JOHNNY CLEGG Q & A
Q1: How did the name
Juluka come about – what does it mean, and why is it important to the
meaning of the band?
Q2: You mention the cultural conflict within the band as
regards, musical styles – how did this conflict play itself out during
rehearsals?
Q3: Who was the final Juluka band line-up?
Q4: Specific memories of performances with Juluka?
Q5: Your approach to Savuka was very different – describe
why and how?
Q6: Who was in Savuka?
Q7: How did Dudu Zulu die?
Q8: What has this kind of loss meant to you as a person
and musician?
Q9: What, in your mind was the difference in approach between
Juluka and Savuka?
Q10: What does Sipho Mchunu do now?
Q11: Sipho has issues with identity, past and present,
what does that mean?
Q12: What was the response to your music by the SABC –
their reasons for not initially playing the music?
Q13: In 1984 you appeared at a conference for CMJ with
Johnny Rotten – what were your perceptions of John Lydon and his issues?
Q14: How did you feel when your record company gave Joan
Baez your song to record?
Q15: Is there still a place for a band like Juluka in
SA? If so, why?
Q16: Can you give advice to someone starting a band?
Q17: What’s your favourite guitar?
Q1:
How did the name Juluka come about – what does it mean, and why is it
important to the meaning of the band?
A: Juluka
was the name of Sipho’s bull. It was a white bull with a black and a
pink eye. In Zulu tradition one installs, or one places a bull as a
"head" of the cattle, as a kind of a chief over the rest of
the herd and Sipho had installed this bull. We were looking for a name
for the band and I thought Juluka was a very strong word – it means
‘sweat’ – and so the bull became part and parcel of the Juluka logo.
The symbol of it you’ll often see on albums. You’ll also see ploughs,
and other very rural, traditional iconography which we used to promote
the concept of, you know, a white university student who’s met with
a Zulu migrant labourer and these two worlds are coming together.
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Q2: You mention
the cultural conflict within the band as regards, musical styles – how
did this conflict play itself out during rehearsals?
A: Basically
I think, where there is more than one creative person involved in a
band, you tend to find that it’s an incredibly healthy kind of conflict,
unless people’s egos are really very, very fragile. I think what tends
to happen is that if somebody has written a song and brings it to the
band as an offering, the band tends to initially take the lead from
that person – from the original creator – and then they start to make
suggestions. Sometimes the suggestions change the song. That’s where
the conflict comes in, because when you wrote the song you had a very
clear and very strong feeling about the way it was going, what it was
trying to depict and represent, and the kind of musical style you wanted
it to have. Then suddenly off it goes in a completely new direction.
At this point, you either have to stand back and distance yourself from
it, saying, "what is good for the song? " You know, it’s like
bringing up a child, "what is good for my child?"
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Q3: Who was the
final Juluka band line-up?
A: The
final Juluka lineup was myself, Sipho Mchunu, Derek de Beer – drums,
Gary van Zyl – bass and Scorpion Madondo on flute. Then we had itinerant
keyboard players who came in depending on what we wanted to do and there
was quite a high turnover of that.
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Q4: Specific
memories of performances with Juluka?
I think
the big highlight for me was when we were pitted against Harare. The
band Harare had just done triple platinum, and we were invited to basically
play on a festival with them at the Jabulani amphitheatre. 15 000 people
were there, and in that moment we gave such an incredible presentation,
including the dancing, that people started leaving the stadium when
Harare – who were booked to play after us – came on. They had basically
come to see us. And the sense of having arrived, it was our first moment
of realizing that we had actually arrived – we are up here with the
best that the country can offer - that for us was a very important moment.
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Q5: Your approach
to Savuka was very different – describe why and how?
A: Juluka
was always two guitars, drums and at times a keyboard, sometimes no
keyboard. I’d say, only as Juluka went more international that the keyboard
became more of a soundscaping instrument. Technically, most of the traditional
Zulu stuff that we did was just drums, bass, guitars and vocals. Savuka
was the exact opposite. It was one guitar and two keyboards, because
we were basically entering the rock period where keyboard was actually
replacing guitar at one stage. So, a lot of our work was presented on
keyboard, although it might have been written on guitar initially. That
was the main difference.
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Q6: Who was in
Savuka?
A: Myself,
Derek de Beer on drums, Solly Letwaba on bass guitar, Dudu Ndlovu on
percussion – he was also known as Dudu Zulu, Keith Hutchinson on keyboards,
flute and sax, and Steven Mavuso on keyboards. Andy Innes joined later
as guitarist.
