WAKE UP TO SUCCESS
DJ Black Coffee is a star in his native South Africa but, the musician and producer tells Ben Walsh, he hopes to raise his international profile with an Ibiza residency
“I dream of doing a song with Beyoncé,” maintains Nkosinathi Maphumulo, popularly known as DJ Black Coffee. “Imagine if the original version of my song ‘Superman’ was sung by her,” adds the softly spoken artist.
The South African DJ and producer is talking to me from his Johannesburg home where he lives with his wife Enhle Mbali, whom he married this year, and two children (who can be heard in the background). Maphumulo is enthusing over a momentous 2017 where he’s come to the attention of not only Beyoncé but, perhaps more crucially, Drake, which he describes as “unreal”.
This year the earnest afro-house maestro appeared on Drake’s hit single “Get It Together”, which features a pared-back reworking of Black Coffee’s 2011 loungy track “Superman”. Beyoncé subsequently added “Get It Together” to her wedding anniversary playlist, which certainly hasn’t harmed Black Coffee’s rapidly rising profile.
“She’s the biggest artist on Earth and it’s a big, big compliment,” says Maphumulo. “And Drake taking on my song, which was actually first created in 2008, is a very big compliment. I was ahead of my time with this song.”
Maphumulo, who began his career in 1995, is already a superstar in South Africa, garnering numerous awards (including the Black Entertainment Television award for Best International Artist in 2016 and 2015’s Breakthrough DJ of the Year at the DJ Awards in Ibiza), but until recently (and his inclusion on Drake’s single) the laidback DJ (his music has been described as “restrained sophistication”) was less wellknown in Europe. I’m excited, but I’m also really nervous. I’m new on the island, and very new on the European scene That is all set to dramatically change when the dapper 41-year-old embarks on his 18-week residency – he performs every Saturday night – at Hï Ibiza (formerly the Space), the brand new, state-of-the-art Ibiza superclub by Ushuaïa Entertainment. Maphumulo is understandably apprehensive of being the club’s first resident DJ.
“I’m excited, but I’m also really nervous,” admits Maphumulo. “I’m new on the island, and I’m kind of very new on the European scene.”
For guest spots at his Hï Ibiza residency, Maphumulo has assembled a “very diverse line-up”, which includes the Brooklyn-based DJ duo Bedouin (whom I manage to mistake for the breathtaking US-based singer Bedouine, aka Azniv Korkejian, whose upcoming self-titled debut record is quite possibly the loveliest record of the year; Maphumulo’s too studiously polite to correct me) and are in negotiations with Detroit’s techno-whizz Moodymann.
Anyone who has evidenced Maphumulo’s smooth performances for Mixmag in Miami and the dance magazine’s Lab LDN will know that a night of slick, inventive and bold sounds is pretty much guaranteed.
After moving from Durban at a tender age, Maphumulo grew up in Mthatha in Eastern Cape, listening to the likes of Prince, Michael Jackson, Anita Baker (Rapture was the first album he bought, much to his cousins’ chagrin who expected him to get “something groovy”) Curtis Mayfield and a lot of Motown. “All the Motown groups played a major role,” maintains Maphumulo about his music education. “For me as a producer I come from that school, making sure the vocals and arrangements are strong, and listening to those Motown arrangements are a joy.”
His childhood appears to have been a relatively calm one – like Maphumulo himself – and seemingly devoid of the political tensions of Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. “It was really like a raw place to grow up in the Eastern Cape,” says Maphumulo, “and we had moved from Durban to a place that was totally different in every way and had no electricity, but it’s one of the happiest places. There wasn’t any political climate there because it was an independent state, so it wasn’t under the Apartheid government, so there was no segregation and no black or white power struggle. There was no political pressure; I experienced that when I went back to Durban.”
Hugh Masekela was the nicest person ever. He came to my studio, I told him what I needed from him, he delivered and got in the car and left Maphumulo majored in jazz at Technikon Natal college – because it “offered all these other things that if I’d gone to a classical training place I wouldn’t have got” – and launched his career in 2005 with a remix of Hugh Masekela’s 1972 hit “Stimela”. Soon after he set up his own record label, Soulistic Music, on which he released his accomplished self-titled debut album. He established his reputation with two further records, Have Another One (2007) and Home Brewed (2009), which featured a turn from Masekela.
“Hugh was very nice, the nicest person ever,” he gushes. “He came to my studio, I told him what I needed from him, he delivered and got in the car and left. It was overwhelming to see how good he was and he’s an amazing storyteller.”
A year later, in 2010, Maphumulo managed to miraculously DJ for 60 straight hours in the parking lot of Maponya Mall in Soweto, in aid of his Black Coffee Foundation, which helps disabled people (Maphumulo lost the use of his left arm in a car accident when he was 13) – and in order to break a Guinness world record. “We did it in the middle of Soweto and it was the toughest experience ever for me,” Maphumulo admits. “We had 30,000 visitors that weekend and it was a nightmare for the traffic and the police, as it became something so huge…”
But did he break the world record? Well, yes and no. “We had spoken to the London office of the Guinness World Records and we wanted this thing to be there in their book because currently there’s no such record,” he explains. “They emailed us all the rules so that we could qualify for the thing. In that 60 hours we abided by all the rules they had given us, and they were recording everything. We submitted everything and nothing ever happened, they never got back to us. It was quite sad that we went through all that and we never got a response from their office.”
The late Norris McWhirter and the affable Roy Castle would be appalled. Did he not lodge a complaint? “Most people assume that it’s in the book already because they saw it happening, but I always correct people when they say you are holding the record, I say ‘no, no, no, it never really happened’,” he adds, sadly. “I always wanted to pursue the matter, but I don’t have the time and it’s not important any more.”
And really doesn’t seem important any more, given Black Coffee’s recent upward trajectory. His last album, 2015’s Pieces of Me, featuring standout tracks “Come with Me” and “We Dance Again” was his finest and most successful yet, with each song over seven minutes. Why so long? “I like to have a beginning, a middle and an end to songs you know,” he maintains. “I’ve never done a song that’s like less than four minutes. It’s something I’m trying to do now, because the bigger you get the more your asked to write radio-friendly songs, but I struggle to cut them down for radio.”
It’s something that Maphumulo’s going to have master now that the likes of Drake and Beyoncé have him in their sights.
Black Coffee performs his DJ residency every Saturday from 3 June to 30 September (18 weeks) at the new superclub Hï Ibiza inPlaya d'en Bossa, Ibiza; tickets available at www.hiibiza.com; Black Coffee will also be playing at Hï Ibiza’s opening night on 28 May