Freshlyground shakes it up

There’s something quite brave about resurrecting a band that once felt like it symbolised the country’s fleeting optimism. Freshlyground, formed in 2002, were less a popular band than an indication of our collective civic mood.

Their buoyant fusion of Afro-pop, folk and jazz coincided with the long afterglow of a new SA that still entertained the delusion that the rainbow that came with our great weather could be a permanent fixture. At their centre was the lead singer, Zolani Mahola — effervescent and beaming — a frontwoman whose energy seemed to power the grid.

Afro-pop optimism, violin skirls, flute flourishes, a sun-shot performance full of smiles. Mahola had a voice that was, and still is, instantly recognisable.

When Mahola left, the band faced a question that most legacy acts eventually confront: whether to preserve the relic under glass, or tamper with it and risk shattering the exhibit. Drummer Peter Cohen admits he wasn’t convinced by the idea of revival. “Freshlyground had its time and place,” he says. The auditions followed — three or four singers — an “unpleasant experience,” he says.

“I’m not reforming Freshlyground,” he told me, with the knowing look of a man who’s survived both encores and sound checks in equal numbers.

And then Mbali Makhoba walked in.

Twenty minutes, he says. That’s all it took. “I could feel everyone in the room experience the same thing. This time it was right.” Makhoba was a shoo-in; she had the exact right sound for Freshlyground now.

Makhoba is 20. She grew up in Imizamo Yethu (Mandela Park, Hout Bay), known locally as IY — shorthand that belies a childhood she describes simply as “not having an apple”. Poverty, for her, isn’t a sociological abstraction but an absence of healthy food. In high school, a friend introduced her to a Danish manager who signed her to a label before she understood what signing entailed. “I was knowledgeless,” she says. Three years later, through a chain of acquaintances that included former band member Josh Hawks, who plays bass guitar, she was invited to audition for Freshlyground — a group she’d barely heard of.

“I could feel everyone in the room experience the same thing. This time it was right.” Peter Cohen

The song was “I’d Like”.

“I remember really struggling,” she says of the chorus. “My voice wasn’t developed. I didn’t know what I was capable of. I was just this hip-hop girl.” She’d been rapping, shape-shifting through genres, trying to discover what she could offer in a ferociously competitive industry.

She says she kept asking herself, ‘What do I bring to the table?’ A difficult question in a world saturated with so many musical genres, easily accessed with streaming apps. What she brings is an emotional immediacy. She discovered music before she discovered her voice: her voice was just another instrument, she says.

Then she realised it could pay the bills. “Music is more than music to me,” she says. “It’s my therapy and my livelihood. If my music life isn’t going well, nothing goes well.” I ask who she listens to? She shrugs: “Everyone, everything”. No curated playlist of influences. Just an appetite to listen and take it all in.

Freshlyground’s new single, Take Me Home, released on February 20th this year, is a bluesy, soulful departure from their previous sound, markedly different from their earlier, brassier buoyancy. Recorded in Harare by Bridgenorth — a Zimbabwe-based label and studio complex run by producer Keith Farquharson — the band decamped for two weeks, old-school style, living and working together. “If we stayed in Cape Town,” Cohen said, “we’d never all be in the same place long enough.” So they went away and made a record like band members used to do: continuously and communally, close enough to get on each other’s nerves.

Hawks says: “The song came together organically over a few months. I wrote the initial chords, Simon (Attwell: flute, mbira, harmonica) steered it into F-sharp major, and Julio “Gugs” (Sigauque: acoustic guitar) and Chris (Bakalanga: guitarist) suggested the verse section. Then Mbali (Makhoba) came in with a great melody and rhythmical vocals."

Makhoba describes Take Me Home as more a message than a song. A plea for peace of mind in a world of social media pressure, corruption, relentless standards. “When I say ‘take me home’,” she explains, “I don’t even know where home is. But I know the feeling. Family, safety, comfort. Warmness. Where you don’t have to be on your guard.”

SA, of course, is both beautiful and traumatising. Cohen says it plainly. He remembers the euphoria when Mandela walked free — the honeymoon optimism, and the long, grinding disappointment that followed. “Can we get our shit together?” he asks, with the weary affection of someone who’s toured the world, seen all the options out there, and still wants to come back home.

The band reflects the diversity of that home: ages ranging from Mbali’s 20 to Cohen’s 64; both have birthdays in June. “She’s the youngest,” he grins. “I’m the oldest.” Six official members, half of them also in the band Congo Cowboys, still navigating the combustible chemistry of old friends and the new blood. On stage, she says, she feels “like a superstar” — yet admits to breathing problems before every performance. She’s aware that she’s joined what she calls a “legendary” ensemble whose bonds predate her adulthood. “It’s their baby,” she says of the band. “I’m new in the family.” She also plays guitar; Cohen insists she could “play anything”.

Is she inheriting a South African narrative or rewriting it? “A bit of both,” she says. The live set reflects that tension: 40% old favourites — even Waka Waka — and 60% new material. You can’t abandon the hits; audiences would revolt, Cohen says. But you also can’t live forever in nostalgia. The forthcoming album, slated for April, promises a sound with “a totally different character,” he adds. Different time, different concerns, different singer.

And perhaps that’s the point. Bands, like countries, either fossilise or evolve. Freshlyground could have remained a glorious relic of post-2000 optimism; wedding playlists and World Cup memories. Instead, they’ve chosen reinvention.

Still busy trying on stage personas like jackets — “Which me am I wearing today?” — Makhoba says when I ask her about her stage persona. The answer embodies her youthful uncertainty. She’s not slick yet, but boy, is she confident! That’s better than slick. It’s more authentic.

In a country perpetually negotiating between what was promised and what’s possible, that might be precisely the sound we need: less anthem, more honesty. In that sense, Makhoba isn’t replacing a frontwoman so much as recalibrating a premise. The question is no longer whether SA can dance, but whether it can listen ...