasm that comes through, particularly
on the live section.
Completely.
Which I assume is still...
Oh yes! I'll be dancing off the walls. I've got three new young guys
plus two old cohorts of mine from Savuka: Andi (Mandisa Dianga) you know, the
girl.
She's still with me eighteen years now and Andy (Innes) the guitarist who joined
Savuka in '93 and then we stopped a year later. He's basically been with me
for fourteen years now.
You must be terribly fit, that's all I can say.
I try, sir. I keep in shape.
Doing that every night would keep you in shape.
"No it does, you're right. I've lost some kilograms in the last six weeks
touring
the States.
So when you're playing nearby, why must people come to the show?
I think they must be there because otherwise they will miss a smorgasbord
of culture and anecdotes and stories that they will feel enriched by. You know,
it's really rare to go to a movie or to a play or to a moment of music where
you come out with like three or four very powerful moments which you take
away
with you and which may even be moments of very deep reflection and enable
you to get into a particular style of music, or genre of movie.
I think what we've done in most of our shows is we've catalysed a lot of interest in other people's mythologies, their ideas, their world views, stemming out of Africa but also I talk about other things on stage. I talk about genetic engineering; I talk about a lot of issues, which are close to my heart at the moment. We get around, we do the full sort of gamut of the academic corridors, from the social sciences into the hardcore science.
If you're getting into so many deep areas, lyrically and musically every
night, does it affect you just as deeply every time?
It does because I don't have a script. I have a set of points that I talk to
in the song, and the song itself is the template for the discussion, so 'Scatterlings
Of Africa' is really a song about the origin of man and that all human beings
are essentially African. 'Cause 160,000 years ago, the first homo sapiens migrated
from Africa up into the Middle East. If you watch the BBC documentary, you'll
see exactly how the migration worked. This has all been tracked back through
genetics. Population genetics has actually been a vindication for me as somebody
who is promoting the idea of African origins as early as 1982. Then we were
just looking at old bones and paleontological evidence.
So the show ranges very widely across these issues. There's a certain amount of anthropology as art, there's a certain amount of discussion about dance movement, what the movements mean, all that kind of stuff. For the audience, it's an exposure to a perspective on music and dance and origins and culture which will be very novel for them.
Speaking of 'Scatterlings," the version on the Anthology compilation
CD is longer than the one I was familiar with.
That's the Juluka version, is it not? That's a very important moment because
that middle verse is the key to the debate which we're involved in now, and
that is if we are on the cusp of conscious evolution and we are going to go
into ourselves and reorganise our genetic material, we are going to be true
masters of our destiny and we will evolve according to our choices. But in
that moment, the verse says,
"Broken wall, bicycle wheel,
African song forging steel singing
The magic machine cannot match a human being a human being..."
The issue about technology versus what we are today is going to be a major discourse. I think it's going to be not only a technical one but a political one. So it's prefigured in those lines and it's something which I feel very strongly about. In fact, I've primed my kids already for the coming politics of genetic engineering. There are huge, major issues I find in Africa which filter into my work, and have filtered into my work long before the situation today.
***
(The interview was conducted for dB
Magazine.)
