As Mango Groove get ready for their first ever live concert DVD recording, Claire Johnston tells us about losing her voice, reconnecting with fans, beating her nerves, spontaneity, Hong Kong, presidential inaugurations, being married to the group’s founder John Leyden, and staying sane.
Akon is a singer, songwriter, producer, and businessman with the schedule to prove it. During a whirlwind trip to Cape Town – packed with radio interviews, in-store album signings, press conferences, and a show – we manage to grab a few minutes with the man and talk cooking, Michael Jackson, ‘Sexy Chick’, and the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
When Arno Carstens steps out on the stage, alone, and starts performing ‘Bubblegum On My Boots’ as an acoustic ballad, the message is clear: he’s grown up.
Not that the Springbok Nude Girl has lost his edge – witness the distortion-drenched finale, the bottle of Jager at his feet, the burning ‘Blue Eyes’ lit up by former partner in crime Theo Crous. He’s simply matured into an articulate singer-songwriter.
Music – not hooting minibus taxis or the drone of vuvuzelas – provides SA’s real soundtrack. In a country with more music genres than official languages, there’s certainly a playlist just for you. From BLK JKS to Miriam Makeba and TKZee to Lira, South African Music Awards judge Nils van der Linden offers his picks.
They were the darlings of the ’80s, the pretty boys of pop who – alongside Duran Duran – topped the charts with hits like ‘True’ and Gold’. But the good times turned bad with an acrimonious split and, later, a bitter court battle over royalties.
However unlikely it seemed, the reunion – almost 20 years later – was inevitable.
Now in a Cape Town hotel suite fit for superstars on the comeback trail, bassist Martin Kemp and multi-instrumentalist Steve Norman tell us about their rocky past, their surprising return, and their bright future.
Gary Lightbody still remembers the first songs he ever wrote.
“They sucked big style,” he grins.
“I was 15 maybe. There’s a little room down underneath the kitchen in our house, like a little dungeon. I would go down there and turn my amp up and my parents would be in the kitchen going: ‘God, what have we done? What child of Satan have we spawned?’
The Dave Matthews Band’s seventh studio outing, ‘Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King’, smoulders into life with an impassioned sax solo — only fitting, really, for an album dedicated to the man playing with such fire in his belly.
Yes, the memory of Leroi Moore, who died suddenly last year, looms large over the album named after him. Quite appropriately then it’s a focused, no-nonsense affair — like the man himself.
“What was it that you slipped inside my drink?/ Maybe poison?” Jon Savage demands on the enigmatic fist-pumper ‘Who Do You Trust’.
No need to be so paranoid, man. His group’s second album – a quietly confident collection of steroid-enhanced stadium rockers, sleek pop anthems, and genuinely heartfelt ballads – is what few others achieve: intelligent, adventurous and damn near impossible to get out of your head.
Depeche Mode, reasons driving force Martin Gore, are “a subversive pop band, able to get away with anything”. Theirs have always been twisted songs of faith and devotion, sex and death. Musically not much has changed either, the past decade spent trying to reach the heights of best work ‘Violator’ and ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’.
Larry Mullen pounds away like the Eveready Bunny on speed. Adam Clayton’s fingers stampede up and down his bass guitar’s fretboard. With his amp dialled up to 11, The Edge fires off savage riffs of mass destruction. U2’s misfiring ‘Get On Your Boots’ certainly relies on a shock and awe approach. And yet what hits hardest is an almost throwaway line from Bono: “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations.”
And, for most of the band’s 12th studio album, the man who never shuts up about poverty, Aids, third world debt and wars between nations actually keeps his word. The Big Themes are edged out by character studies of ordinary people, himself (“Napoleon in high heels”), and, clearly unable to ditch the political entirely, an Afghan man wounded in a bomb blast.
Nils van der Linden