Hilton Rosenthal
Johnny Clegg: Le Zulu Blanc: A Remarkable South African Musician and Anthropologist, Part 2 (with Special Guest Jesse Clegg)
Hilton Rosenthal and Professor David Peimer - Johnny Clegg, Le Zulu Blanc, Part 2
- Okay, great, thank you. So, hi, everybody, and welcome, and welcome back to part two of celebrating the life of one of the, for me and for many people, one of the most remarkable South Africans who lived, you know, over the last second half of the last century into this century. So thank you, and welcome, and very happy and honoured and privileged to be joined again by Johnny’s son, Jesse, and Hilton, his best friend and superb, fantastic producer. So welcome, and thank you, and Emily, thanks for your work, and to Judy, Lauren, and the others, and of course, Wendy, as always. Okay, so in the celebration of Johnny’s work, we’re going to look at a couple of things that we’ll tease out as we go along, show some clips of Johnny singing and performing and also speaking about the artistry, about his writing, his music, and some other aspects and incredible achievements globally of his life and work. At the beginning, I want to mention again, and I’m going to unashamedly plug it, if you haven’t had a chance to get it and read it, please, this is the book by Johnny. It’s a brilliant, fantastic book. It’s written so beautifully in terms of thought and poetry and metaphor. Everything is inside it that we could imagine. So if we can dive in at the beginning and just ask Jesse, before we show a few clips of your dad speaking at Dartmouth College about writing and the artistry of his work, if there’s anything you’d like to share with us, Jesse, about what your dad may have said to you or help teach you in a way about writing, making music.
Sure, thank you. I’m happy to be here for part two. This is a great honour to celebrate my father in this way. So thank you for having me once again. Yeah, I think as a young songwriter, you know, I was learning guitar, and I was, you know, I think it’s overwhelming when you start out, when you listen to, you know, the greats of music creating, you know, complex lyrical and melodic structures and complex chord progressions and stuff. And I remember my father saying to me at a young age, he was like, “You know, if you look at the deep structure of all these songs, it’s actually a simple chord progression, and it’s a simple idea.” And he always said to me that the simple song is the hardest song to write. The song that captures something very deep but says it in a way that is just clear and direct and resonates with people is actually the hardest song to write, and it’s three chords. I mean, Hilt, you can probably testify to that as well, but-
Absolutely.
I think in, you know, he, over the years, he was one of the rare lyricists that could tell really complicated stories and use, you know, many different languages and many different sort of literary tools to explain something in a way that was still completely relatable and completely, you know, something that you could really connect to, even if you had never heard the history, you’d never heard the story, and that that really was his genius, I think. You know, if you look at songs like “Scatterlings” or “Impi,” I mean, these are like, “Impi” is a great example ‘cause it’s really a historical text. It’s telling a historical story but in a way that is so universal. And it’s, the song is still sung today, and it has many different ways to resonate with it and many different contexts that you can understand the song through. And I think that’s the sign of a great writer. So in the next few clips, you’ll hear him talking about how he uses metaphor, how wholeness and the concept of redemption is a running theme through his writing and how he talks about issues in the sense that you have to make them universal. It’s not just a specific political thing. It’s something that you have to access and make universal as an artist.
Jesse, thanks so much. He puts it beautifully. Just one thing before we show the clips, just to mention to everybody, Jesse is actually backstage preparing for a performance, and we just want to thank him very much for joining us backstage and that he has to leave in about 30 minutes or so. But we have a clip for later today. We’re going to show Jesse singing with his dad a song that Jesse created and also one or two other clips of Jesse speaking for later in our presentation. Okay, Emily, if we could show the first one of Johnny speaking at Dartmouth.
Issue, the thing about an issue is that an issue dies. You can’t, if you’re write about an issue, they solve it. The song’s no longer relevant. The poem is no longer relevant unless you’ve universalized it. So issue-based music or issue-based poetry or issue-based sculptures are, they don’t have, they can’t talk across time unless they are presented cleverly, you know? Goya’s painting, that’s an issue, but it’s done in such a way that you see it and you think over the centuries, “Wow, what was going on there?” And you’re sucked in. So it’s a technique. So if you’re going to write about politics and you want to be an activist, you have to do it in a way that enables people to have an entry point, an angle, a sense of some emotional contradiction or paradox or darkness or humorous thing that twists it and gives it so that when you’re into the work, you discover that landscape that’s hidden there inside. You think, “Oh, okay, this is about this and that and whatever,” but it’s actually quite nice. It’s actually, it gives you a sense of I can interact with this without feeling under pressure or being judged or being forcefully conscripted into a position. That is the key to successful for me.
And Johnny puts it so, so succinctly and beautifully. Thanks, Emily. If we could show the next clip, please, which is where Johnny speaks about what Jesse mentioned, wholeness.
You could go and keep thinking, you know, mine was wholeness, completeness. A lot of my songs are about, I come from a world that is fragmented, a world that is divided, a world that is separated by force. How nice would it be to be whole, wholeness? So a song like “Dela,” a song like “Bombs Away,” a song like “Two Humans on the Run,” all of these songs were about when will we be whole? How can we make, how can we close the circle? Because that’s what we wanted, and that’s what democracy in South Africa meant for us. It meant that we would be one. It meant that there would be one space for everybody.
