ocal songbird Lira talks to Leigh-Ann Hunter about how a cake and a Fanta changed everything
Even during our interview, Lira seems to be composing. Her frequent laugh provides a musical counterpoint as her hands fly up from her lap to sketch treble clefs and quavers in the air.
The multiplatinum-selling musician has performed for Nelson Mandela. Today she's in jeans, floating around the Randburg recording studio with long-limbed grace.
You see the no-nonsense business-woman in the way she cocks her head as she listens intently, or wipes an invisible thread from her blazer sleeve.
Regarding me with a piercing gaze, she gives the impression of a woman who wouldn't hesitate to lie down on gritty tarmac to change a flat tyre.
But in her unguarded moments, when a question makes her pause or dig into her past, she seems almost vulnerable. It's then that you glean a hint of the girl who spent her days staring at the four sides of a cubicle, shuffling papers beneath fluorescent lights.
The Afro-soul artist says if fate hadn't intervened she would still be that young woman, an internal auditor - but by now perhaps in a larger box. (I notice as she crosses and uncrosses her long legs that she has perfected the art of compressing her body into small spaces.)
"Everyone wants to write off that 23-year-old," says Lira, now a decade into her career. "But none of this would exist if that girl didn't show up for me the way she did. She's my biggest hero."
How Lira, born Lerato Molapo, went from Joburg township girl to nine-to-fiver and finally singing sensation, is a story she tells with an air of calm, a calm cultivated through meditation, on the golfing green and in her garden. "I thrive in solitude. I can have a great time by myself," she says. I picture her in a lotus pose, her two Great Danes guarding her like sentinels.
"I wasn't a genius," she says. But at an age when most children were learning to tie their shoelaces, she was already a voracious reader.
Back then, as now, her onyx eyes took everything in. She watched her impeccably dressed street-vendor grandmother, "dark as night with an English nose" - who I'm told Lira resembles - stretch her meagre earnings to feed her and 12 others. "If any of us wanted money she would say, 'Here's a box of apples, you go sell. If you want it, you will earn it'."
It's why the businesswoman believes that "money is beautiful". It's also why she can't abide apathy among South African youth, or generally.
"These little ones are born free and they just want to sit around? Oh, slap the idiocy right out of them," she seethes. "Don't complain about the state of the country if you're not going to do anything about it. If you don't like it, change it. Otherwise, shut up."
A philanthropist who devotes time to humanitarian causes, especially those involving education, Lira has been known to throw disruptive children out of her classroom lectures. "I tell them, 'My time is expensive. If you're not going to hear me, then get out."
Clearly she wasn't one of these indolent youth. Taking her grandmother's lessons to heart, Lira went on to graduate in financial accounting. And the rest would have been history - if it weren't for the case of the Fanta and the R14.50 cake.
The 33-year-old laughs as she recalls being presented with this paltry bonus after helping to raise more than R1-million for her auditing firm.
"I was highly disappointed. Running a business now, I see that you don't incentivise people like that."
Pegged for auditing greatness, an icy dread filled her when she looked at her bosses in their starched shirts. "I realised, 'I'm going to become you'. It felt like they'd announced the death of me."
But these were not wasted years because it was precisely the business savvy she'd acquired that enabled her to plot her journey to stardom.
"I had a comprehensive five-year plan," she says. "First year: develop my material and look for a record deal. Second year: release my first album. Third year: become huge in this country, win a SAMA [South African Music Award], the works. Fourth year: infiltrate the US market and hopefully get a Grammy by the fifth year. Simple enough, right?"
Not quite. Lira went on to tick off nearly every achievement on what evolved into a 10-year strategy, but not everything went according to plan.
Her savings depleted, and with no album to show for her efforts after she'd quit her corporate job, she panicked.
"I thought, how will I survive? If I'm not meant to sing, what am I meant to do?"
She says the journey stripped her to the core. "When I look back, I realise I needed it. I was in no way ready. I wasn't even a confident performer. I was pathetic, to be honest. But I had a vision and that was enough. There was always a purpose to this madness. I knew that if I didn't see it through I'd live with the regret. I'd be 45 one day and say, 'I came so close'."
She recalls the terrible silence as she stared out over the sea of faces at one of her gigs - she had lost her voice. "Back then I had no resources. Rehearsing without a mic, I'd often strain my voice. I was manager, stylist ... It was madness."
Of all the obstacles, including legal battles, her own insecurity was the most difficult to overcome. She never thought much of her looks. "Tall and lanky was never popular," she says.
It was Miriam Makeba who inspired the budding musician artistically, and gave her a model of African beauty she could relate to.
"I recall looking at this divine being and thinking, 'She wears her natural hair and nobody calls her barbaric?' I had to deal with the fact that we used to call it k****rhare. It's not even our term, and we decide it's OK?"
