DELA

DELA

Putting words to paper is special, there are those times you do not know what will come out. Life’s events spur you to write, scribble, jot, so as I begin this I really don’t know how to start this....Johnny Clegg has just passed away, I didn’t realize how that would affect me, he’s been a part of my fabric long before I began my own African Adventure, so, now, here the words will tumble out, but in what form, punctuation or direction as I search for that spirit of a great heart..?

I still remember where I was when I heard John Lennon had been shot, I was sitting in an open carriage on a British Rail train from Piccadilly in Manchester on my way to Bristol, a mind numbing clickety clack journey, where sleep eludes the traveler, the skies were darkening, the day was losing its shine and I had this urge to write something down, as if I had to communicate in some fashion to everyone around the anger I was feeling, why anger ? My lack of understanding of death perhaps, but it is as real now in my memory as that day when I thought the music really would die.

I still have that musing, those words came out in the form of a song, silently on paper but I was screaming at the top of my lungs. Yes, I still have the original draft in my youthful scrawl. Those were the days long before laptops and the ability to type anywhere, or the avenue of social media to share the teenage angst, a fairly simpler time I dare say.

I have some experience now, I should be calmer, but words need to be said.

“A bottle of white, a bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rose instead
We'll get a table near the street in our old familiar place
You and I, face to face

A bottle of red, a bottle of white, It all depends upon your appetite
I'll meet you any time you want In our Italian Restaurant…..”

Songs and music conjure up every emotion and as you understand the lyrics of a song they can get into the fabric of your being. I have no idea why the Billy Joel song is in my head as I so desperately want to share about Johnny Clegg, shouldn’t I be using the cliché of “The Crossing” or “Take my Heart Away” even “African Shadow man”

It’s as though stories in song can have parralletic affect,( made up word alert)  the parallel of maybe a different song to avoid the wave of emotion, who knows… let me just apologize, it works in my head as i hear the tune and these are those words tumbling out, you know, just a story, plain and simple from beginning to end. None the less the sense of feels you get as you listen to Billy and how he orates to us through the narrative, you could indeed start your relationship with Johnny as you sit down together to enjoy a meal.

Songs, you use them to escape, sometimes to drive you, to express anger, to get you through, to get you to dance, to meet people, to express feelings, to get married to, my brother hit a home run with Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me”

 Or however irrelevant or even irreverent, it’s the song or music played at a funeral, my sister gets that home run, with “Dancing Queen” by Abba playing as everyone filed past her casket.

Songs.

 

“Things are okay with me these days, got a good job, got a good office
Got a new wife, got a new life and the family's fine.
We lost touch long ago, you lost weight I did not know you could ever look so nice after So much time

Do you remember those days hanging out at the village green
Engineer boots, leather jackets and tight blue jeans
drop a dime in the box play the song about New Orleans
Cold beer, hot lights my sweet romantic teenage nights”

For Fifty pence ( earned from mowing graves at the local churchyard) in the late 70’s early 80’s I was buying up 45’s bringing them back and stacking them on my turn table, I had this urge to pick up for about a pound this great looking African shaped clear vinyl disc, looming large from the center was this white guy amid these cool tribal looking Zulu warriors, I didn't know what the song was all about, nor did i know the musical journey i was destined now to take, what i did know was that the disc looked Hella cool !!

That disc stayed pinned to my teenage wall for some time before I even thought of playing it, the name Juluka was already indelibly stamped, but what about the music…….African Idea, Make the future clear…We are the ....

Brenda and Eddie were the popular steady’s and the king and the queen
Of the prom. Riding around with the car top down and the radio on,
Nobody looked any finer or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more Than that out of life
Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive.

Brenda and Eddy were still going steady in the summer of '75
When they decided the marriage would be at the end of July
Everyone said they were crazy Brenda you know you're much too lazy
Eddie could never afford to live that kind of life.
But there we were wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye’

I don’t know if the boy from Bolton knew he would follow the boy from Bacup to South Africa, but there I was waving England goodbye.

Johnny Clegg was born in Bacup, Lancashire, England on 7^th June 1953. When his parents divorced six years later, he moved with his Rhodesian mother to Zimbabwe before finally settling in South Africa.

I know this because I thought it was kinda cool that I was also a kid from Lancashire, Bolton, Lancashire to be precise, the absolute metropolis of exactly nowhere, just down the road quite literally from Bacup, As it always does, Time Passages and now, a few years on, I’m moving to South Africa, turns out it wont be the last time my path with Johnny will cross in life.

Already right up there in South African music culture, I had now seen the man I lovingly called Johnny Legs, due to his penchant for Zulu tribal dancing at his shows, albeit from a distance among a crowd of road weary,musically deprived South African youth, at the then named Ellis Stadium. Big hair always prevalent in those days, the country still under oppressive apartheid rule, the radio station ( for there really was only one !!) decided to put on its “Big Birthday Bash”, so, as the forty thousand strong ran onto the Springboks hallowed ground, really with no idea of how to act or behave, this remember had never happened in South Africa before, and even if I had some experience, by already being front and center for the global jukebox at Live Aid, Knebworth Park for Queens final show with Freddy and Wembley stadium, to see Genesis get their Invisible Touch with Phil Collins in their heyday… 

It didn’t matter, the tension was real, would the mix work, just two days before there had

been major uprisings as people marched on Jo’burg demanding fair wages…. 