Thank you, and then if we could show the last one on at Dartmouth where Johnny speaks about metaphor.
So as a writer and as a storyteller, the key for me was always to find a metaphor, an idea, an image, a set of clues to make the song attractive through a nice melody, but also to suck somebody in to say, “That’s interesting.” And as they went in, it unfolded, and they said, “Oh, this is about somebody who’s gone missing. Oh, and he’s banging on the door, and this is happening.” And they said, “And they can’t find this person.” And the Zulu says, “Uzukijima, you can run, but you can’t hide. We will find you, and when we find you, you will disappear.” “Wow, that’s quite intense. I wonder what this is about?” That’s what you want to do, because there’s a big, it leaves that person with a question mark, and when you have a question, you want to find an answer. It makes you curious, and you then you step in, you step in. I haven’t dragged you in by kicking and screaming and saying, “You guilty bugger.” That’s a key, and for-
So beautifully put, summarises in such a fantastic essence the whole approach to making art in very, very tough political times. Hilton, would you mind, would you speak just a little bit about, you know, Johnny’s sense of the Western and Zulu approaches to music, you know, that he’s working on?
Sure, David. Thanks again for having me. Yeah, yesterday we basically covered mostly, you know, Johnny’s beginnings and, or Johnny & Sipho’s beginnings, and the combination of Celtic and Western music and Zulu music that Johnny really began his professional journey on. Once Juluka broke up, it was 1984, 1985, very, very dark times in South Africa, and Johnny went through a really tough time, didn’t really want to do very much with his music. But eventually we had a chat, and he said, Look, I’d like to try and do something totally different just for fun. Let’s experiment. Let’s go and do some songs which combine even more of the different genres" he’d been listening to, you know, pop and rock music. And we did a solo album that was purely, purely experimental which incorporated much heavier rock guitars, big drum sounds. Female vocals was a thing that I said perhaps to differentiate from Juluka moving forward, we should incorporate some more female vocals, so we did that. And then having done that, he decided, “It’s time for me to create a new group. I don’t want to be reliant on any one person, but I’d like to have a band around me, so I don’t want to call it the name of the band. I want it to be Johnny Clegg and,” and it became Savuka. The beginnings of Savuka was a decision to do a week of concerts at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, and they started rehearsing. One of the days I walked into rehearsal, Johnny was sitting with his legs hanging over the stage with a guitar, and he said, “Listen, I’ve just written this thing. We just have to play it to you.” And he basically played me “Asimbonanga,” which just made the hair stand up on my neck. And I said, “Look, we have no plans to do anything recording-wise, but fortunately the advantage of my having my own studio is let’s go in tomorrow and capture this as it is right now without any ability to lose the spontaneity,” which is what we did at that time without any plan for releases or anything. So the Market Theatre show, which was planned, I think, for a week, ended up being five weeks, sold out every single night. And this was definitely the beginnings of a whole new section of Johnny’s career.
Great, thank you. Just for everybody who isn’t originally from South Africa or in South Africa, Market Theatre was the most important theatre during apartheid and was one of the only very, very few where you could have mixed audiences, mixed racial, racially mixed audiences. So, you know, it’s iconically so important, one of the probably eight or 10 theatres in the world which has such an iconic reputation and renown. Great, thank you. And then if, Hilton, if you could share with us after that going to France. We’ve called the whole presentation of yesterday and today Le Zulu Blanc, you know, a little bit about the French connection and the reception in France, why France and that experience. You told me another story of Mitterrand and his wife and those stories.
Sure, so yeah, Johnny and Sipho had been invited to France and to Europe, to Germany earlier on in the Juluka days as a cultural visit, and during that visit, the French basically termed the phrase Le Zoulou Blanc. With the buzz that was going on with the Market Theatre shows, we suddenly started getting calls from people in France, and we got a call from a promoter who was handling the Angouleme, the annual Angouleme jazz festival, and he invited Savuka to go and perform there. That also prompted a young French manager to contact us to say that he would like to represent the band in France, and his name was Claude Six. So after the performance, the morning after the performance at Angouleme, the front page of the newspaper in France had a photograph of President Mitterrand’s wife dancing on the chair in the front row of the show, and we knew that Savuka had arrived. That in turn prompted EMI Records to contact us and ask if they could represent the band and sign the band for the world outside of South Africa, which we did. But in terms of showing the importance of having a local representative in a territory, while I was negotiating with EMI, it was Claude who said, “Listen, I’ve spoken to the EMI France guys, and I don’t believe that they have the belief we need to handle this record. They’re projecting sales of about 15,000, and I think that what we need to do is get our own promotion team onto the record as part of our contract with EMI UK,” which we managed to do. And the result really was that this album, “Third World Child,” firstly started with the single of “Scatterlings of Africa.” We decided to rerecord “Scatterlings of Africa” in a kind of more commercial way. The Juluka version had been kind of quite challenging in terms of time signatures, et cetera, and we put it much more into a commercial form. And that single became a hit in France purely, I think, because we had our own promotion team, but that was a hit single in France. Then we decided that “"Asimbonanga” should be the next single, and it was released. I was invited to a party from Capitol Records, the EMI company in the States, at Universal Studios, and when I walked in, the managing director of EMI France picked me up, he was a huge guy, Guy Deluz, and kissed me on both cheeks and hugged me. And I went, “Ha, what’s going on here?” He said, “You don’t know? 'Asimbonanga’ just exploded in France. It’s become the anthem basically for the anti-racism movement, and it’s going to be one of our biggest-selling records.” So that was, again, a seminal moment and the beginnings of a very huge career in France.