This 20-something Lira practised affirmations. Every day she would look in the mirror and say, "This is good. This is fine." Despite her crippling lack of confidence, she clung to the knowledge that she had something that touched people. She'd seen it when she performed at "white" clubs as a young chanteuse living in what was then apartheid South Africa.
"You would never look a white person in the eye, so you can imagine what this was like," she says. "Likewise, I think whites were taught to smile at black people. We had these systems of survival to appease one other."
But her music was a great leveller. "They could hear my words, feel my energy. I didn't have to be anything in particular. It made the environment just ... human."
She toys with her wedding band and smiles. "And then God sent me a white man just to put a twist in it," she says. "I thought, 'Wow. You have a sense of humour'." Of her marriage to her producer Robin Kohl, she says: "There's nothing conventional about it."
The politically charged milieu of her youth naturally influenced her musical ethos. "Mandela had every choice to come out guns blazing and say, 'F*** all of them. Send them back to Europe.' But he discovered a greater truth. He turned the country in a certain way, which gave me an environment in which I could express my freedom."
And she did this in the best way she knew how: she sang about it. "For the first time I was following what I'm born to do, not the circumstances of where I grew up. So in my music I speak of empowerment and celebration because that's what we need to take forward."
It was perhaps her award-winning hit Feel Good that best encapsulated this spirit of sanguinity. "I'd been depressed for a long time. I wanted more than that. I wanted to 'feel good' every day. Let's be honest: negativity does nothing for the world. Some people love sad songs. I don't function well in that space.
"I consider it my duty to be an inspiration. Everyone needs an example and I've got enough guts to do it for the whole group. I'm not afraid to, anymore."
Lira, who says she's now far more comfortable in her skin than the unsure girl she once was ("I genuinely like me now"), must have realised just how far she had come at the premiere in Sicily of The Italian Consul, an internationally released film about human trafficking, in which she made her acting debut.
Makeba had been the last African to perform at the ancient Taormina theatre. "She came as a musician. I came as an actress," says Lira, who expected to be part of the audience. But the host called her from the stands, asking, "Would you give us the honour of stepping on the same stage?"
Fame has brought its own challenges. "I get shown very little kindness as a celebrity. I miss that. Common courtesies go out the window. People grab, push, and dig cameras in your face. There's no 'please', no 'thank you'. That saddens me deeply. People think you're a celebrity, just deal with it. I'm so ordinary. I enjoy being regular, having genuine conversations with strangers."
But Lira is pragmatic in her approach to stardom. "It's very likely people will forget your glory days. I had to decide that was something I was going to live with."
Adopting a stage name was one way she coped with the pressures of fame. "I said 'Lira' will be the one who shows up, but in my private space I don't want to work that hard just to be."
On the subject of being in the public eye, our conversation shifts to the Oscar Pistorius case, and her tone becomes sombre. "He's a man who made a bad decision that resulted in terrible conditions, but he's still the guy with no legs who inspired the whole world."
She tells me she's not perturbed that she didn't have her "Marilyn" moment with President Barack Obama when she performed - in an animal-print gown by local designer David Tlale - at one of the many inaugural balls held in his honour earlier this year.
"It was amazing just to be in [Washington] D.C. at that time, drawing in the energy ... all these famous people."
Vocal on the subject of politics at home and abroad, Lira says of Obama, one of her idols: "I look at this man ... how he goes to the US and has dreams of becoming a black president? I mean, how dare he? Who does he think he is?"
Embarking on the next decade of her career (and another 10-year plan), Lira has set her sights on global superstardom. "Like that 23-year-old girl, I still thrive on dreams. I need to have something to chase that's bigger than myself," she says.
But she insists that being South African is a fixture in her life. "I'm not trying to be American. I don't know their story. I know my story."
When the title track of her debut album All My Love kicked Beyoncé off her billboard position in SA, it was one of Lira's proudest moments. "It was the first time a South African act had ever done that. I was like, 'That's right. This is my time. You can't beat me in my country.' I could see a tide turning, you know? There was so much music that was played way more than ours. It's very different now. Our artists are celebrated more than ever."
And it could get even better, she says. "We could have more diversity in the SA music scene, be more risqué ... push the bar higher. We already have enough Liras out there."
From a cubicle to the stages of the world, was it worth the risk? Her arched eyebrow says: "You do the maths."
Lira by numbers
- 2003 Lira releases her debut album, All My Love.
- 2006 "I was fixing my situation; taking control of my career." Her Feel Good album makes waves locally.
- 2007 "It was a heavenly year," says the diva. "The sweet taste of success - topping charts and hearing my music all over the radio - was empowering."
- 2009 "I took that year on and upped my game. The SAMAs were a great pat on the back." (She won Album of the Year and Best Female Artist for 2008's Soul in Mind).
- 2010 "I was turning up the juice. Performing at the Fifa World Cup concert was a grand opportunity to become known on a world stage."
- 2011 "My album Return to Love was about getting back into my skin."
- 2013 Lira performs at one of the balls marking US President Barack Obama's inauguration in Washington D.C.