Soul singer

Simphiwe Dana was in London recently for one night only. Performing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank, she brought down the house. The concert came at the end of her European tour and within a year of what the BBC’s John Lusk called ‘a storming [London] debut at the Institute of Contemporary Arts”. Lusk considers Dana to be ‘South Africa’s brightest new singing star. She seems invincible.”

The English press have been kind. The Guardian described her sound as ‘cool” and ‘sophisticated”. The Times said of her latest album: ‘The jazz-tinged arrangements generate a dreamlike soundscape” and ‘the structure of the pieces calls to mind one of the greatest soul albums of them all, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On”.

When I meet her on a cold and windswept day in London, Dana explains the meaning behind her song, The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street, which is also the name of her recent album. ‘It’s about Biko and his ideals and his dreams and hopes for us, you know, his children. That’s why I sing the song and I wrote the song because I felt we needed someone to look up to, someone whose flag we can hold high and be proud of. We needed a hero,” Dana says.

She wrote once: ‘Bantu Biko street is the only street paved with our hopes and dreams, our golden highway that must first exist in our mind.” She says ‘he was a shining example of what an African is and how an African mind works. He did not only live for his ideas, he chose to die for them as well. We need someone that we can look up to. Maybe he is the person that can show us the way forward.”

Dana has been accused of profiting from the Biko name, to her obvious annoyance. She speaks of the lesson she has drawn from his life: ‘His basic belief was that we cannot fix the outside, it’s the inside we need to fix. We need to deal with the trauma of slavery in our own country and the cultural deprivation that was forced on to us and that created all of these issues of self-loathing, of not respecting your own culture, of being ashamed of being black.”

Dana describes how she learned to sing in her church in rural Transkei: ‘Music was a very important part of praise and worship. We didn’t have a piano, we’d sing, we’d clap and we’d stamp our feet.”

She drew her inspiration from her mother, who was a praise and worship singer, but who had already stopped singing when Dana was young. ‘I’ve heard stories about how she would make people fall into a trance when she got up to sing,” she says. ‘People saw her as a messenger of God.”

Dana moved from her home in the Eastern Cape to make her mark in Johannesburg, where she started out singing at open-mic sessions in the underground club scene in Newtown and Yeoville. ‘You usually felt you were a part of these people — it was a place where you could grow. We all nurtured one another,” she says.

Now, after two albums, a host of awards and credibility on the local design scene (she designs her own garments and headgear), she is on the rise. Critics have compared her voice with Miriam Makeba’s. ‘I love them, like mad,” she says of the old-school artists. ‘Dorothy Masuka, the Skylarks and Makeba — they were taught to use their voices as instruments.”

This weekend Dana will hear if she has won a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music. But she’s sceptical about the label: ‘I hate it. What is world music?” she asks. ‘All the artists they lump under that label are so different. I think it is almost like a derogatory term. They need to look into it.”

She prefers people to say she sings soul ‘because it is music that touches your soul. It has a spiritual element to it. It might even bring tears to your eyes.”

The Awards for World Music are broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on April 11 from 8pm. For a list of nominees and upcoming world-music broadcasts visit www.bbc.co.uk