Fantastic.
And in other French, in other French territories as well. I mean, it was never limited just to small territories. Johnny, you know, always had an audience all over the world touring, but France, Belgium, Switzerland were just huge.
Do you think there was an extra reason why it was so resonant in France, French-speaking areas and countries?
Well, yeah, I think France was going through, you know, the Socialist Party, they were going through elections, and it became the anthem for the Socialist Party at that point in time in France and for the anti-racism movement, which had become a big, big issue in France at the time.
Great, thank you. Okay, if we could show the next slide, please, Emily. And Hilton, could you speak to here the Savuka Day?
Yes, one of the issues or the ways that Capital Records thought that they could get some publicity in America was that they contacted Mayor Tom Bradley’s office in Los Angeles, and we had a ceremony on the top of the Capitol Tower, that iconic circular tower that looks like a, like, you know, in Hollywood, it’s one of the icons of Hollywood. And Mayor Bradley presented Johnny Clegg and Savuka as Johnny Clegg & Savuka Day, and this was the certificate that he gave us talking about all the different issues that Johnny stood for.
Great, thanks, okay, and Emily, if we could show, so the next clip will be from the Zenith show, and Hilton, if you could introduce that for us.
Sure, so I’m sure everybody knows that “Asimbonanga” was an anthem to Nelson Mandela and becoming this huge, huge hit in France. I went over to the concert at the Zenith in Paris, which is a six, 7,000 seater, and the response was just incredible. And as Johnny started the song, six, 7,000 French people started chanting the chorus, singing along the chorus in Zulu and putting their lighters in the air, and it was a really special moment.
Fantastic celebration. Okay, if we could show the next clip, which is the clip of the show. ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Oh the sea is cold and the sky is grey ♪ ♪ Look across the island into the bay ♪ ♪ We are all islands till comes the day ♪ ♪ We cross the burning water ♪ ♪ Asimb ♪
It’s amazing, every time you listen to it, the hairs go back up on the body. Just before we show the next clip also from it, ‘cause I know Jesse has to leave fairly soon, Jesse, we were talking it about a bit earlier, you know, of your dad and writing in the book, you know, such an important chapter about identity is a choice, if he spoke to you about that or your thoughts on, your feelings on that?
Yeah, I think my father’s life is a testament to the journey to find one’s own identity, one’s own sense of their place in the world. You know, my father was a white Jewish boy born in the UK and found himself deeply connected and moved by African music and African culture in Johannesburg. And I think that the message of his journey is really that there is nothing off-limits. All culture is human culture. We are all trying to answer and ask the same questions, and his music was trying to sensitise us to that universal question. And yeah, and I think that that was his great journey, and that’s why he was such a, he had such a deep curiosity about culture and religion and tradition and ritual because it really was like the source code of what human beings have been asking about what their lives mean for thousands of years. And I think that it just, it supersedes politics. It supersedes racism or, you know, whatever ideology, whatever, you know, momentary situation we’re going through in society, it supersedes that. It’s a very deep question that I think he was trying to answer his entire life.
Fantastic, and just to follow on that, why do you think, or what did he say to you, or what do you feel led him more towards Zulu culture as opposed to, say, any other?
Oh, I think that, I mean, you know, in my dad’s case, it was the music initially that he was, he just, he was just completely blown away by this new style of music that he’d never heard before. He was learning classical Spanish guitar, which was not really resonating with him. And when he heard it, it was just incredible. But I think that as he got deeper, there’s something about the conception of Zulu masculinity, about individualism but still connected to community. There’s something about the celebration of self-expression, to claim your space, to claim your life. You know, these were people that, you know, were undergoing incredible political and socioeconomic persecution, and there was still a sense of pride and a sense of self-definition that they had through their culture. And I think in my dad’s case, because he had no father figure, no role models, he was lost. In a way, this ideology and this friendship and the community that he found, I think it saved his life in a lot of ways. I mean, he would say that, you know, this was something that saved his life. It gave him direction. It gave him a sense of how to understand himself and how to portray himself in the world and gave him the confidence to express himself. So it was one of those beautiful, happy accidents of history that my father was in the situation that he was in, and he stumbled across, you know, these amazing people who were so generous in their sharing with him their culture.
[Wendy] Can I just jump in? I’m terribly sorry.
Sure, go for it, Wendy, of course, yeah. Wendy?
Oh, you’re muted. You’ve muted yourself, Wendy.
I think you’re on mute, yeah,
[Wendy] Like now, have I done?
[David] Yeah, you’re perfect.
[Wendy] Am I there? Am I back?
Perfect.
Yep.
[Wendy] I’m just wondering what Johnny would’ve said today. You know, he was such a, he, you know, he was such a beacon of hope and integration and dealing with the narrative today and the disruption and the, you know, and the diabolical dialogue, narrative that we have right now. You know, just put yourself in, I wonder what your dad would’ve said.
