Candice Heyns is hooked on music.
‘When I search for music on the net, I’m like an addict – I can literally sit for hours,’ she laughs. ‘I’m constantly looking for new artists and new sounds.’ It’s not surprising, then, that Candice has forged a career in the music industry, first working behind the scenes in promotion and management before she launched her career as a solo DJ, one half of electronic duo Blush n Bass, a radio and TV presenter, and a budding businesswoman.
‘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).
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’.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
‘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.
‘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.
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.
Nils van der Linden