Everything from gospel to kwaito features on Sipho Hotstix Mabuse’s first new album in five years. GLYNIS O’HARA talks to him
YOU hear the name Hotstix and you think Burnout and Jive Soweto even though the songs are 12 years old. Then you say that it’s a pity, but Hotstix really hasn’t done anything to equal those songs since. For Sipho Hotstix Mabuse this is a problem.
Burnout has been something of a millstone around his neck, he says. “But you can’t stop counting the sales. It still sells to this day. I got a call from someone in Holland who’d just bought my new album, as he put it. And it turned out to be Burnout. It sold over 500 000 on EP.”
It was a song that crossed the colour divide, appealing to black and white equally and this, he says, is the objective with his new album, Township Child. “Our musicians need to awaken to the reality of our socio- political situation and start focusing on the wide musical tastes of the market.”
The album features good, appealing dance tracks among the dizzily eclectic mix of maskanda, folk-ballad, reggae, jazz, gospel, jive and kwaito. Why such marked diversity? “It shows how confused I was!” he ripostes, and adds, “I felt the need for people to hear how much music there is in this country. I didn’t want to stick to one sound … “
Later, he says: “On this album I’ve tried to move away from Burnout so that people will now think `Wow! There’s more to him than just that’.”
It’s Hotstix’s first album in five years and it was recorded over a year with a range of musicians, including sax player Khaya Mahlangu, bassist Victor Masondo, trumpeter Stompie Manana and maskanda musician Umfaz’omnyama – which means “black woman” – who is actually a man. “What a performer!” enthuses Mabuse, but he can’t explain the odd choice of name. “You’ll have to ask him. He’s a great act, it’s like watching Jimi Hendrix.”
Maskanda comes from the Afrikaans musikant, explains Mabuse, and its polyrhythmic guitar style is specifically Zulu and Baca, not Xhosa at all.
He also introduces a beautifully haunting Basotho instrument, the lesiba, in the track Thaba Bosiu. Close in sound to a Jew’s harp, consisting of a wooden stick, gut and a feather, it’s used by herders in the mountains to call their sheep “and each flock knows the distinctive sound of their own herder’s lesiba. You have to belong to a particular lineage to play it,” he says, emphasising the need to preserve “almost extinct” instruments and music.
Born the child of a Zulu mother and Tswana father, Hotstix moved from Soweto to Memel, near Newcastle, when his parents split up. He was 10 years old. “It was straight from an urban setting to a rural one. I used to look after cattle, herd sheep. The move was traumatic, I can tell you.” His grandmother looked after him while his mother worked in the city.
“I didn’t like it at all … But this is how I got to interact with maskanda. A musician named uShenkele used to come to the village all the time to sing these songs.” At the same time, he took kwela sounds to the country, forming a little boys’ band and going to the church every Friday to perform. He also found a piano in the priest’s house – “it minimised the trauma”.
Nowadays his favourite music is jazz (the strains of Billie Holiday’s Don’t Explain at the interview venue were a complete distraction), and says South African jazz should be seen in its proper context. “I’m not sure people play jazz here much, it tends to get confused with marabi and township.”
The album includes the by now obligatory track in tribute to Nelson Mandela, but before you start snarling about hagiographies and national sentimentalism, it’s the best I’ve heard. Mandela himself put in some session time to re-record a section of the speech he made at the Rivonia Trial. Whether or not he was paid session fees, is not entirely clear.
But Mabuse’s personal favourite is a surprise. Called Enchanted Garden, it’s a new-age ballad in praise of his flowers. “I just love gardening,” he says. “My fans probably won’t understand the way I feel about it. But it’s a part of me and I must express it.”
He wrote and produced all the tracks himself, as well as playing drums, alto sax, flute, piano, percussion and bass. It would, he says, be “easy to play bubblegum music, but could I really call myself a serious musician, especially after so many years in the industry? I do not want to pigeon-hole myself. I want to be a total musician in the mould of Phil Collins, Sting or Al Jarreau.”
Few of the paler and younger folks realise the extent of Mabuse’s history and fame in music. Turning 45 this year, he joined a high school band at Orlando West in 1967 at the age of 15. It was called The Beaters, and included Alec Om Khaoli, Selby Ntuli, Arthur Rafapha and Monty Saitana Ndimande. “We didn’t have any intention of it becoming a professional band,” he says, but that’s exactly what happened.
It became one of the longest-running and most popular bands around – clocking in 14 years from 1967 to 1981. It did change its name though, when The Beaters toured Zimbabwe in the early 1970s. “Black consciousness was happening there in a big way. We were meant to stay six weeks, but we stayed for six months and adopted the name of the township – Harare. We developed new interests up there; there was new music coming in from all over Africa, especially Central and West Africa.
“Mozambique became independent in 1974, the liberation struggle was gaining ground in Zimbabwe and at home we had the black consciousness of Steve Biko – we were caught up in that milieu. The first album, called Harari, dedicated to the people of Zimbabwe, was such a hit here, even before [Nigerian band] Osibisa were big.”
Do Soweto’s youngsters look at him and think “old-timer”? “Ja, in a way they do, but I think they also look at me with pride and as a role model.”
His children, Naledi (12) and Phaliso (10), to whom he always refers his music, “are different though, because they grew up listening to everything from John Coltrane to Boom Shaka.”
There are two daughters in England as well, including Mpho, who’s now 20 and a “really good singer”.
Success, says Mabuse – who was feted after Burnout, taken to England, given a Virgin contract and is the recipient of much expectation, “is overwhelming for most musicians”.
“They tend to lose touch with reality and it wreaks havoc.” So how does he stay in touch with what’s real? “Maybe the fact that I’m in touch with nature helps. I love working in my garden and playing with my dogs, Tiger and Bobby.”