You want me to tell you what he would’ve said about now, like, speak for him. I mean, I don’t know. You know, I don’t want to put words in his mouth or speak for it on his behalf. I think that, I think our dad was concerned, you know, and he saw that there was some troubling aspects that were unfolding. I’m assuming you’re speaking about South Africa specifically. Wendy, or are you talking about just the world? Anyway, so I think in terms of South Africa, there were things that he was concerned about, but I think he also had a deep understanding and sympathy for the grievances that people genuinely hold and how long it takes to work through that. It’s not just a political issue. It’s a human issue. It’s an emotional issue. It’s an inheritance of trauma, and those emotional traumatic things, you know, play out in unpredictable ways in the politics of any country, and South Africa’s had a very wild history. I mean, we have a very unique history, and there’s been some beautiful moments that have come out of it but also some very traumatic ones. And so I think my dad had genuine concern, but he also had empathy and patience. And I think that the one thing he would always say to me is that history’s very unpredictable, can be unpredictable in the negative, and it can be unpredictable in the positive. And South Africa is an example of things not going the way history would predict. and in a positive sense. You know, the fact that South Africa came through that terrible transition and remained intact and remained united is a beautiful sort of flair of history. And I think that we must have faith.
[Wendy] Yeah, he understood the soul of the nation and touched the soul of the nation and was part of the soul of the nation.
Yeah, and I think he also, he had a very, you know, his perspective was generational. You know, I think he’d studied culture and history from a much sort of a longer arc. So, you know, he had a sense that these issues take time to resolve. And these are cultural issues. These are racial issues. You know, these are things that are not just, you know, you just set up the political infrastructure and now suddenly every everyone’s happy-clappy. It takes time, and it’s ongoing conversation and storytelling and expression and seeing each other. And I think, you know, that happens as much through art as it does through politics. And I think, yeah, that’s, I think that’s what he would say.
[Wendy] Jesse, thanks, that’s great. Thank you very much. Yes, I’m sure that’s right. That’s exactly what you would’ve said. So what’d you say, Hilt?
Yeah, no, I think, you know, there was a period in particularly in the '90s just before Mandela was released that, you know, Johnny wrote numerous, very often, he rewrote songs many, many times, and, you know, he was obsessed with a third way, really. You know, that song ended up becoming a song called “These Days,” but effectively it was all about trying to find a third way.
Yeah, yeah, I think also what you’re saying, what Jesse, you, Hilton and Wendy were saying, and comes also obviously in his book and his life, you’re able to step back and see the whole historical arc. And as you were saying, Jesse, it takes time for beliefs, customs, ideas, they change, they’re messy, all of it, yeah. Okay, great. Thank you. If we can show the next clip, please, Emily, which is-
Can I set it up before we do?
Definitely set it up.
Jesse, are you about to leave, Jess?
I can hang for another five, 10 minutes.
Okay.
I’d love to talk about “Cruel, Crazy” if we have time.
Okay, we’ll flip through quickly what we can and get to “Cruel, Crazy.” So yeah, and I was standing at the back of the theatre watching this “Asimbonanga” clip, and when the end came and the solo spotlight, Mandisa Dlanga, the female singer that was with Johnny from, for many, many years, all the way through to the end, put her hand up in the air and was singing about Mandela, and the spot just closed on her hand. I ran backstage, and John came off the, I mean, it was just an unbelievable moment. And John came off, came down the side of the stage and fell into my arms, and the two of us just sobbed.
Fantastic, thank you. Okay, Emily, if we could show it, please. ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪
Emily, you can hold that? It’s more and more powerful every time I listen. Hilton, if you could lead us through, you know, the dancing at Zenith and a little bit about the Lyon show, the Wembley, and then leading us on to “Cruel, Crazy.”
I think, David, it might take a little longer than what Jesse has. So perhaps we can just jump forward. You know, we can revisit the sequence. I mean, that album, “Third World Child,” became the biggest-selling non-French language record in the history of France. You know, in a country where a hundred thousand is gold, it sold well over 1 ½ million units. For six months in 1989, we had the number one and two album. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that if we have time, but you know, the third album that we recorded was called “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World.” And it was hinged all around the song that he wrote for Jesse, so let Jess talk about that.
Sure.
Yeah, it’s a song that he wrote the year I was born, and it’s a really, it’s a beautiful gift that he gave me. You know, its writing, it’s a song that’s written from the perspective of a father talking to their son or their daughter, and it’s kind of a bittersweet bit of advice from someone who’s seen the world and has lived through many things and saying to their son, “Listen, you know, the world is beautiful, but it’s also a hard place, and it’s a complicated place. And I wish I could be here with you until the end, but there will be a point where I have to leave, and you’re going to be by yourself, and I just want you to know that it’s all part of the great journey of life.” And it’s been a song that’s really carried me through all the sort of trials and tribulations in my life. You know, we’ve had some losses in my family, and I’m a single father, my baby’s two years old, and it’s a song that’s really made me think about what it means to be a father and how to give your kids a sense of hope, a sense of faith in the universe, no matter what it throws at you, that you never lose that sense of wonder and that sense of magic, that every day is a gift. And I really am, it really is a, it’s the deepest gift my father could’ve given me, which is really some life experiences and some wisdom put to words and music. So it’s a song that I’m so deeply connected to and is about me, and also it was for me, and it’s something that I carry with me through my life.
Thank you for sharing so much, Jesse, really. Can we play that clip, please, Emily?
