Powers of survival
A powerful memoir of stardom, love and gruesome addiction. By Jennifer Platt
PENELOPE Jane Dunlop. PJ Powers. Thandeka. The making of this musical sensation — from a middle-class white girl to muchloved singer embraced in the townships — is echoed in South Africa’s own freedom fairytale.
Her book, written with Marianne Thamm, grips from the opening chapter. Powers is woken from a stupor by uncontrollable shaking. She’s in her bed in a rented townhouse in Fourways — “wearing the same clothes for days on end”— surrounded by empty bottles of vodka. She is jonesing for her fix. Eventually she manages to crawl out of bed to the bathroom where she finds a half-empty can of hairspray. Powers ingests it — it contains alcohol. She collapses and is rushed to hospital by her sister Priscilla, who saves her life.
When you get to know the real Powers, youngest child in a family of four, any schadenfreude dissipates, and what you’re left with is sheer admiration for this determined person who has known what she wanted to do since she was five years old.
In 1978, aged 17, Powers left Durban for the bright lights of Hillbrow, where people “could forget, if only momentarily, that they lived in repressive, conservative and deeply divided South Africa” and “reinvent themselves”. She was then the lead singer in an all-girl group, Pantha. They wanted to follow in the footsteps of Clout, the band that had huge success with Substitute. Managed by Eddie Eckstein, Pantha moved into the Hyde Park Hotel, where they were booked to play a regular gig. But they were terrible, and soon found themselves homeless and jobless.
They got another gig at the Bella Napoli in Hillbrow, and a flat in Ponte Tower. A couple of band members started dating, which was PJ’s first introduction to the lesbian scene. Oblivious to the fact she was one herself, she said to Eckstein, “Eddie, we can’t have lesbians in the band! It’s disgusting! Fire them!”
Eventually, it was Eckstein who was fired — the band felt it was his fault they’d had a series of bad gigs. Powers, having met Mike Fuller briefly before, decided to give him a call. Thus began the love/hate relationship that has followed her throughout the ups and downs of her career. And Powers pulls no punches in describing a rock’n’roll cliché, the manager who takes advantage of a talented young performer. Today, she is still in legal battles with Fuller.
The heart of this book is Powers’s trans- formation into Thandeka, which gave her an incredible sense of self and homecoming. She was first called the name at a concert in Soweto in 1982. She and the all-white male band Hotline had an inexplicable hit with You’re So Good To Me on the Radio Zulu charts and were subsequently invited to perform at Jabulani Stadium in Orlando. They were overwhelmed by the reception from the 40 000-strong crowd (packed into a 30 000-seat stadium). The event also saw the birth of her most famous hit, Jabulani. Her fellow band member George van Dyk penned the song, celebrating the day.
Despite the fame, Powers fell on bad times, essentially because she didn’t take responsibility for her finances. The lows were very low: performing at a Beares furniture store in unglamorous Estcourt. The highs, very high: appearing on the same bill as Eric Clapton at a concert in Maputo. “According to the local newspapers I ‘stole’ the show from Clapton, which I have to admit I did,” she says.
Her biography is packed with personal detail, including her battles with weight issues and alcoholism, and her relationships with various women. What most impresses, though, is the honesty with which she tells her story — even if, at times, it comes across as blowing her own horn. Thandeka remains the loved one.