MUSIC: Bafana Khumalo
LAST weekend’s Soul Invasion Tour at the Johannesburg Stadium was a memory lane affair rather than a young-and-with-it bash where the latest trends in dance and music ruled the night. What with Randy Crawford leading the pack of late Sixties and early Seventies crooners; The Stylistics; those kings of funk Kool and the Gang; and one of the numerous heirs apparent to Bob Marley’s throne, Maxi Priest, on the bill it could only have been a walk down memory lane.
Randy decided not to shake up the nostalgic gentility of it all. She breezed – almost too breezily – through her most recognisable songs.
At some point I seriously began to wonder whether I was listening to a radio station or seeing her live. Part of me kept expecting to hear some or other DJ from Orlando, Soweto who thinks he’s in Orlando, Florida nasally announcing, “And that was the evergreen Randy giving you a thang there called … ” I, for one, didn’t get a thang from her performance that offered any reward for having braved the increasing threat of a thundershower or the extraordinary number of ticket scalpers at the gates of the stadium.
Even when Randy performed her highly successful new version of Bob Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door it sounded like she was on the radio. It had all been processed far too often.
The Stylistics were not much better. The group, who first gained musical acclaim in the late Sixties, although choreographed and smooth as ever, seemed better suited to a country fair than a stadium concert. We swayed along to the music more out of loyalty to our generation than out of uncontrollable rhythmic pleasure.
If we were looking for uncontrolled pleasure we surely found it when Maxi Priest took to the stage and all nostalgic gentility was thrown to the wind. Their reggae beat was an appropriate precursor to Kool and the Gang’s rooted funk.
These gentlemen – I use the word advisedly – somehow turned what was essentially an assembly line concert into a privileged jam session where a rare rendition of inane poppy pop songs like Jo Anna came across as truly original. Here there was no place for our Orlando, Soweto DJ; this was was the stuff bootleg recordings are made of.