Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse can’t help himself. Sitting with his back to a piano is anathema. Within the space of one dinner he is compelled to play it twice.
The second time has the entire room, at a Wine & Executive Club event in partnership with Business Day’s Wanted magazine at Fairlawns Boutique Hotel & Spa, tingling with delight.
Through jazzy improvisations, we begin to hear the now anthemic chords of Burn Out. The propulsive and intensely familiar beat suddenly takes shape, and in this intimate setting the consummate showman has everyone melting into a nostalgic puddle.
Like the music he shares tonight, Hotstix feels larger than the sum of his parts. Charming, funny and iconic, he is deeply woven into South Africa’s cultural fabric.
“I was born in Orlando West,” he says. “It was known to be a bedrock of resistance politics. That’s where you’d find Winnie Mandela and that’s where you’d find Tokyo Sexwale. My parents were part of the movement of liberation politics.”
Music, for me, was always my default
— Sipho 'Hotstix' Mabuse
He describes a childhood of endless soccer fields, cadet bands and choir rehearsals. “There’s no choice but [that] you want to be this whole thing,” he laughs. “I don’t think there was a young person in Soweto, especially guys, who didn’t play soccer. However bad they could be, they still played soccer.”
Music, meanwhile, was omnipresent. “In the township, black people are always singing, whether it’s at a funeral, whether it’s at a wedding, whether it’s in the streets. Music, for me, was always my default.”
The formation of his first band happened almost accidentally. As a teenager he watched a school performance by a local group playing Beatles and Rolling Stones songs and noticed they lacked a drummer.
“I said, ‘Do you have a drummer?’ He said, ‘Do you play drums?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You’re the last member of the band. That’s what we were looking for.’”
That group would eventually evolve into Harari, whose fusion of jazz, funk and township soul transformed the South African musical landscape. “We came with a new sound that no other band was playing, so we were quite an attractive band.”
At first the transition from schoolboys to stars happened so gradually it barely registered. “We didn’t even realise we had left school,” Hotstix says. “We were always meeting in school, then suddenly we were touring the countryside.”
The audience erupts when he mischievously adds, “It was also the girls. Some of them were very possessive.”
But behind the humour sat the darker reality of fame. As Harari became one of the country’s biggest bands, pressure mounted. Mabuse became increasingly disciplined while others in the group struggled to adapt.
“I didn’t drink alcohol. I used to work out a lot,” he says. “Every time I came back from swimming, I’d find some of my colleagues still sleeping. We had some of the worst concerts because people would not make it on time. There would be riots. People would break up [the] halls.”
The eventual collapse of Harari clearly still carries emotional weight. The split became public before the band itself had processed the event.
“The Sunday Times wrote this story,” he recalls. “People in the streets were screaming ‘Harari splits’. I was broken.”
What followed was perhaps the greatest reinvention of his career. Having spent years behind the drum kit, Mabuse suddenly faced the terrifying prospect of becoming a solo artist. “I was a drummer. I was not a frontman,” he says. “So how was I going to pursue a solo career? As what? As a drummer?”
The answer emerged through instinct more than intention. He began writing songs almost unconsciously, processing grief and liberation through music. “The first track I wrote was Set Me Free,” he smiles. “Two hundred thousand sales. What was I setting myself free from?”
Then came Burn Out. His relationship with creativity feels almost spiritual. He does not believe songs are engineered. He believes they arrive. “I don’t go to an instrument and say, ‘I’m writing this,’ he explains. “I just go in and play. That’s how Burn Out came out. I was just playing the piano, and suddenly there was this riff.”
This is the moment he returns to the piano to demonstrate. “It’s spiritual,” he says. “There’s never any intention on my part to say I’m going to compose a song and this is how the song is going to sound.”
Instead, he describes creativity as a process of improvisation and excavation. “I spread the mess,” he laughs. “I spread the mess within the studio, and when that mess comes out, then I start dissecting it into parts that I hear, and I bring it all together to become complete.”
Even now, after decades in music, he remains driven by curiosity rather than nostalgia. “I’m never content with formats,” he says. “If you listen to all the records I’ve made, they’re all different.”
Unexpectedly, the most moving moment of the evening arrives when Mabuse speaks about returning later in life to complete his matric. Surrounded by classmates young enough to be his grandchildren, the legendary musician sat once again at a school desk.
“I always felt something was incomplete,” he says quietly. “We had left school unfinished. The teacher asked me, ‘What is it that you want from this?’ I said, ‘I’m here to complete what we left behind.’”
First published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