We danced the night way to Brenda Fassie, Stimela, Mango Groove, Die Gereformede Blues band and the worst kept secret of the night Johnny Clegg reuniting with Sipho to perform as Juluka for the first time since their split, I think I might have mentioned I have the knack of being in the right place at the right time sometimes….

Now however, a wee bit older and debatabley wiser, with many, many concert experiences under the proverbial belt the chase was on.

 I knew Savuka were about to play the Village Green in Durban, for the first show of their 1990 Savuka world tour. 
Remember this is the musically starved apartheid ravaged South Africa of the 80’s, but somehow crossing the cultural divide Johnny was as big in South Africa as …. Well name any western artist who’s had any success …just ask Paul Simon, or Peter Gabriel…

Posse now in tow, friends, curious as to how we would pull off this general admission show, that was expected to haul in twenty thousand to a tented venue capable of holding realistically maybe twelve at best !!  It’s a knack I have for some reason, so with this band of pals we now filed into the tent pitched on the Durban beachfront, this small troupe dodged left, ducked right, crept, pushed, danced, our way through the warm up act of Claire Johnstone's Mango Groove until, there we were face to face with the white Zulu himself, yellow painted trousers, black waist coat. I was entranced and elevated to another level, I do truly remember the experience i still now want to remain wrapped in that existential flow, for the life of me couldn’t give you the set list, it just happened.
For good measure however, documentation of events were transposed to the Natal Witness by Anthea Garman, one of the shorter members of our troupe. 
You can’t shake these moments….. I haven't, and as if proof was needed to explain this out of body experience, i kept all the original press clippings. Fortuitous?

“They got an apartment with deep pile carpet and a couple of paintings from Sears
A big waterbed that they bought with the bread they had saved for a couple
of years. They started to fight when the money got tight and they just didn't count on
The tears. They lived for a while in a very nice style but it's always the same in the end
They got a divorce as a matter of course and they parted the closest
Of friends.
Then the king and the queen went back to the green but you can never go back
There again. Brenda and Eddie had had it already by the summer of '75
From the high to the low to the end of the show for the rest of their lives
They couldn't go back to the greasers the best they could do was pick up the pieces We always knew they would both find a way to get by that's all I heard about
Brenda and Eddie can't tell you more than I told you already and here we are wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye…”

So, just like the song, there I was waving goodbye to South Africa. 
There is something about an African sky, it is hard to say goodbye to, it lingers in creational splendor supporting the southern cross, it wraps the guttural sounds of lions in the distance waking up from their slumbers, yet coaxes you to your own as you lay smiling under the thatched roof of your rondavel, I did hope that as I pursued life’s adventure some more I would once again find myself under its watchful gaze…

That gaze came a lot quicker and in a more bizarre format that I even expected as Johnny’s and my paths crossed once more, late 1990 this time in Seattle WA, at the Moore Theater to be exact,  Osiyeza, Osiyeza, proved true he was coming, Johnny brought that very same Savuka world tour to the eagerly awaiting predominantly ex pat South African crowd, for the next two hours i felt myself melted back into the African Sky Blue and as i stood mid front stalls, fist clenched in the air, I realized even then he WAS the Great Heart.

The lump in my throat needs to subside a little, these are beautiful memories that I have no idea at all how to put in words, they are vivid multicolored videos set on repeat in my mind, I can even feel the pulse of Dela as I dance, jump, sing at the front of many shows to come, too many to recall, but, I really do think I know why the dog howls at the moon….!

He called it the Final Journey, I knew he was sick, but the undertaking of a farewell tour this size lulled me into the false sense of security that he would always be around.

I did have two tickets for the show, it had had been marked on the calendar, on the fridge as a don’t you dare book anything else on this date, type of event, but something stirred that I needed to do something a little more special. So as the show spun dangerously close, I took that old concert approach you know where you move left, dodge right, scooch ever so much closer to the…. Front line of the ticket office! 
The young lady, staring blankly back, faded pink hair, pierced eyebrow, t-shirt advertising the Clash who I am not sure she even knew who they were... here goes nothing, excuse me I know that tickets often get returned or maybe just maybe…"would you like these two front row seats", she gets me..not sure if a transaction has been secured quicker, I thank the gal, I cant hold back the excitement, I tell her she must go and see the white Zulu, with a humdrum OK coming back through the glass, she has no history or frame of reference, sorry love your loss.

The tickets I had went to two South African friends who had never seen the legend but had always wanted to, and rushed to the venue they now thank me even more for the opportunity, we didn’t know how little time we had left.

I sat at the front with my wife, really not knowing how fortunate this was, The set list was what you wanted, stories, songs, more stories, dances, his son Jesse doing a duet with his dad, again the lively Dela resounding, this wasn’t a man ravaged with Pancreatic cancer, this was a guy dancing across the centuries.

It’s a Cruel Crazy Beautiful World…. and i am so glad you lived in it.

I am fortunate in life to live in it also, my experiences are not over, far from it, my words are not clever, so simply put I shall cherish the memory I have of meeting the man in person and for the many many shows.
hamba kahle my friend, go well...

The Final Journey Balboa Theater San Diego

Photos are all snaps taken by me #bennysantiniproductions
#grahamsataconcertagain



"If I could find the voice that says the words that capture you,
 I think I know why the dog howls at the moon."
Johnny Clegg, from  Dela 1989