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Fact #160470

When:

Short story:

Last Night A DJ Saved My Life by Margino enters the Springbok Charts in South Africa. It will peak at No16 during a six-week run.

Full article:

Iain Banner : Margino was actually a performing name of my wife, Kim Kallie, who was a platinum artist in South Africa. My friend Attie Van Wyk produced her records. She was a white artist performing in the black townships to sell-out audiences in the mid-80s. She became a phenomenon because Madonna wouldn't release her work in South Africa so Margino did cover versions of Holiday, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life and so on. She used to be helicoptered around from venue to venue.

Attie Van Wyk (record producer) : Margino was a very beautiful and talented white girl, married to a very good friend of mine, Iain Banner, who later became a director of our company (BigConcerts) in the mid-90s. I recorded a lot of songs with her that had an African feel and she became almost a Madonna in the townships.

It was always a bit nerve-wracking, for any white man to go into an area where a million black people were living. We'd play festivals on a Sunday. We were always escorted in and out by the promoters, with bodyguards, and you'd see 30,000 black faces in front of you, but she became such a big star that there was never any trouble. She'd perform and get out.

I would go as far as the mixing desk, but it was nerve-wracking because in those days we had a state of emergency. It was pretty hectic. We had P.W.Botha as president. He wasn't a Hitler but I was very surprised that he didn't get bumped off by some sharpshooter the day he retired. Those were really bad days, the apartheid days.

I was very much an activist and I wanted to get that message across in my songs. A lot of the songs I wrote, for example, We Miss You Manelo, when you sing it, it sounds like We Miss You Mandela. We had to submit it to the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) because they had to see the lyrics to screen them for political content, make sure we weren't going to incite riots, and so on before they would play it.

We did a video for it which was all about girl that fell pregnant and was disowned by her parents, thrown out of her home, but everybody in the townships sang We Miss You Mandela.

Another one was called I Cry For Freedom (by Yvonne Chaka Chaka), and there was another No1, Let Him Go, which was superficially a love song but really it was about Mandela.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, September 2009)