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Q7: How did Dudu
Zulu die?
A: Dudu
was assassinated in a very convoluted conspiracy relating to a taxi
war that unfolded in his area in 1993. The killers were never brought
to book and of the five people who were present when the shots were
fired at night outside his homestead, four have subsequently been killed
in tribal feuds and taxi wars.
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Q8: What has
this kind of loss meant to you as a person and musician?
A: Dudu
was a very important person in the band because he was the percussionist
and dancer, and he was also somebody who was a "shinga", or
great warrior. He was a very forthright and honest person. He would
never allow the band to eat itself up. On the road people might get
a little tipsy or drunk or get pissed off in a show and start backbiting.
Dudu would basically make sure that what was said in that little moment
would be raised by him. He would say to the drummer " listen, you
said this about Keith, it’s wrong because Keith is this and that and
whatever." "Keith, when you do this, you must realize you’re
part of a band." So, he was always there as a kind of a mediator,
but he wasn’t a diplomat – he mediated but he wasn’t diplomatic. He
would say it as it was. Just as an important mainstay, he also brought
a tremendous impact to the visual side of Savuka as the dancer and percussionist.
He was always moving. He developed a style of playing that was unique
to himself. In terms of my own development, personally, as a dancer
and as a member of the community, he was very important. You must realize
that I met him in 1978 and he taught me most of the dancing repertoire
that I employ today on the stage, or the various competitions that I
partake in. So, the loss of Dudu was really the loss of a mentor, the
loss of a warrior friend. Also somebody who had his own blindsides and
shortcomings. But his life was hard, he was an orphan, his father drowned
in the Mooi River when he was a young, young boy. He had no brothers,
he became an orphan, he had to grow up in another family, and he was
always a second class citizen in the families that he grew up in. He
had a very tough upbringing and in the end, he managed to make right
and that’s a very important part of the story. In the song that I dedicated
to him, " The Crossing", there’s a section in the lyric which
says that I never knew my father either. I met my father for the first
time when I was twenty-one. So, for Dudu and myself, the father figure
has been a very important measure of our ability to deal with those
masculine issues, which pop up from time to time. And, in this particular
song, I’m trying to say our fathers where never there. We had such a
powerful sense of our father – that he was our perpetual audience. There
was this perpetual audience, this invisible audience. Even as a warrior,
as he’s being beaten, he’s smiling to himself because he knows that
his father can see that he can take it. He can take the pain, he can
take the damage, he can take what life throws at him because he feels
that his father is with him, and so that was a very important part of
the second verse.
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Q9: What, in
your mind was the difference in approach between Juluka and Savuka?
A: There
were two differences. Juluka initially was a cultural exploration, it
was a crossover project, which had no political agenda. It was a cultural
agenda – which in South Africa was political. You couldn’t mix cultures
and get away with it politically because of the cultural segregation
law. We came together because Sipho and I were excited by the cultural
aspect of it. Savuka was launched in the state of emergency, 1986. The
entire album was hard-hitting, it was directly political and it had
very strong political metaphors. That’s the album I wrote the song for
Mandela and released it commercially inside South Africa, that’s the
album which was also restricted and banned, the video was heavily banned.
We were more engaged. I joined the UDF and I became a cultural activist
inside South Africa as well as outside. There was a far more direct
political and conscious understanding of the fact that I had to have
a position, I had to have a point of view and I embraced that and I
worked at it. The second difference is that musically, Savuka tended
to be more of an international melange, it was more rock, it was more
hard, it was a harder edge sound and we were not drawing just on Zulu
guitar. I drew on many other influences. I drew on Zimbabwean guitar
music, I drew on Zairian music, I drew on Latin-American rhythms and
even in the last album I drew on a traditional Hindu prayer song – which
in fact we are singing in Hindi. On that album you’ll hear a Zulu /
Celtic / Hindi melange, but within a more rock, western format.
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Q10: What does
Sipho Mchunu do now?
A: Sipho
is a farmer in Natal, on the Tugela River and he farms a variety of
livestock. He farms every kind of poultry from wild, to chickens, ducks,
geese, pigeons, if it’s got feathers he’s farming it. He’s also a very
keen cattle farmer. He has a whole irrigation and water system, which
he’s developed, and now he’s living in the rural areas.
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Q11: Sipho has
issues with identity, past and present, what does that mean?
A: Sipho’s
issues with identity mean that he has to make a choice between rural
or urban, a tribal traditionalist or to make the crossing into the urban
environment. He’s always resisted that and it’s always been an issue.
