Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Life and music is journey for Clegg
Farewell tour will not be end of the road for superstar who plans continue to release music
IN JANUARY this year, Johnny Clegg came face to face with his own mortality.
This week he announced his Final Journey tour to bid goodbye to his South African fans in eight weeks’ time, followed by concerts in London and Dubai.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on April 8, 2015; four days later he was under the surgeon’s knife for a Whipple operation that excised part of his stomach, his pancreas, his duodenum and gall bladder and then, in Clegg’s words, “put them back together”.
The 63- year- old music icon was lucky; only 15% of patients with pancreatic cancer qualify for the operation. Clegg was put on a round of chemotherapy and carried on with his busy life; delighting fans across the world with his unique brand of music and story-telling.
Six weeks after the operation, he was perfor ming live at the launch for the Springbok World Cup jersey – but on a stool. He would miss only two gigs t hroughout the entire chemo.
“No b o d y knew. I was strong, I wasn’t suffering from the side effects,” he said this week.
But then in March last year, when he returned from touring the US, his doctors detected an uptick in his tumour count. No one was concerned. Then the tumour count doubled the next month.
He was put on a second round of chemotherapy for six months.
“They warned me,” Clegg says, “it’s like an atomic bomb, five different solutions pumped into my body. It’s so powerful you can only have two treatments a month.”
He was told there would be massive side effects – on his legendary energy levels, his ability to concentrate, his digestion. Except it didn’t.
On December 31, he finished his show and sent his oncologist footage of him leaping about the stage, dancing like a dervish. The oncologist messaged him saying he couldn’t believe him. And then reality struck. He was laid low for the whole of January this year as everything he had been warned about hit him with a vengeance.
When he emerged, it was time to talk, honestly and frankly, with his management team.
“This chemo guarantees a year of suppressing the cancer, we’ve got a window. They said to me: ‘You don’t want to be in a space in two or three years where you don’t have the energy to say goodbye in a twoand-a-half-hour show.’ ”
Clegg is chipper; thinner, gaunter, but his eyes burn with passion. There’s no sign of the rigours he’s undergone. The price has been steep. Neuropathy has been one of the side effects. The chemo has been killing his nerve endings.
“I can’t feel my fingers, I have to look at the fret board (on the guitar) to see where my fingers must go. If I press too hard, the note would go sharp,” he says. “I feel like I’m walking on someone else’s feet.”
So he spoke to his oncologist and the medication was changed. The feeling is returning to his fingers and he’s trying out the old dance steps in his garden, to check if he’s still got the balance to do them.
“It’s super concentration, but each week I’m getting stronger. I’m in the gym, I’m eating well.”
He’s looking forward to the Final Journey. He laughs at the term. “It’s kind of final, isn’t it?”
It’s a farewell to his fans and 40 years of performing, but not to life, not by any means. Being diagnosed with cancer was a terrible shock, he admits, a time to take stock.
“I read a lot about it, I tried to understand why I had contracted it. Was it diet, stress or just random? No one could tell me.
“There’s a Zulu saying that translates as ‘this has arrived on my plate and I must eat it’. It’s a brand-new journey. Talking to Sipho (Mchunu, his longtime collaborator from Juluka) also took me out of self-obsessing about my condition.”
me it’s like an atomic bomb, five different solutions pumped into my body. It’s
The Final Journey tour starts at Cape Town’s Grand West on July 1, moving to Joburg the next weekend for two shows on July 7 and 8 at Montecasino and then down to Durban’s ICC Arena at the end of July. He’s scheduled to perform at the Eventim Apollo in London on August 19 and then the Dubai Opera House in late September, with dates for Europe, the US and Australia still to be added.
“It’s going to be an autobiographical show,” Clegg explains, “it’s like flipping through a family photograph book, sharing a life; it’s not a commercial presentation of hit songs.
“It’s something only South Africans will understand, because I’m a product of the South African experience. I incredible curiosity.
“I never thought when I was growing up in the streets of Johannesburg, ducking and diving from the police with Sipho or with Charlie (Mzila, the man who taught him guitar) that a band would emerge out of this and I would have a musical career. I saw myself as an anthropologist who’d be working and getting a salary, teaching and discovering other cultures in a very secluded intellectual environment.
“A lot of what happened to me was the consequence of choices. I made the right choices but not for the reasons people suspect. I never did Zulu street guitar to make a political statement, it was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t politically conscious at the age of 14. I fell in love and it became a massive musical detective story on a hunt to discover the roots of it.
“When I discovered Zulu dancing, that changed my life.
‘They warned so powerful’ ‘My ambitions