Hotstix hits the park

Legendary musician Sipho 'Hotstix' Mabuse reflects on music, art, legacy and preparing to share the stage with younger artists

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Township child: Sipho 'Hotstix' Mabuse will perform at BMW Art Generation Vol III on 30 August at the Nirox Sculpture Park in Johannesburg. Photo: Lethabo Motseleng

of singers who came from Orlando West High School. But the request to raise funds for certain students who were going to university was a watershed moment for us. That's how we decided to form The Beaters.

And now here you are and Burn Out is part of every South African's DNA. So it seems. I mean, the song was recorded over 40 years ago.

As you were recording it, did you have a sense of what it would become?

Well, I did. It was just incessant ... I wanted to listen to it over and over again. Strangely enough, it didn't take me as long to compose, compared to other songs.

I wasn't a pianist, but I could just play around on the keys. So I went to the piano and started playing. There was a pianist accompanying me, sitting across from me. I noticed how he responded to what I was doing.

So, I asked the sound engineer to stop everything else and please record what I was playing right then. "Put this down," I said. "Before I forget it." Because I knew by tomorrow, I might have forgotten it completely. So we recorded it.

When I brought in the record company executives — that was Peter Gallo and Ivor Haarburger — and said, "I want you guys to listen to this," the first thing they actually asked was, "What is this?!" They had never heard anything like it before.

Can I ask who it was about?