Author: Nils van der Linden

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Interviews

Evita Bezuidenhout: the Darling diva

Forget Madonna. Sure, she’s sold more than 300 million albums over a career of 30 years. But, as someone hailed for her constant reinvention, all she’s really done is change her outfits and dance moves every few years. Those who call her multi-talented clearly haven’t seen her films, or heard of Evita Bezuidenhout.

The most famous white woman in South Africa has been (take a deep breath) an actress, newspaper columnist, politician, TV talk show host, chef, educator, activist, author, tweeter and musical performer. But before all that, she was just known as Evangeline Poggenpoel: a timid, shy girl growing up in Bethlehem in the 1930s.

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Interviews Music

Johnny Clegg: great spirit, great heart

Elephants march in unison. Giraffes gallop across the plains. A hippo yawns. A lion sleeps. And intercut between the music video’s stock wildlife footage, a brighteyed and curly-haired young white man with an acoustic guitar performs traditional Zulu dances, shows off his stick-fighting skills and sings of his search for the spirit of the great heart.

“There’s a highway of stars across the heavens / The whispering song of the wind in the grass / There’s the rolling thunder across the savannah / A hope and dream at the edge of the sky / And your life is a story like the wind / Your life is a story like the wind.”

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Interviews Music

Shadowclub step into the light

From recording and launching their fiery debut album ‘Guns And Money’ to supporting Kings Of Leon on their South African tour, 2011 was a busy year for blues-rock trio Shadowclub. And they couldn’t be happier.

“It’s feeling amazing,” admits frontman Jacques Moolman backstage at Synergy Live in late November. “We’re working really really hard and we’re riding the wave that came when we signed our record deal at the beginning of the year.

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Movies Reviews

‘Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol’ scales new heights

Good thing IMF agent Ethan Hunt isn’t afraid of heights. He’s already leapt from a speeding train onto a helicopter inside the Channel Tunnel. He’s gone free-climbing up a 600-metre cliff-face. He’s leapt between Shaghai’s skyscrapers. So scaling the outside of the world’s highest building, Dubai’s 163-storey Bhurj Khalifa, without ropes, is all in a day’s work.

The epic action centrepiece of ‘Ghost Protocol’ easily surpasses its predecessors in terms of sheer scale and white knuckle thrills. But – with comedian Simon Pegg in tow to explain how Hunt’s adhesive climbing gloves work (“blue means glue, red means dead”) – the sequence also highlights the differences between the ‘Mission: Impossible’ films.

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Interviews Music

Toya Delazy pumps up the volume

‘Pump It On’ isn’t just four minutes of pop genius. The irrepressible summer anthem also heralds the arrival of Toya Delazy – as if from nowhere.

But it’s been a long journey from a convent primary school via Howard College’s Jazz program to the South African pop charts.

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Interviews Music

Hugh Masekela: blowing with the wind

‘Never forget where you came from,’ Louis Armstrong once told Hugh Masekela.

He never has.

Hugh remembers growing up in the KwaGuqa township outside Witbank, where women ran alongside the coal trains with tin cups to collect the nuggets that fell from the cars. He remembers playing soccer with a worn tennis ball in the gravel street, occasionally losing a big toenail when he kicked a concealed rock.

But most of all he remembers the music.

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Interviews Music

Yoav: escaping the plan

Born in Israel, raised in South Africa, a resident of New York, first successful in Denmark, Yoav knows no borders. Nor does his music – combining elements as diverse as acoustic folk and hip-hop – which has seduced people everywhere from Russia and Turkey to Tunisia and Iran.

“It’s like a Risk board,” the 36-year-old musician jokes of his songs’ global penetration which – three years after his international breakthrough – have even caught on in South Africa. That’s largely thanks to a hugely successful 2011 – his second album, ‘A Foolproof Escape Plan’, won a SAMA, ‘We All Are Dancing’ topped the 5FM charts, and he supported Tori Amos and Imogen Heap on their local tours.

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Reviews

John Cleese tells tall tales

John Cleese has been the disgruntled owner of a dead parrot, a lawyer, overconfident (and ultimately limbless) knight, clueless and belligerent hotelier, TV news reader, civil servant at the Ministry Of Silly Walks, zookeeper, cheese aficionado, Roman Centurion, and fruit-obsessed self-defence instructor.

So it’s easy to forget that, as the actual creator of these characters, the self-described “writer, actor, and tall person” is first and foremost a storyteller.

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Interviews Music

The Dirty Skirts turn on the dark

“Strike the match and light the fire/ whole word burns/ a funeral pyre,” sings Jeremy De Tolly on the lead single from The Dirty Skirts’ new album, ‘Lost In The Fall’. “It’s all gonna burn, it’s all gonna burn”.

Bit of a change then for the band best known for wanting to punch a hole in Saturday night (‘Homewrecker’) and describing dads who don’t dance (‘Daddy Don’t Disco’).

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Interviews Music

The Script are breaking even

“It’s pretty crazy at the moment,” says The Script’s drummer, Glenn Power, with just a hint of understatement. In the past month he and bandmates Danny O’Donoghue and Mark Sheehan have been as far afield as Australia, The Philippines, the Netherlands, and the United States.

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