He’s always very solidly followed his star. He’s always had plans to
return home, he takes the money he makes from music and reinvests it
into the tribal traditional system. He then translates it into traditional
terms of wealth – in other words to have a big house, many wives, and
to be a traditional farmer, living within the seasonal cycle of life
and death. Technically he’s had some good years, but he’s also had a
lot of problems. He’s had to deal with faction fighting, tribal wars,
massive droughts and more. There’s a song called Circle of Light, and
in this song it says I'’ saying goodbye to my tribal past and I will
step into the light, I will cross the bridge, but I realise I do not
dream in the house of my father any more. So this idea of crossing over,
moving across, has been a huge metaphor in Sipho’s and my life. We’ve
crossed over our music, our beliefs, our systems of metaphors, we’ve
been completely confused about who we are. I experimented with ways
of dressing, talking, food styles, everything. I tried to construct
for myself a picture or image of what I was straining for, inside. This
nameless abstract urge, which needs definition. I look at pictures of
myself in 1980 and I just want to fall over in embarrassment. I can
see my pain, that I’m not a coherent person.
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Q12: What was
the response to your music by the SABC – their reasons for not initially
playing the music?
A: The
initial response was to ban it - not in any vicious way, because initially
it wasn’t political. They banned it because of the rule, which was that
language had to be separate, as part of the cultural segregation. The
broadcasting act said that different languages had to be kept separate
and the policy of segregation and separate development meant language,
housing and culture. So if you mixed English and Zulu they would not
accept it, because they said it bastardised the language. So we fell
victim to this because we were singing in English and Zulu on the same
song. The first 18 months after releasing the music, the only way we
could get airplay was for the record company to present it as ‘international’.
Then it got played.
Later Savuka
was banned and our shows were stopped. Juluka also had a strong social
agenda, however Savuka tended to be a lot more politicised. We were
performing for the End Conscription Campaign, amongst others. In 1986
things came to a head. You were either this side or that side.
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Q13: In 1984
you appeared at a conference for CMJ with Johnny Rotten – what were
your perceptions of John Lydon and his issues?
A: From
what I remember the issues that they were dealing with were issues of
creativity and originality. Students were challenging Johnny Rotten
on his authenticity, they said he was now selling out. There was a lot
of swearing. There were many different cultural issues raised around
the profit motive. I remember a question asking why were musicians using
‘brass instruments’ in their music, as that was buying into the mainstream
. I found the debate completely peripheral, which was different to my
debate, which was simply the right to sing, or do something creative
without being banned. I said, "These are the issues of a first
world country. I come from SA and we don’t have the luxury of dealling
with these kinds of issues. These are the issues of freedom, authenticity
and validity are different to what we need in SA. I felt very estranged
from the proceedings and I couldn’t participate in the debate. The issue
of censorship was peaking in SA at the time.
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Q14: How did
you feel when your record company gave Joan Baez your song to record?
A: We had
released our song in SA, and I only heard later that she had covered
it. I wasn’t really phased by those kinds of things. I was involved
in my world, my politics, my music and my dancing. Stuff that happened
outside SA was like another planet. In that sense the cultural isolation
and boycott had worked. I was in a vacuum.
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Q15: Is there
still a place for a band like Juluka in SA? If so, why?
A: There’s
a huge need for a band like Juluka. I think that the idea of sharing
a cultural experience, experimenting and exploring ways is excellent.
It’s not just a black and white thing, but now I’m seeing that upper
class wealthy blacks have no clue about tribal African people. So there
are huge ironies and the idea of any cultural ways of reintegrating
people set apart by economics created by an emerging SA, can only aid
the way forward.
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Q16: Can you
give advice to someone starting a band?
A: I can
from hindsight, which helps me see where music is going. Music is in
a very, very dangerous place at the moment- there’s a really serious
aspect where it can become nothing more than a value-added service.
Songs are linked to products or services, similar to sports being hooked
up to sponsorship. Music has always had that really magical personality;
its ability to be outside the system of profit making is being compromised.
My advice is, keep your eye on the song and on what you really feel.
That’s what’s put you in the position of being so moved that you got
up and bought a guitar, or sang. Because you had to find a way to say
these things, and you heard it in a melody, you didn’t feel it in a
move, or see it in a picture or find it on the typewriter. It moved
you, you moved yourself. That’s important to remember above all the
convolutions that the music industry is going through.
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Q17: What’s
your favourite guitar?
A: I’m
not a guitar player. I use the instrument in a crude way, in order to
write a song. I’m not a virtuoso player and I can write a song on any
guitar.
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