GLYNISO’HARA speaks to veteran songbird and survivor Tandie Klaasen about the release of her new CD
IT’S been years – 24 years, in fact – since Tandie Klaasen’s face was set on fire in a senseless attack. “So don’t call me burnt face,” she says now, “just call me Tandie.”
People still remark on it, she adds. “They still say it. But I’m The Voice, I’m not The Face.”
And to prove it, she’s recorded an album of her own again, the first one since Love Is Strange, which predates her attack. It’s a long time for someone like her – who started performing again a year after the incident and has never stopped since – to go without a recording. In fact, it’s bizarre that it’s taken so long.
And it’s only really due to Belgian interest that it happened at all. The new CD is called Together As One (Music For Africa/HKM) and was financed by the Arts and Culture Trust, set up by the Department of Arts and Culture, Nedbank and Sun International.
The Belgian connection grew through alternatiewe Afrikaans singer Johannes Kerkorrel, who has made a career for himself in the Benelux countries as well as here. Belgian star Stef Bos worked with him and came out to South Africa, where he met Tandie.
Their first three-way collaboration resulted in the marvellous song Awuwa, recorded in 1993, incorporated on Kerkorrel’s Cyanide in the Beefcake album and a was a hit in the Benelux countries. That song is also on this album, as are a range of other co-compositions between Stef and Tandie, from two blues songs to ballads to good old-fashioned 1950s pop in the jivey Kikirikiri.
Essentially though, it is a move away from her well-known blues style, although she’ll always do the blues, jazz and African jazz in live shows.
“It is the music I wanted to do,” Tandie, now 65, says in a shouted interview at the raucous Bassline in Melville between sets. “I’m really glad Stef discovered me.
“I’ve been wanting for so many years to do the right music with a message to South African people. He was just the right person at the right time.
“Now there’s a message about my life on the CD and that’ll help because people are always asking me about my life.”
We speak after the Sibikwe Players, led by Smal Ndaba, have left the stage and left the room resonating with Fifties images and music in extracts from Kwela Bafana. “Aren’t they great?” she says, swelling with pride for the new, younger generation.
But like most South Africans, Tandie is having a hard time keeping her head above water these days. She may perform a lot, but she has no car, “because it was stolen and it was uninsured. They’ve broken into my place in Eden Park nine times. Write that down, write that! Nine times! Haai. I work hard for what I get and they keep on breaking into my house.”
She’s been the epitome of the blues in South Africa for so long though, that a move away from the style seems to mark a sea change. Is she happy now? “Haai,” she says, gazing into the middle distance, “I don’t know what happiness is. I’ve lost all my family [10 of her brothers and sisters have died, as well as her mother].
“I should have been sharing my first CD with my family, but instead it’s with friends and people in the industry who have helped me.”
But mention her singer daughter Lorraine, based in Canada with her husband Ignace Lumumba, nephew of the late Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and her face brightens.
“She’s on tour in Louisiana right now. I performed with her in a festival in Barbados in January, along with people like Roberta Flack, Tanya Maria and Grover Washington. Roberta dedicated The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face to me. Imagine that … to me. It was one of the greatest, most moving moments of my life.”
Lorraine, 12 at the time of the attack on her mother, was the one person who stayed at her side throughout her recovery. They’re still very close, and as a result, Tandie has toured Canada with her in a show called Soweto Groove.
Tandie was attacked the night before she was to go to Japan to sing with Nina Simone. It happened at a “friend’s” house as she entered, and the stereo belted out a tune from her first solo album. Two young men threw petrol over her face and set her alight. One of them subsequently got three years in jail for it, the other was never found.
The story is legendary. Everybody knows it. Plastic surgeons built up her mouth again, grafted skin from her thighs to her face and reinforced her neck.
It took her a year to recover and appear on stage again.
What few people realise though, is that the incident and its fallout seriously harmed her career at a point when things were looking really promising. She also lost her husband as a result of the burns and for a short while turned to the bottle.
A Canadian friend who saw her at the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg six years ago was completely bowled over by her energy, passion and charisma. “She’s the only person I’ve seen here who I think could’ve made it in Europe or the Americas,” he said. “She’s a real star.”