No, I think, sorry, David, if I can interject, I think the clip kind of jumps around now, if Jesse’s going to leave. The clip isn’t of “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World,” by the way. It’s about the, from the documentary we made when we-
Documentary.
When we made the album, and but you’ll see Johnny dancing with Jesse on his shoulders, et cetera, et cetera, during that clip a little later.
Very cute.
So for those people-
I was a cute baby.
Who do you want to listen to it, sorry, David and Hilt, for those of us or for those people who are on who do want to listen to it, can you just say the name of the song and where they’ll find it, the clip?
Yeah, well, it’s “Cruel, Crazy-”
“Beautiful World.”
“Beautiful World.”
“Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World.” It’s available, you’ll find it by Johnny Clegg and Savuka on any of the streaming services, on Apple Music or Amazon or Spotify.
Thank you, thank you.
If anybody would like to email us through Lockdown, we can put you in touch as well, yeah. Okay, could you introduce the clip? Well, you just have Hilton on-
Jess, are you, Jess, are you running?
Oh, thank you, guys. This has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege, and I’ve actually prerecorded some of my thoughts and ideas about some of the upcoming topics. So I wish I could stay, but I have recorded some personal perspectives on the rest of the presentation. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Wendy. Thanks, Hilt. Thanks, David. Lots of love.
Thanks, Jess.
Thank you, Jesse.
Lots of love.
Thank you so much for everything.
And Jess, good, as you know, we’ll have you on as a musician yourself and to tell your story.
I would love that.
Thank you for joining Lockdown, the Lockdown family.
Thank you, Wendy. Thank you. It’s a great honour, and enjoy the rest of the presentation. I wish I could stay for it, but I’ll watch the prerecorded.
And my best to your mom and to Joan. Thanks, take care. Thanks, good luck for tonight.
Thank you!
Yeah, good luck for the show, great.
Okay, cheers.
Cheers, cheers. Okay, if we could show-
David, sorry, so if we can go back to, you know, sorry, I’m jumping in, but I’m just, to try and get back to our sequence.
Sure.
We’re still talking about the early days of Savuka. Anyway, in France, one great little story was that one night, I mean, this is to show the immense popularity that Johnny was enjoying in France. We had a show booked at the one stadium in Lyon, and it turned out that Michael Jackson had a show booked the same night in the other stadium in Lyon, and he cancelled with only 6,000 tickets sold, and we sold out 45,000 seats. And the next day in the newspaper, the headline was, “It seems that the French people prefer the white man who wants to be black than the black man who wants to be white.”
That’s a stunning story, Hilton. Thank you, that’s brilliant.
We can just maybe show you a little bit more of the clip at the Zenith of one of the ways that Johnny incorporated the Zulu dance sequence into kind of an entertaining format.
Great.
You can just feel Johnny so deep inside it all, eh, Hilton?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Great. Did you share with us-
So the following-
Yeah, go for it.
Sorry, David, you asked the question.
[David] I think go for it. Go for it.
Yeah, so the second album that was number two when this album was number one was African, “Shadow Man,” and that became a huge hit in Canada as well. And Johnny was booked to perform at the Montreal Jazz Festival, which is an annual festival that’s been going forever, and it’s still going today, and they’d set up this huge screen in the centre of the city. And almost each day the week before, Jean Duchesne, who was the guy who booked the festival, was calling me and saying, “We’ve had to add new screens on every street corner” to the point where by the end of the week when the show was on, I think there was, in the downtown area of Montreal, it was screens on every corner, and it was the biggest crowd they’d had to date, certainly, of any artist performing at the Montreal Jazz Festival.
Amazing, amazing, huge. Okay, can we go on to the next clip, please, Emily? Yeah, if you want to introduce this, Hilton.
Sure, so this was the clip we were talking about. There was a documentary called “Revolution with a Smile” that was made when we were about to release “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World,” and it was filmed in L.A. while we were recording, and some of it was filmed at a party at my house, and you might have an opportunity to see Johnny directing with Jesse. It’s also some footage in my studio, just very quickly.
When you sit down and kind of go through the whole thing, logically and intellectually, it seems like it’s never going to happen, you know. But you get on stage or you go and you see a movie or you do something, and there is a feeling and an energy that is created, and that’s what I wanted this album to do, to say that there is still a fund of goodwill. There’s still a, we will survive, we will see it through, and let’s look at those patterns of repression, oppression. Let’s look at the patterns of struggle, how struggle creates new things, new life, and let’s smile at that.
The one thing I’m always confident of with Johnny Clegg is that no matter what criticism is thrown at him, there’s such authenticity there that if it was ever, if ever anybody wanted to actually try and do an undercover operation and actually bare everything, Johnny’s story is 100% what you see is what you get. ♪ Woman be my country, until my country can be mine ♪ ♪ Hide me deep inside your borders ♪ ♪ In these dark and troubled times ♪ ♪ Remember me my innocence before ♪ ♪ I drowned in a sea of lies ♪ ♪ Woman be my country ♪
[Narrator] “Woman Be My Country” . “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World” .
Sheer beauty. Okay, if we can go on to the next clip, please, next slide. Thanks, could you speak to the image here, please, Hilton? You know, with Dudu and about David Webster.
