The name of the band appeared as an engraving on a gold bar. Clegg gazed into the distance with a questioning intensity. Mchunu looked into the camera with all the resoluteness of a revolutionary. They were dressed in paisley waistcoats, beads and car-tyre sandals. The sleeve carried a picture of two men - one white and the other black. The album hit the streets in late October 1979. ![]() No radio station under the jurisdiction of the apartheid state would play the album, so Rosenthal took it to Capital Radio in the Transkei, which played the single, Africa, to an enthusiastic but tiny listenership, and to Radio Swazi where Mesh Mapetla burst into tears when he heard Africa. The band believed, firmly, that they had produced something important, but everyone in the industry told Rosenthal that it was “too black for whites and too white for blacks”. I have a hard time thinking about Universal Men without the hair on my neck standing up.” Rosenthal speaks for many when he says: “There’ve been other great moments - like Asimbonanga and Scatterlings -but Universal Men is my favourite album. No one was thinking about how many units we would sell. We went into the studio with the aim of making great music. ![]() It’s one of those albums that will be there for life. Twenty-one years on, Gumede enthuses that “ Universal Men still sounds fresh. No one had done this before - we were flying a kite and hoping to be struck by lightning.” The whole project was, musically, completely new. Johnny Clegg remembers: “The most incredible aspect of the recording process was that the jazz musicians from Spirits Rejoice managed to sound completely different to their normal sound. ![]() I thought we’d just put them in a room and see what came out.” The gamble paid off, spectacularly. Their producer, Hilton Rosenthal, had a simple plan: “To avoid commercial pressures and to give the musicians a mandate to experiment and be spontaneous. So in 1979 Johnny and Sipho went into the studio with the country’s best musicians - people of the calibre of Gumede Mervyn Africa, who went on to play with Jazz Africa in London Colin Pratley from the legendary Freedom’s Children, who now runs a home for babies with HIV in Durban and Robbie Jansen, who, of course, remains the inimitable Robbie Jansen. We got talking and they invited us to join the recording project.” It was the first time I’d seen a white guy playing African music and the music was very strong. Sipho Gumede, who was laying down bass grooves for the out-there jazz band Spirits Rejoice at the time, remembers: “I saw Johnny and Sipho playing as a duo at the Market Cafe and I was excited by what I saw. From the earliest days their music was infused with a remarkably perceptive engagement with their time and place that made it as timeless and universal as anything by Marley or Dylan. Their infectious melodies and gentle presence didn’t disguise the fact that this union between an illiterate gardener from rural Zululand and a Jo’burg academic was as radical a musical statement as it was possible to make at the height of apartheid repression.īut Johnny and Sipho were a lot more than just Verwoerd’s worst nightmare. In the mid 1970s Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu started playing together as a duo under the name of Johnny and Sipho. Universal Men, first released in October 1979, was the beginning of a remarkable career in music, and the generation of poetic meaning, that profoundly shaped many people’s understanding of South Africa, both locally and around the world ![]() Today we republish it in honour of Johnny Clegg, a musician whose crossing has elicited an extraordinary moment of public grief and remembrance. This piece by Richard Pithouse was first published in the Mail & Guardian in October 2000 to mark the 21st anniversary of Universal Men, the celebrated debut album by Juluka.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |