Hello and welcome to Episode 27 of the I guess that's why they call it the UnJohn podcast podcast. This episode is based around the song Passengers, Verne Loosely as you'll find out. There is a place like no other, a place where nature reigns supreme for 3 billion years, until the coming of the sun. A place where every morning more than 3,000 workers rise with a dawn to turn your fantasies into reality.
Many are a big, big, nice scene in the sea. The Sun City was a Vegas-style luxury resort in the northwest of South Africa, about 2 hours from Johannesburg, which opened in 1979. Some people in South Africa would say it wasn't in South Africa, that it was located in Bop Huthat, Swana, known as Bop, thankfully, which South Africa had unilaterally declared to be an independent state. That meant that, unlike the rest of South Africa, gambling was allowed there and so were topless review shows.
It was also racially mixed. If you had the large amounts of money you needed, then you'd be welcomed there, no matter what the colour of your skin was. All of this provided a technical get-out clause for any international musical artists who chose to break the UN's cultural boycott of South Africa by playing there. But if those musicians had stepped out of the dream and out through the gates, they would have found themselves deep in the reality of apartheid South Africa.
Bop was one of the 10 South African Bantu stands, or homelands, reservations that existed to segregate black South Africans from the whites. The Bantu stands, the slum conditions, the dehumanization, the brutalization, for example the Sharpville Massacre in 1960, the Soweto Uprising in 1976. These things belonged to the 19th century where they'd originated from, and the world's eye had turned onto South Africa and it didn't much like what it saw. So musicians who agreed to appear at Sun City's 6,000 capacity Super Bowl arena caught a lot of ire from the press, from the musicians union in the UK, and from the UN itself, who'd initiated the cultural boycott in 1968 and then reaffirmed it in 1980 to try and force change.
For his part, Elton was on hiatus in the first half of 1983. He started off the New Year Holiday in Sydney, Australia, watching the cricket. At the same time, Chris Thomas was in LA, putting the final touches onto too low for zero, which wouldn't come out until the beginning of summer. Elton had nothing booked, no promotional duties, no gigs, he went into holiday mode, he'd split up with his boyfriend Gary Clark, he of the Elton-Mai-Elton memoir.
At the end of 1982, according to Gary, Elton was meeting a lot of guys from a range of backgrounds and bringing them back to Woodside. One of these liaisons led to some of his jewellery being stolen, and when that eventually went to court in 1985, it probably provided a few interesting contacts for the press to follow up with the press. Elton's last shows had been a Christmas residency at the Hammersmith Odeon in December 1982. That's not sped up by the way, that probably sounded the right speed to the band at the time.
Elton had spent £30,000 in today's money, wrapping the building up like a present. He wasn't in a good way though, and unlike the Christmas shows of 73 and 74 at the Hammersmith Odeon, he didn't really enjoy these gigs. One show on the 14th of December turned into an absolute fast, this was the show that Elton, Davey and Dee were left to play as a three-piece because Nigel failed to turn up. Elton and the band battled on.
When they got to many of the Jets, things went from bad to worse. Elton kicked out at his piano stall and it bashed into the shoulder of a lady in the front row, then proceeded to be extremely defensive and offhand. Presumably he was mortified. But telling the lady to go and seek help from the RSPCA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was not a very kind thing to do.
He left the venue for a driver on the block before returning for the Encore, his Elton talking to Mel Redding about the gigs in late 1983. Well, I hadn't played him with a band for a long time. Oh, God, it must have been five, six years. I've done the Ray Cooper to that band, or with a band rock and roll band.
I thought, I might have gone to Wembley's pool, which I don't like. I don't like that for cost. I don't really want to go to Ells Court. So, well do.
I'll play 14 nights at Hammersman's only because Hammersman is my favorite venue to go and see a rock and roll show in London. It's a great atmosphere. Unfortunately, it was in it, Drow me crazy because 14 nights in any one place does, I mean, I like to move on. We were getting very, very tired by that point.
I guess that's why they called it the Blues was released in advance of the album in the UK in April 1983 and the promotional machine was getting into gear. There were tentative plans in place for a double-headed tour with Rod Stewart. Here's Elton speaking to Mel Redding again. I didn't want to go on stage and do my hits and do his hits.
We were going to do sort of like, it was going to be like a 1980s revamp to version of the steam packet. Doing all old Motown medallies and stuff like that. Great old Sam and Dave stuff. It was on the cars.
We had these dates booked in Australia. I think he's really wanting to concentrate. He wants to go into a studio and do an album which he's doing at the moment. Whatever his decision is fine by me.
I mean, there was a story saying we'd fallen out. I just got a little annoying because I got a telex. That's all not a phone call. But now it's all been sorted out.
I'd like to thank Mel for giving me permission for using his interview in this way. So, Elton's engagement of seven shows at Sun City in October 1983 turned out to be his only full-band shows that year. No set list have come to light. So it's not known whether they debuted any too low for zero songs out there.
Frank Sinatra, I've been the first major artist to go there in 1981 and he was followed by the likes of the Beach Boys, Cher, Liza Manelli and Tina Turner. By the time Rod and Elton had gone, particularly Queen, who went in 1984, these visits were getting a lot of negative attention. Here's Elton in January 1984, just a couple of months after the visit, defending his choice to play out there in an interview with Paul Gambercini. I was going to tell me I can't go anywhere and have a look for myself.
If people hadn't been able to buy the tickets, if it hadn't been mixed, I wouldn't have gone. I went to check it out with when Rob was done. But the most ludicrous thing about me being part of the United Nations Blacklist from by Americans when they had the Clients Clan and when we had the National Front. The only way you've ever got to solve a problem is by not politically.
I mean I learned that when I went from eating with the local council, but often I was. I met in Zilch. So the only way I can improve things is by going and playing music. And George Benson's done it.
He went down there and played to Insawater. And it's nonsense to say that. I mean it's nonsense to make sport and music a political vision. I really think they're actually talking about the back of their answers.
I'm terrified of doing the GLC standing up. Oh bullshit. I want to see for myself, I don't need to tell what it's like. I want to see for myself the facts.
I want to go and see somewhere else. I don't want to make my own mind up. There's not much difference between people anywhere. They're using nice people.
They say you get distorted views of it. When I went to Russia I couldn't believe how much Americans they were. The actual people in the street were as warm and friendly as Americans are initially. I wouldn't have thought that until I'd gone there.
So I found that out. And you're told so many things. I want to see for myself. And nobody to say that I can't go to South Africa.
When we have people in the English cricket team in the South Africans. When English players can't play it. It's just hypocrisy, if you're obviously gone there. And I'll fight that music and sport bring people much closer to anything else.
There are echoes here of present day spats between musicians, Roger Waters and Radiohead Springs to mind. In that case over the right some wrongs of boycotting Israel. The UN was prepared to make pronouncements back then on South Africa. And that's how it came to be that Elton found himself on the UN Center Against Apartites Register or Blacklist of artists who'd broken its cultural boycott.
This dubious bit of recognition. His fee for the shows and some items of jewelry weren't the only things Elton brought back from South Africa. He also brought back a recording of a folk song that he and David found and wanted to make use of. These days there'd be people who call this cultural appropriation.
There are plenty of other words for it though. Field work, folklore studies, song collection, ethnomusicology. In the end though it's rich white people primarily going out and collecting the music and traditions of much poorer black people. And it's this dynamic that makes it ripe for reassessment.
Some musical borrowings were done in better faith than others. 35 years before Elton found his South African folk song Alan Lomax had done the same with this song Mboobay by Solomon Linda which was a hit in South Africa in 1939 and he brought it to Pete Siga in 1949. The chorus of this song which goes O'Yim and Mboobay which means you are a lion was misheard as O'Yim and Mboobay and that sequence of sounds the topic of the song. The falsetto vocal line and the rhythm and the feel of the song were lifted wholesale from the Solomon Linda original.
Then and now if you could call a song traditional and arranged by you you'd get 100% of the royalties hardly and the encouragement to look deeply to just how a song came into being. In this case they just said that they thought that Linda had covered a traditional Zulu song and let that be the end of it. For what it's worth Pete Siga was strongly advocating modernising this system in his late years. It still goes on.
A great deal of Timbaland's early career was based around samples of Arabic music which he initially tried to pass off as his own work but he did. Mboobay and Solomon Linda's family eventually became Disney's headache when they used the song in the Lion King musical. For his part Elton did give a songwriting credit for his fairly significant borrow. Okay so here's the song that passengers was based on Isanto Lesignoni by Zulu musician Phineas Ngise.
was SQT due at today on the song that'd suddenly be followed by David Johnson Theme and D oh nice you to find out. According to Davy, who was asked about this song and sadly defumped, asked Davy Johnson websites both he and Elton that discovered the original' Devil shows us John rating credit for this song have always been really puzzled about how it came into being. It's one of the main reasons that I've researched this episode, but I've not been able to find anymore about how they actually came across it. In all likelihood, it was passed to them by an executive from Gallo Records who brought the record out, maybe Eric Gallo, the CEO himself, during Outen's Sun City visit.
I've spoken to Phineas Mkiise Sun Bennett by email for this episode, and he also believes that that was the connection. I'd like to wholeheartedly thank Bennett for agreeing to answer my questions, because now we can fill in some details about Phineas Mkiise's life. Bennett told me that his family still live in the same area that they always have, Kwazulu Natal, which is 90 minutes north of Durban on the east coast of South Africa. Phineas used to stay in Johannesburg to find work.
Bennett says that he and his siblings had a typical upbringing for that area, which unfortunately included regular violence and killings in their village. Such that, in some years, school didn't get to start up until springtime. Phineas had three wives and 18 children, none of whom ended up going into music, according to Bennett. Bennett says that the album, Isanto Lezioni, was released in the late 1970s.
Wikipedia says differently than it was released in 1963. Bennett says that the song was popular locally in the Mafel Mulo region. The song is in the Mascandi style, which is a form of the Zulu folk music, which is alive to this day. Isanto Lezioni means Church of Zion, but the way it's used in a song is as if it's somebody's name.
The lyrics say, was Santo Lezioni, or Beekah which translates to Isanto Lezioni, why do you run away? Phineas, by the way, was not a political writer. He hated politics because so many people were dying because of their affiliations at that time in South Africa. Phineas retired from music in 1991 with his last album being called Encan Yasini, which is the name of his home in Mafel Mulo.
He became a traditional healer and he passed away in 2006. Bennett says that his father used to speak a lot about Elton John and the role that he ended up playing in his music. He was always excited that his music was being listened to overseas. I'd like to thank Bennett again for sharing his memories of his father and for helping us to put things into context.
Elton took a lot of elements from Mkeise's original song, Whole Rhythm and Arrangement is very similar. The accordion refrain is identical, as is the main melody of the chorus, both the call and the response part. The bulk of the lyrics of the chorus are in fact a mishearing of the original Zulu lyric, Ube Ekeane becoming Huan again, and then who want to get on would have led them straight to Deny the Passenger and to the topic of the song. Here's what they put together, recorded with Chris Thomas in Monsterat for the Breaking Hearts album and then released as the second single from that album in the UK in August 1984.
It made the top 5 in the UK and the top 10 in Australia sounds like a success to me. In South Africa, it was Elton's first single to finish outside of the top 10. It only made it number 15 in the main charts but locally I think it did a bit better in some areas. In the US, who wears these shoes came out instead?
The songs got an extended remix. I think it's the first of the 80s songs to get that treatment, a couple of extra minutes added in by looping some sections, dropping out parts here and there, doubling up the African percussion sounds and slicing up Elton's vocal in the breakdown section, generally spoiling the flow of the song. Presumably at this time these mixes were being done by Chris Thomas, since no one else is named on there. Wikipedia says that the song was recorded in December 1983, just a few weeks after the Sun City shows, I'm not sure where they get that information from.
The album was recorded in two bursts, first off in December 1983, when they did restless, slow down geology, little refrigerator, breaking hearts and sad songs say so much. I know this much because Elton says these were the songs that were finished in an interview with Shazam in New Zealand in March 1984 and he says they're going to go in and finish the album off, which is what they did. They went back to where studios in Monster At the following month, so I don't know when it was recorded. I'll agree with Wikipedia.
Davey described the process of recording this song, sorry, past Davey Johnson website. He said, we cut it in Monster At with the studio staff, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, etcetera on the lawn outside and had a party as they sang the choruses with us. I think that sense of fun comes across in the recording. I like the bits that Elton and Davey wrote for this song.
It's a catchy verse and a strong middle eight and the whole thing holds together quite well. The world beat to the song has some authenticity for me. There's nothing else in the Elton John catalogue with this kind of sound. It was new territory for the band.
You've got to give them credit for attempting it and for making a hit out of it. I love D's upside down bassline, rolls around the chorus in a really odd way around Nigel's vaud clever percussion. There's no piano, there's a couple of organ sounds, there's a harmonium in there, lots of acoustic guitar and I don't think it's credited but there is some quite very dry electric guitar as well. They must have considered quite carefully how to get the right sound for this song, how to avoid pastiche, to give it a bit of edge, something to match, Bernie's gritty lyric.
Bernie had a cameo in the video for this song so it's likely that he really believed in the project. What he wrote has got a clear anti-apartheid message but he does it without being obvious or trite. There's some willfully obscure imagery in there, the non-commercial native who's living in a blood bank, it doesn't bring many coherent images to mind that, but that is mixed in with some much more direct lines. He starts the first verse off with the idea that there's two things that are required to make up a fascist society, one hypocritical fool, a charismatic fascist leader, and one crowd that's never there, the silent, unthinking majority who are part of a machine, just following orders and doing what's expected of them.
Bernie gets in references to mining, chain gangs and that verse as well have a look, it's a lesson in economical lyric writing. The jail on wheels that he talks about sounds like South Africa itself to me, still trumbling on running on the blood, bone and the tears of the African people. Someone else in front and someone else behind is the story of white people putting themselves ahead of native people all over the world. In a more literal sense, it's also the cufra, a segregated form of public transport where the conductor is just doing his job, but he's falling on a ticket that no one's used in years, the conductor and the state that he represents are using old arguments that just don't cut it anymore in the modern world.
The video backs up the Antia partite message of the song in a similarly oblique manner. It was directed by Simon Mill, the New Zealand board director who was working a lot with Duran Duran at the time, and it was filmed in Central Pais, still one of Elton's favourite holiday destinations. Intriguingly, Mill's father worked for the UN, the fact for you there. It's possible that some of the imagery in the video was suggested by Bernie himself that we know that he would go on to make an attempt at storyboarding the Nikita video the following year, so maybe this is something he was getting into at the time.
The video starts with Elton in a hotel room, a cuz of Sun City here, waking to the sound outside of a man in the jungle, black dancer, screaming at the top of his lungs. Elton's got a disillusioned look on his face. He starts to get up and go about his day, but magically the dancer is transported to the hotel room and it's him that drags a room service guy into the room, carry on style, and then that room service guy emerges, dancing now dressed in a loincloth. Then the black dancer himself steps out of the room, he's wearing a black jacket, he's carrying a white staff, he does a bunch of crazy laughing, he's probably meant to be some kind of witch doctor.
And Elton is outside once he's got his hat on and he goes about his day along with his girlfriend in Santropay surrounded by packs of dancers who are using moves that are somewhat reminiscent of traditional African dance. The black dancer is there as well, he's hanging around in trees and doorways, pulling people off camera and magicing onto them the same make-up as he's got on, which is essentially half black, half white face. The day goes on with more scenes of typical Santropay life being juxtaposed with the male and female dancers in their rags and in their loincloths dancing around in packs led by that original dancer. And then Elton starts to dance with him for short periods, each time he's rescued and where rescued as well by his girlfriend, using ever more lavish forms of transport, first an open top sports car, then a speedboat, and then finally a helicopter.
By this time though, his girlfriend's had her make-up done as well, and when Elton re-emerges, it's night time and he's made up as well wearing a white jacket and using a black staff to magically set fire to a grand piano. The mood's gone sexual, the dancing having given way to some more primal bumping and grinding. Then it's the morning again and everything's reversed. Elton's in the jungle now emitting the primal scream, which is something you have to watch.
The dancer in Elton's hotel room wakes up with his own world weary look and then the switch happens again and it's Elton that pulls the loincloth wearing room service guy into the room, who then re-emerges in his uniform, carrying his tray and Elton pops out to give us an eerie grin with all traces of make-up having been removed. What to make of this? Firstly, the video probably wouldn't have come into being if David Bowie hadn't made Let's Dance a year earlier. Bowie had paved the way when it comes to getting MTV to embrace the anti-colonialist message.
Then again, it was pretty brave of Elton, even in 1984, to be playing with Blackface in this way. The video has got a strong and a relatively direct message. Elton and the Blackdancer are interchangeable in the video. It seems to be saying that we're all the same underneath, that skin colour doesn't need to define us, maybe that we've got something to learn from the African way of life.
There are two ways of life from being depicted. There's the empty, decadent Western life in San Tropez that Elton seemed to be getting sick of, but it keeps pulling out and back. And then there's the other life. This, for me, is where the message gets a little bit mixed up.
It would be nice if the other side of life was full of something wholesome. Like a respect and love for nature and your fellow man maybe? Instead, no, it's a life of sex and magic. Oh well, in the end I guess MTV gets what MTV wants.