Sure, so, yeah, just to prove how cruel and crazy as well as beautiful this world is, when we were recording the “Cruel, Crazy” album, the following album, there was twice while we were recording in Los Angeles, there were calls that Johnny had lost a close friend. During the recording of “Cruel, Crazy,” he was called back to South Africa because his very good friend David Webster had been assassinated by the anti-apartheid government, or by the apartheid government, sorry. And then while we were recording the “Heat, Dust and Dreams” album, he got a call to say that Dudu had unfortunately perished in a faction fight in Zululand, the cause of which we were never quite sure about.
And just to add on to that, the impact was so huge when people knew in South Africa about Dudu and then about David Webster, probably one of the most important scholars to live in South Africa, assassinated, as Hilton said, by the apartheid police. Okay, if we could go on to the next clip, please. Thanks, so this is obvious here, Johnny, obvious, you know, with the prince and getting his OBE, one of many remarkable global awards, just to start to show the global impact of his music, of his life journey, extraordinary, and touching so many people everywhere, cultures, places, and touching obviously the top of English aristocracy and elsewhere. If we could go onto the next slide, please. This is just one of the lists of some of Johnny’s main international awards. And you start to see a career, which started as a 14-year-old, going to a flat in Johannesburg, learning guitar, learning dancing with migrants in the tough conditions of the hostels on the gold mines in Johannesburg. And there’s a massive career, you know, and some of the international awards. I mean, you can have a look Here for yourself, the Chevalier, the Grammy Award nomination, and so many others as well, extraordinary arc, which goes parallel with everything we’ve been speaking about of Johnny’s journey. If we can show the next slide, please. And then of course, South African awards as well. And you know, one can have a look and see, so from South Africa, how things started to really take off as well as globally. Anything you wanted to add in here, Hilton, about the awards?
I don’t, there’s not much to add, you know. He was given so many awards by so many people, including a doctorate at Dartmouth, and we have to thank Dartmouth for allowing us to use that, those clips from his talk there to the Montgomery Fellowship there.
Great, okay, we’ll go on to the next slide, please. Thanks, Emily, so perhaps Hilton, could you introduce Jesse and “I’ve Been Looking”?
Sure, sure, so in 2015, we all got, I got this crushing call from Johnny to say that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he went through hell, obviously, in terms of having the surgery, and the strength that he showed throughout that period was just unbelievable, to the point where he was still able to come back a couple of years later in the middle of everything and do a tour and also make a final album, which he did with Jesse, and I think let Jesse talk about that in these next two clips.
Okay, if we can show them please, Emily.
“I’ve Been Looking” is a very personal song to my father and I, and it came out of a very difficult moment in both of our lives. As a young singer-songwriter, I was really trying to find my own sound and my own artistic identity, and so for a long time, me and my dad didn’t connect through music. We didn’t perform together. We didn’t write together. I kind of wanted to find my own thing. Even though we were very close in every other aspect, this was just something that I felt I needed to safeguard in order to carve out my own space. But then in 2015, he got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the diagnosis was very serious. And it’s amazing what a moment like that can do to your own sense of priorities and your own hierarchy of what’s important to you. And I suddenly realised that this would be maybe our last chance to make music together and connect in that way, and I also realised that it would be something that I regretted if we never got to do that. And so this song was a part of a recording project that ended up being my father’s final album that I co-wrote and co-produced with him, and it was the first time that we got into studio together, first time really writing music together and ultimately performing it together. So it was a beautiful experience, and it was something that I’m very grateful that we got to do. The song is about the things in life that you can’t replace, the things that make you who you are, the forces that hold you together, those gravitational forces that no matter what moment you’re in, no matter what time or space you’re in, there’s just these things that keep us going and keep us feeling connected to our past and to our future. And for us, me and my dad, one of those things was our family. And so it’s really a celebration of family and a celebration of the deep connections that we have with each other. And it’s also a song that allowed us to express something very special about our connection, and I’m very grateful that we found the moment and we found the time and the energy to create this thing, even though my dad was going through such a difficult time with his illness. You know, there’s so many times in life where you never get to say what someone really means to you. You know, the moment passes or you never find the words. And this song was really a chance for us to say that thing and to celebrate each other and just to acknowledge something deep in our connection. And so I’m very proud and grateful that we got to make this song.
Thanks, Emily, if we could show it, no one could say that better. ♪ I’ve been living in an empty room ♪ ♪ Walking in someone else’s shoes ♪ ♪ Oh, well, it’s hard to find yourself ♪ ♪ I’ve been waiting on another view ♪ ♪ I’ve been holding out the light for you ♪ ♪ Oh, well, it’s hard to even tell ♪ ♪ Looking at the sky, and I’m wondering how I got here ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ All I want to do is tell you 'about my fear ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Standing on the edge and looking at your face ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel, to tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ These are the things I can’t replace ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh, oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh, oh ah oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh, oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh, oh ah oh oh ♪ ♪ Looking at the sky, and I’m wondering how I got here ♪ ♪ Oh ey oh, oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ All I want to do is tell you 'about my fear ♪ ♪ Oh ey oh, oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ Standing on the edge and looking at your face ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh oh ♪ ♪ Standing on the edge and looking at your face ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh oh ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ To tell you how I feel ♪ ♪ Oh ah oh ey oh ♪ ♪ I’ve been looking for a brighter day ♪ ♪ I’ve been looking for the words to say ♪ ♪ Oh, well, it’s hard to even tell ♪
Thanks, Emily. Pure beauty. If we could show the next slide, please. Okay, perhaps Hilton, would you introduce the last bit as we move to the end of the presentation of the Final Journey tour?
