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BIOGRAPHY/ REVIEWS |
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DOREEN THOBEKILE: ‘LONDON ZULU’
SOUTH AFRICAN MUSIC WITH A LONDON ATTITUDE.....
“Superior African music produced in London…bubbles with Zulu funk and global beats. Highly recommended.” STRAIGHT NO CHASER
“Fantastic, full of soulful Township ballads and dance floor friendly tracks where Doreens South African melodies meet kwaito inspired cutting edge production.” BBC AFRICA ON YOUR STREET
Beneath some wonderfully cheesy retro cover art were all those tunes that I’d thrilled to three years previously…Given that Doreen is such a compelling live presence I wondered how well the music would stand up on its own. No need to worry, it stands up just fine.” fROOTS
“Based in Britain where her daring excursions into Zulu music and dance have made her a popular figure (she practically stole the 2004 WOMAD festival)…Her Gospel vocals and African rhythms and dance beats are finally getting mainstream acclaim.” THE WORD
“Thobekile puts her lovely, clear voice to us on a series of traditional and contemporary tracks augmented by TGUs sensitively placed electronic beats and her own deft efforts on mbira and concertina….on ‘London Zulu’ TGU have fashioned a framework within which Thobekile has deftly sumoned up her mother country.” SONGLINES
“It's about time we had UK-created South African-driven music which understands electric elastic Kwaito and Township Jazz from the inside while feeling what works clubwise here. DT's never lost her Zulu roots and her Transglobal Underground collaborators enable her to distil lifetime traditions and transcultural living into something special." MUSIC WEEK
While plenty of South African music has found an audience in the UK theres been less music from the South African British diaspora that leans on both its African and European roots. LONDON ZULU is a record by an artist equally at home playing playback club dates in London, kwaito, Afrobeat, township jive, jazz soul and hiphop. It takes a long time and much effort to distill experiences as wide and adventures as strange as Doreens into one record…it can take a whole career. When asked what she did before releasing this album she says ‘I was working on it!’ And it was long, hard work…
Doreen Thobekile became known in South Africa initially as a dancer, starring in the stage show ‘African Follies.’ She worked in South Africa as a dancer and singer and appearing in a number of films (she turns up in the British film ‘Zulu’ starring Michael Caine).
“African Follies” was a big success and went on tour outside South Africa. In Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, while still on tour, Doreen got married to a white Briton. On orders from the South African government the Rhodesians deported them both and Doreen arrived in the UK with no passport.
Doreen rapidly found work in London and was lead singer in the London version of the West End South African musical ‘Ipi Tombi’ for 8 years. This led to her being a founder member of Shikisha, a Zulu women’s vocal and dance trio, which toured all over the world, backing Miriam Makeba amongst others, while doing sessions in London for all sorts of unexpected people such as David Essex, Howard Jones, and the KLF, which led to Doreen appearing on a number 1 UK single singing alongside Tammy Wynette! Along the way Doreen wrote and recorded demos of her own songs, which reflected her experiences between the UK and South Africa, and started looking for the right partners to bring them into the world with. She played regular dates backed by an acoustic group, but the songs demanded an approach that could bring them to a sider audience
At this point Doreen met up with Trans-Global Underground. Appearing on their fourth album, ‘Rejoice Rejoice’ she rapidly became part of the TGU family and joined them on their endless touring schedule that took them through the end of the millennium and onwards, through Kazakhstan, India, Venezuela and eventually back to Cape Town and Johannesburg in the new democratic South Africa. Meanwhile she conducted arts workshops in schools, kept working in studios, and appeared onstage as a singer, as a dancer and as an actress.
Most people would have considered that enough to be going on with….but Doreen saw in TGUs mixing of traditional and dance music a chance to get her own musical ideas out into the world, and began recording with TGU at their studio in Farringdon.
The first result of this was ‘Hamabanam’ a track that mixed Doreens voice, mbira and odu against TGUs electronic backing. It became a cult club track in London and appeared on the Six Degrees compilation ‘The Outernationalists.’ Encouraged by this, Doreen and TGU worked on other songs and performed them live round the capital.
The final results are here. “IYAHOSH’ IMAMBA and UMHLAHLO’ start from the UK but take on a heavy influence of South African kwaito, while ‘KHALIMA’ and “UMFOLOZI’ head in the opposite dir...
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