The Best of the SABC Years

Starting her career in the 1950s, Irene Mawela wrote songs for the Dark City Sisters and the Mahotella Queens, was instrumental in getting Ladysmith Black Mambazo their first recording contract, and has more than over 250 recordings to her name. Many of them were made for one of the South African Broadcasting Corporation's Bantu stations (which was set up as a vehicle for the apartheid policy of ‘separate development’), including these 22 wonderful sides recorded between 1982-88. Mawela's voice doesn't quite have the soulful emotion of Miriam Makeba but she deploys it to sturdy effect on a range of township styles from lilting jazz-jive to the fat pop beats of mbaqanga and bubblegum.

Backed by various bands including the Sweet Melodians and Banda Six, standouts include the effervescent ‘Danny Boy’ (no, not that one, but an original Venda love song), the acoustic folk ballad ‘Ariye Muraleni’ (recorded in 1982 but sounding like it comes from a much earlier era) and the slow blues ‘Ri A Humbela’, a plea for peace reminiscent of Makeba's classic ‘Soweto Blues’. None of the tracks were ever released commercially before now and this disc fills an important gap in the story of music's resilient role in township life under apartheid.