Sure, well, as I said earlier, it was just unbelievable the strength that Johnny found to do the tour. And maybe I’ll give you an anecdote at the end of this clip, but this is Jesse’s explanation or his feelings about that period of their lives.
Yeah.
When my father finished his first about of chemo, he decided that he wanted to do one last tour, one last chance to perform music, one last chance to connect with his fans. And so he announced the Final Journey tour, which I was a part of, performed with him and travelled with him, and it was a very extensive tour on three different continents. It was over 50 shows, and it was just, it was an incredible and intense experience for both of us. There was a lot of shows and a lot of travel, and every single night, his performance in that place, whatever city we were in, it was his last time playing there. So every night was a farewell, and it was such a profound mix of joy and sadness and celebration and also a goodbye. It was just this, both feelings were present all the time. You know, it was like the joy of this music but the sorrow that this was the last time, every single night for months on end. And it was just, it really gave me such a beautiful view into what my father had achieved and how his music had connected with people and resonated with them so deeply and how his life was like a, was a vision of what the world could be, and he’d lived that life. He’d lived a life of principle, and people just connected with it in such a beautiful way. And I was very happy that he got to see his legacy play out before he died. He got to experience people who had been touched by his music and that this music would live on. He got to see that before he passed, and I think that that brought him a lot of courage and a lot of strength.
So it’s wonderful when the artist can be loved and supported by his audience to get him through something. There was a sense of this energy exchange that was just amazing. It was also a difficult tour for me as his son. He was ill at the time. He had to, he was on lots of medication. I had to make sure that he was healthy and that he was okay, and there were many times where he would get off stage and be completely exhausted. I mean, he was dancing and explaining the songs, and I mean, they’d play a two-hour set, and it was just a very physical and intellectual experience. You know, he’d really wanted to cover all his music and all his body of work for these final shows, so it was quite a taxing show for him. And I would watch him every night from the side of stage and just make sure he was okay, and he just, his incredible stamina and strength and stubborn determination to finish this tour, he didn’t cancel a single show. I was so impressed by that, and it just showed me what a true artist looks like, what someone who is dedicated and passionate about their art and their truth, how it can just carry you through. So it was a real lesson for me as a son, as a songwriter, as an artist, and a man, as a man, just to see someone who is committing to something and finishing it. So I learnt a lot from that experience, and I was very grateful to be a part of it.
Great, would you like to add anything, Hilton?
Sure, well, if we flip to the next photograph, I can tell a little bit of a story of the final tour show in Johannesburg. These two photographs basically can be perfect bookends for the beginning, certainly of the international career, and the end of the career. The left-hand photograph is the one we showed yesterday of the launch of Juluka in England with our friend John Craig, who was our record company there, and remained our music sub-publisher in England, and the same four of us backstage at the end of the show in Johannesburg. John and I had arranged that he would come down to the show and surprise Johnny. When we went backstage at the intermission, we found Johnny lying on the floor just about in tears, in absolute pain. And he sort of expressed, he pointed, said, “Look, I cut my stomach, and you know, still haven’t healed properly.” And I really thought there was no ways he was going to go back onto the stage. But he got called, he was helped up. John and I went back into the audience, and out came John and did an hour at the end of the second half of the show, dancing with the sons of the people that he used to dance with at the hostels. Looked like there was just nothing had ever changed. And at the end of the show, I went back, and I said, you know, again, he was absolutely exhausted. I said, “How did you do that?” And he said, “I don’t know, I just, I go out there, and something possesses me, and I’m able to just do it. It’s not really, you know, I lose all perspective of what’s going on around me.”
Thanks so much for sharing that, Hilton. Really, really powerful. We’re going to end it with Johnny and one of the great, great icons of all of our lives and eras. Going to show that in a moment. And just to say that a huge thank you to Hilton and to Jesse, to Lauren, Judy, Emily, the team, Wendy, everybody for putting, you know, that we’ve all come together to make this presentation and in the spirit of celebration of a remarkable life of Johnny Clegg on so many levels we’ve spoken about, which I don’t want to go into now, but not just a musician, but so many other aspects, and as a beacon of hope, a beacon of an ideal to aspire towards for many, many people, not only in South Africa, but globally. We all want to thank you for coming with us on this journey over these two presentations of a celebration of a remarkable, unique South African life. And we’re going to play out with Johnny with another huge icon.
Well, it is music and dancing-
[Audience Member] Yeah!
that makes me at peace with the world. And at peace with myself. But I don’t see much movement at the back there, you know? I would like us to join, let’s just repeat, let’s just repeat it.
Okay.
Come and repeat it. Let’s all join! ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪ ♪ Asimbonanga ♪
Okay, thanks, everybody, for sharing, and we can go on to questions now. If we can open that, please. Give us a minute. Oh, wait, I can open it here. Okay, so I’ll feed this on to to you, Hilton, as you know, as we spoke.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: So Marian asks, “In his book, Johnny mentions there was an absence of a consistent male figure in his life. Was it the warrior and male-oriented culture of the traditional Zulu that resonated with him, that gave him a sense of belonging in a welcoming, dominant male culture?”