I may have overdone the analysis a little bit there. But this isn't a run of the mill single, Elton and Bernie in the band were really trying to create something meaningful, something respectful, to South Africa with this song. Something to show that they believed in the anti-apartime cause. And that they had more depth than just being that act that was happy to play Sun City without a second thought.
Of course, I never explicitly said this, not during the Gamberchini interview in January 84 when presumably they had the song in their hands, the original at least, and then not later. But it's there right in front of us, the message is there, but it didn't really seem to get through. Probably there were people that recognised the gesture, but they found it to be in authentic, certainly in South Africa. There were more authentic crossovers between Western and Zulu culture to be had, such as in the music of Johnny Clegg, who was known as the White Zulu.
Two years later, Paul Simon would release his own album of constructive engagement with South African musicians, Graceland, something that really ruffled feathers for breaking the boycott, but musically was seen as a triumph. Elton didn't stop getting it in the neck, it was all raked up again in October 1985 when Steve Van Zant from the E Street band put together a group protest song called Sun City, which featured Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, L'Ooride, Ringo Starr and many more. His original demo of the song went through the Blacklist of Names, presumably including Elton, although it hasn't surfaced. Here's the released version.
As regards passengers, the story basically stops there. The song was probably played about 40 times during the UK and island leg of the Ice on Fire Tour in 85 and early 1986. This is the version from Manchester on the 1st of December 1985. It sounds like a fairly fun live song.
As we're here at the end of the episode, the crowd gets to join in with the call and response vocals in the chorus when the band are in the mood. By the time the tour moved on to mainland Europe, it had been dropped though, in favour of Paris. The song wasn't covered by other artists, it turned up on the very best about John here in the UK, which must have provided some nice royalties for Phineas Minkizet in the 90s. Of course, Bernie didn't stop thinking about South Africa.
In 1989, he wrote Durban Deep, more of a work song than a political or protest song. Elton physically returned to Sun City, along with Ray Cooper in 1993. By this time, the apartheid era was over, although change, conflict and upheaval remained a way of life out there to this day. And for his part, Elton had initiated a great number of changes in his life by 1993.
He'd found a belief in a higher power, broadly in the power, for people to change the world when they worked together. He was seeking redemption, and that came in the shape of his Elton John AIDS Foundation, which he set up in 1992, and which has since raised almost half a billion dollars. Also, if you check out the Charity Navigator website, you'll see in terms of its administrative efficiency and the accountability of the charity is one of the best out there. Elton's foundation works closely, now, with the UN, on many of its initiatives.
The then-secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, received Elton's Founders Award from Elton's charity, in 2016. And because of the nature of the AIDS epidemic, a lot of the Elton John AIDS Foundation's initiatives have been focused on helping people in Africa, Southern Africa, in particular, and Elton's gone further though. There are stories of him making low-key visits to the country, for example, in 2005, he opened up a new centre there, and he toured projects that his foundation had helped to set up. This all culminated in Elton receiving the Harvard Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2017 for his charity work.
We are so delighted to welcome Sir Elton John to Harvard University. The superstar musician was welcomed to Harvard with applause and with inspiring music from Harvard students. It was a wonderful memory of South Africa that I go to a lot and love so much. It's for his work in South Africa and around the world that brought him to Harvard today, honored as the 2017 Humanitarian of the Year for his work, Raising Money and Awareness of HIV and AIDS.
Elton's speech, which can be found on his YouTube channel, makes reference to South Africa, a place that he says he loves, and he says how apt it was that the students should have performed a piece of music from South Africa for him. It's worth watching the speech. It's great to see Elton so passionate and so well-informed about the fight to overcome AIDS. So that's the end of that little tale.
Hopefully you've enjoyed this episode, which has been a bit of a three-pronged thing, a deep dive into the song and the video for passengers, a joint through Elton's links with South Africa, and then a tentative bit of history for the 1982-84 period of Elton's career. If you've got any comments, you can send them to me at EltonPodcast at gmail.com or feel free to put a review up on iTunes. I've worked out that you need to put in different country codes if you want to see the reviews that have been submitted in different iTunes areas. So there's more there than I'd actually realized, as well as really Brown, who did a great review.
I need to thank Patrick, Big Fan, and Boghob Lives for their reviews on the US iTunes site. And I know there are some reviews elsewhere as well, so thank you very much for doing those. We're going to go out listening to the live version of Passengers in full from Wembley Arena from the 14th of December 1985. See you next time.