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Interviews Music

Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse: drumming up applause

‘You never stop learning,’ says Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, a few days after his 60th birthday. ‘You learn from the past, the present and the future, which keeps your mind evolving and helps you discover a new person in yourself.’

He should know. His insatiable curiosity is behind a music career that, over the course of five decades, has seen him be a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, industry commentator, arts and culture advocate, jazz club owner, 46664 ambassador and even Eighties pop pin-up (complete with prerequisite Afro and black leather garb).

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Interviews Music

Nik Kershaw revives the ’80s

Can’t tell Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones apart?

Don’t worry — nor can Kershaw’s infant son.

The affable singer chuckles as he tells the story: “I’ve got the CD of the 25th anniversary gig Howard did because I played on it. The front cover is a picture of Howard, and my son pointed at it and said: ‘daddy’.”

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Interviews Music

Howard Jones is still standing

He may have lost the big hair, but Howard Jones has lost none of his passion for music.

“I still really love to play live and I’m touring constantly,” he says on the phone from England. “As long as I can get up on stage, I’ll be doing it,” he laughs.

“It really is good for me because I have this heritage of hit songs that people know and it’s such a pleasure then to play them for people so they can join in, sing along, and recall a part of their life with the songs.”

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Interviews Music

Watershed are laying new tracks

Watershed have spent the past two months touring South Africa. Some would call that a slog. They call it laying down new tracks.

“What we wanted to do with this tour was go out on the road and just go back to that thing that got us into the industry, why we do this. And it’s because we love singing, we love playing music, and we love touring,” explains the group’s frontman Craig Hinds.

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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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