Last weekend soccer lovers gathered at the FNB stadium outside Johannesburg for the Telkom Charity Cup, the traditional season opener.
One of the tournament’s most memorable features, however, was not a soccer match, but a live music performance by Lucky Dube.
In the early days of the charity spectacular, at the Ellis Park stadium in the late 1980s, Dube, clad in camouflage gear and a Rastafarian scarf, wowed the crowd with his rendition of I’ve Got You, Babe, pacing up and down the stage and threatening to steal the thunder of the soccer stars whose day it was.
Just like the tournament at which he made an impact all those years ago, Dube himself has made remarkable progress to establish himself as one the country’s most successful musical exports. He has now released his 22nd solo album, Soul Taker.
With surprising modesty Dube speaks of himself and his band as a collective. “We have achieved in seven years what other bands would need 20 years to achieve.”
It started with the release of Trinity in 1995 by Gallo and Motown records. Since then, the band has more time out of the country than in.
The build-up to this international success, though, started in 1982 with the release of Kudala Ngikuncenga, an album that was not reggae but mbaqanga, a genre that was to serve him well for four more albums until his transition to reggae in 1985.
“The change was brought about by the fact that I wanted to reach the world. With mbaqanga I would have been seen as a tourist musician.”
Is that to suggest then that Ladysmith Black Mambazo appeal because they are seen as being quaint, exotic and peculiar? “No, no, no,” he says, “Mambazo are way out of that league. Initially it might have been like that. But since the music has been refined and the message delivered in a way that an international audience can understand.”
His introduction to the international stage was heartening, such as when he was invited to play at the Sunsplash Festival in Jamaica in 1991. He recalls how the spiritual home of reggae had been waiting for them. “We knew they love the music. They said we remind them of Peter Tosh.” On the final evening of the festival they were called back for an encore — and for another performance the next year.
His reception on the international stage has been mixed. European audiences have argued that he sings world music and local audiences feel his music has changed to an extent that it flies over them. Of the first group he says: “They said that the music does not sound like Bob Marley or Peter Tosh then they classify it as world music.”
That does not seem to bother him as much the attitude of locals. “We have found that locally the audience does not grow with you. People expect me to still be doing Ayobayo [as at Ellis Park all those years ago] yet that was 1987 and this is 2001. The music is no longer dealing with local problems and audiences.”
He continues to emphasise the need for an international outlook. On his 1997 album Taxman he featured a string section from the Soweto String Quartet. “I did that because I had never heard strings on a reggae album before,” Dube says. “A new album is not because you have a new cover, shaved your hair or changed your lyrics … It’s about what’s new about the music”.
One of the most interesting experiments on Soul Taker is the use of bagpipes, again because Dube has not heard them on a reggae album. “I was amazed by this instrument that has not been changed in 600 years”. After receiving a set of bagpipes as a gift from his Scottish “mother”, Freda Louw, he conscripted Peter Theron, a Johannesburg professional piper to contribute to the album. Its use on the title track is intriguing.
Soul Taker is inspired by Dube’s love for horror flicks. The title is taken from a 1990 movie directed by Michael Rissi, starring Joe Estevez. “We have always had this curiosity about what happens when we die,” he says of his grim choice of subject matter.
The opening and closing segments of the track have a Gothic and eerie feel consisting of the chirps of crickets, haunting footsteps and then, of course, the searing strains of a bagpipe. An interesting twist occurs with the use of Dube’s voice manipulated to sound like children chanting.
The album also sees Dube reach back to his mbaqanga roots by playing the keyboard in mbaqanga mode — after some lessons from the king of mbaqanga, the Soul Brother’s Moses Ngwenya. To round it all off, McCoy Mrubata continues to make a sterling, unselfish contribution to other artists’ work. Having contributed a jovial solo on a Bongo Maffin track recently, this time he gives a sombre and melancholic variation on Romeo.
Dube has always had to fend off questions of whether he is Rastafarian. “If Rastafarianism is about having dreadlocks, smoking marijuana and believing that Haile Selasie is God, then I am not Rastafarian. But if it is about political, social and personal consciousness, then, yes, I am.”
Although his idol is Peter Tosh, he acknowledges the unshakeable influence of the king of reggae, Bob Marley, whom he describes as “the reason we know reggae”.
He recalls how on their first trip to Japan they only had to say Marley’s name to explain the music they play.
In his years on the international stage, Dube has learned to look past critics and only to “care about the buying public”, who have raked up 2,6-million copies of his releases and have come out in numbers to see him perform at music-loving venues — from cities in Germany, Switzerland and France through to the Far East and, of course, Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg.
Catch Lucky Dube at the Oppikoppi Tuned Festival at Fountains Valley, Pretoria, on August 4 at 8pm. For more information visit www.oppikoppi.co.za or Tel: 082 231 0231