A - I think absolutely. I think Jesse alluded to it a little earlier as well. No question that this gave Johnny a home and a sense of some kind of belonging,
- I think, yeah, it’s, thanks for that, and thank you for your question. You know, Marian, because it’s, as you say, he writes about it quite a lot in his book and a sense of, as Hilton’s saying, of belonging and attachment. There’s another part in the book where he mentions identity is attachment in the most fundamental sense. And of course, part of it would be the male figure the parental guiding male figure.
Q: Marian asks again, “How about Johnny’s mother, Johnny’s mother’s benign neglect? If she had been more watchful, she might have for forbidden him from venturing into the flats where Zulus worked in Yeoville, a dangerous environment at the time. Indirectly, did she facilitate his mingling with Zulus in Johannesburg?”
A - Yeah, well, he talks at length about that in that Dartmouth, obviously we couldn’t show the whole talk, but you know, Muriel was a singer who spent many nights out, leaving Johnny on his own, she-
Sorry, just to say Muriel is his mother, for those of you who haven’t read the book. So if you can go on Hilt, sorry.
Yes, yeah, Muriel, who had married Dan Pienaar, so she was when I met her known as Muriel Pienaar. Dan Pienaar was in fact the journalist for the Sunday newspapers, who ended up kidnapping his daughter, Johnny’s stepsister, and moving to Australia with someone else. But there’s no question, it was an interesting thing. I mean, obviously time-wise, there was a lot of neglect. Johnny had a lot of time to get up to mischief, I guess. But she was still a very deep-caring mother. Difficult to explain that, but there’s no question that the fact that he was able or he had the time and was effectively lonely, that that was what went, what caused him to go out in search of something else and led him to see Charlie Mzila, the Zulu guitar player whom he met on the street and ended up going to his room in an apartment building across the street.
Yeah, and now, this is an extraordinary, Miriam, thank you, extraordinary question and comment, and it’s part of the magic and the treasure of Lockdown University. Miriam writes, “Hilton, Sipho was our gardener. I have fond memories of Johnny and Sipho practising songs and Zulu dancing under the oak trees. From the beginning, what a wonderful friendship. I would never have imagined the success they would achieve. I attended many of their concerts at the Market Theatre and when they opened for Ray Charles. Grateful to having said our final goodbye to Johnny in New York.”
That’s amazing, Miriam. It was wonderful. Wendy told us yesterday that she had discovered your presence playing Bridge with her mom. And it’s just, I’d heard so much about those stories, and we’d filmed in your garden, but it’s wonderful to catch up with you after all these years, thank you.
Extraordinary, Miriam. And again, it’s the magic of Lockdown, thanks. Sally, “Thank you for introducing me to a musical genre that is totally new to me. Your section on South Africa has been an exploratory journey, thank you.” It goes on, thank you, Sally.
Q - Rhonda, “It was fabulous. What year did he perform at the jazz festival in Montreal, please?” Thanks, Rhonda from Toronto.
A - I think it would’ve been 1988, might have been '89, I’m not quite sure. I mean, the album that we were talking about was released in 1988. It was probably 1989, summer of 1989 in Montreal.
Q - Okay, and then Barry writes, “Did Johnny ever do a concert in Israel? And thanks for a brilliant presentation.”
A - Not that I’m aware of. Thank you for the question. But I’m not aware that he did, that he ever did a concert in Israel, just he was never invited. I’m sure he would’ve gone if he had been invited.
Q - And then Lawrence asks, “I know that Johnny was buried in Westpark Cemetery.” For those of you who don’t know, in Johannesburg. “Was he laid to rest in the Jewish section?”
A - An interesting story, right around that time of that Final Journey concert, my late father-in-law had passed away, and he came to the funeral. And when we left, as we were walking up to the grave, he pointed to where his mother was, had recently been buried. And at the end of the funeral, my wife, Linda, turned to me and said, “What’s happened to John?” And he had disappeared. And when we went back to the auto, he had just walked out of the office and said, “I have just booked my plot for me and Jenny.” I was in America the weekend that he passed away and couldn’t make it back to Johannesburg. I did for the memorial the following couple of days later, but I wasn’t at the funeral. And when I asked Jenny what had happened and told her that I knew that he had booked the plots, she said he forgot to pay for the plot, and they had not kept the reservation, but they actually ended up laying him to rest with all the heroes in Westpark Cemetery.
Thank you, so it just remains for me to say thanks to everybody, most importantly, all over, everywhere, different parts of the world. Thanks for coming with us on this journey as a celebration of a remarkable South African life and a remarkable human being, musician, anthropologist, you know, individual, and cultural, way beyond cultural figure, everything. And thanks again so much to Hilton and to Jesse, Wendy, and everybody who’s part of the Lockdown team in helping us make all this happen together. I don’t if you want to add anything, Hilton?
Just, no, not much that I can add other than thank you for that to Wendy and to you, David, and to the team-
Second.
For thinking about us and for allowing us to at least honour our best buddy.
Thank you, thank you, Hilt. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, David. Thank you, the whole team. Of course, Jenny, Johnny, and Jenny and the Clegg team hold a very, very special space in our heart, and we could never have done anything on South Africa without celebrating Johnny and his contribution to the world and to music. Thank you, guys. Thanks everybody for listening, bye-bye!