It is Thursday afternoon at Cape Town’s Salty Dogs studio in Woodstock. The walls are lined from ceiling to floor with hessian. It feels like one of those blanket caves that children build in their rooms when it is too cold to play outside. An earthy cocoon.
I have come here to witness a rehearsal session with South Africa’s most happening band. They are called Hot Water. They have a growing local and foreign fan base and music critics say they are the next big thing. But if you haven’t heard of them it is not surprising. Their decision to stay independent means they have had little commercial airplay, even though they have released three albums on their own label, Siki Siki, and wowed festival audiences.
The band’s charismatic frontman and founder Donovan Copley launches into a maskanda guitar riff. It is raw, sweet and urgent. “Strange man knockin’ on my door, I said, who you looking for? Who you looking for?” he sings.
What started as a rehearsal explodes into a private concert. Maskandi flows into jazzy folk, with hints of blues, goema and sakkie-sakkie. The music is both familiar and fresh. It is like your mother’s cooking — only with spices and flavours she never discovered. The sound is African at heart, intertwined with rhythms from the global village, evoked by tabla and digeridoo.
Playing with passion
For Copley, Hot Water is more of an evolving collaboration than a band, because it is all about “bringing people together from different backgrounds”. The line-up is continually changing. “I wanted to play with African musicians, interesting musicians, musicians that had passion,” he explains.
In future Copley hopes his project will embrace from “the extreme left to the right; from the African to the Afrikaans”.
Indeed, Hot Water’s current line-up is something of a kaleidoscope.
Bassist Wakile Xhalisa is the embodiment of his instrument: calm, grounded and warm. By day, he teaches the youth of Langa the skills to work backstage at gigs.
Ronan Skillen is classically trained and plays a wide range of instruments from the French horn to the tabla. His cool sophistication is the perfect counterpoint to Copley’s high-energy style.
Drummer Andre Swartz comes from a jazz background and says he initially found it “weird” when devoted fans “screamed out” all the lyrics during the band’s performances, especially in Holland. “You’re thousands of kilometres from home, and you’re playing music that’s not really on TV or radio. For me, that was a special moment.”
Music from feeling
For back-up vocalist Leon Visser it is all about being “authentic” and “pulling the music from a feeling”. Only then can you reach people, he says. In performance, Visser often dresses up as a 1980s traffic cop, complete with shades and crash helmet. He is known as Officer Roodepoort.
His fellow vocalist, the exuberant Soubry Makupula, takes to the stage as a woman. He wears traditional Zulu female headgear and beads — and adds plenty of padding in all the appropriate places. “We needed a girl in the band,” quips Copley. When he is not with Hot Water, Makupula is a surgeon at an initiation school.
The band started performing in 2005 and launched their first album, Home, a few months later. It’s a mix of electric energy combined with songs like Fat Cat in which the tempo is slower and more soulful, heavy with blues-infused history. Jazzy harmonica mingles with the liquid sound of the hang — an unusual domed steel percussion instrument — to produce a sound so rich it makes you want to sway seductively to the beat.
Home also includes tracks such as the infectious Siki Siki, inspired by Copley’s Eastern Cape roots, and East Meets West, which does what it says. At times the album channels Johnny Clegg and Paul Simon, along with the Mahotella Queens, with hints of Freshlyground. But the music is never derivative. Instead, it is fresh, challenging and confident.
Hot Water’s second album, One (2008), is less edgy, although it contains some crowd-pleasers such as Prayer Song. But the band got their groove back in 2011 with the release of South and fans breathed a sigh of relief.
Township celebration
South includes the popular Laduma, a tribute to the beautiful game, featuring local comedian Nik Rabinowitz as a hyped-up soccer commentator. “This song is so catchy, it should be quarantined,” blogged music critic John Samson. “It has all the joy of an African summer day [and a] township celebration.”
With such songs in their repertoire, Hot Water’s decision not to sign up with a mainstream record label seems about as logical as ignoring a prize-winning lottery ticket. But they prefer to be free agents and the lack of commercial backing hasn’t stopped them from generating slow but steady success. In 2009, they performed at the Hague Jazz Festival, with Freshlyground and Hugh Masekela. Later that year they joined Griot, a major Europe-based music agency that represents top South African artists abroad.
Hot Water has been featured in a BBC music documentary, has appeared on German TV and has had a song selected for an Italian national health service commercial.
This April, they will perform at Kirstenbosch gardens in Cape Town. The band played their debut gig at the same venue six years ago. The 2012 concert promises to be something of a homecoming.
“Like the blues, [our] songs always start from the roots,” says Copley. “On top of the rhythm, a melody emerges and, on top of that, a tree grows”.