Artists

Clegg, Johnny & Mchunu, Sipho

image of Clegg, Johnny & Mchunu, Sipho Against all rules

The beginning of this duo is a friendship otherwise inconceivable in a land under apartheid. As the first racially mixed South African group, Juluka, consisting of Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, symbolizes the positive utopia of a freely integrated society.

In 1970, when he was sixteen, Johnny Clegg got to know Sipho Mchunu. “On day there was this young Zulu sitting in front of hour house and he asked it was “Bis Ears” (that was my Zulu name). He'd heard that there was a young white who played Zulu music and he didn't believe it. We played some songs for each other and he just fascinated me.” That was the start of a team that was to work together for the next fifteen years. For the first six years they played street music together, performing in hostels and clubs throughout the city, the surrounding suburbs and Soweto. Occasionally they would have the chance to appear in front of an audience of mixed races at the university campus.
In 1976, a few months before the Soweto student uprising, Clegg and Mchunu were already so locally known that they decided to go into a studio and record four singles. These are the first recordings of traditional Zulu music ever released on the EMI-Brigadier label. One of the songs, “Woza Friday” became a hit with the migrant workers – but the SABC still refused to give the singles any air play. An absurd explanation for the boycott was given by one of the white program directors: “Zulu music played by a white could only offend the blacks.” But it was just such an audience who accorded the band such praise.
In 1979 the duo released its debut “Universal Men”. Their music was still very much focused in Zulu street music, but they had already combined this with accents from European Folk and American Pop. This mixture, continually adapting with the ever more numerous influences coming from international Pop music, was Juluka's trademark, even making the band popular in white middle class circles.

Juluka disbanded in 1985. Sipho Mchunu returned to his Natal homeland, to go back to farming. Johnny Clegg founded a new band Savuka and devoted himself to an international career, subsequently becoming a star, whose albums have sold millions all over the world.