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Special Star.

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Directed by Nick Hofmeyr. This is perhaps Mango Groove’s most famous track, packed with the hallmark Mango sounds: Duzi’s inimitable penny whistle, big Marabi horns, gumboots and Claire’s soaring vocal. The schoolgirl dancers equally became closely linked to the song, and the dance itself continues to be popular with dance groups throughout SA.

This Is Not a Party

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Music Video for the first video single off the Bang The Drum release.

Another Country.

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Produced and directed by the internationally acclaimed SA artist William Kentridge, using real-time charcoal animation. The award-winning and groundbreaking visuals continue to offer one of the most powerful representations of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to the modern, non-racial democracy that South Africa is today.

Nice To See You.

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Directed by Ralph Zeeman, the LA based film and music video director, responsible for amongst other things, videos by Michael Jackson and Vanessa Williams. South African by birth, Ralph affectionately and seamlessly marries footage from ‘50’s SA movies such as ‘Have You Seen Drum Lately?’ and ‘Jim Goes to Joburg’ with more contemporary Mango Groove footage. The result is a stunning and uniquely South African visual feast.

Moments Away.

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Directed by Nick Hofmeyr. Mango Groove’s first big love song and title of Mango’s 2006 release ‘Moments Away: Love Songs and Lullabies 1990-2006’.

'The Essential' Mango Groove DVD: all the faves plus 3 new Videos

The new videos are all of 3 songs taken from the latest Mango Groove 'Best of' release ‘The Essential Mango Groove'.

At the time, they were Mango Groove’s first new videos for several years, so a great deal of thought, time and hard work went into their production.

As Claire explains:

‘We wanted the videos to reflect where we are today as South Africans, but at the same time to show that this is intimately bound up with where we have come from.’

Certainly, the key and distinctive Mango Groove elements are all there: the ‘50’s urban/Sophiatown aesthetic, the glamour-styling of Claire, Marilyn, Beaulah and Ayanda, the horns, the pennywhistle and the inimitable Mango Mixture of Modern Pop and ‘50’s urban SA music styles. At the same time, however, the videos very much hold a mirror up to South Africa today.

Again in the words of Claire:

‘We have come a long way as a group. We feel that the videos capture in a very unselfconscious way a group of artists and friends who know each other well and who enjoy expressing themselves through music’

 Jayce of the Boom Boom Boys directed all three videos. Claire had worked with Jayce before, on the 2003 official SA Rugby World Cup song (‘Together as One’) and was blown away by Jayce’s aesthetic sense, so working with him on the new videos made perfect sense. As Jayce himself explains:

‘It was great to be working with Claire again, as we had a great rapport on the last video, and doubly exciting then to bring in the whole of Mango Groove. I think a key aim of the three videos was to create a fairly unified look across the 3 videos, in a way that properly captures the spirit and ethos of the group, while equally bringing out the more individual nuances and qualities of the different songs.’

Southern Sky

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Southern Sky is both a love song and a song that celebrates being South African, symbolised above all by our huge and beautiful sky. Shot in the heart of Johannesburg, with the famous Jozi skyline dominating, the video captures a time and a place while equally hinting poignantly at times gone by.

Taken For a Moment

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Written in 1990, ‘Taken for a Moment’ was written as a direct response to and in memory of, David Webster, the anti-apartheid activist murdered outside his Troyeville home in 1989 by Ferdi Barnard of the CCB. The song was first featured on the ‘Hometalk’ album, but appears in a re-edited and re-mastered form on the new ‘Love Songs and Lullabies’ album.

The making of the video was poignant for the group, as it was shot just a couple of kilometres from where David Webster was killed. The video itself, however, is very much celebratory: in the words of Duzi ‘it’s a bunch of us just having fun. David Webster was a man who loved South Africa, its people and its music, so I hope that the video captures in some small way the spirit of what he stood for’.

Ulale Kanjani

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Claire and Mango have often sung in different SA and other languages, but ‘Ulale Kanjani’ is their first all-vernacular track (Zulu, with a smattering of Tswana). Written by John Leyden and Mduduzi Magwaza, and translated as ‘How did you sleep?’ the song is essentially both a love song and a lullaby, and its nostalgic, dreamlike quality is perfectly captured in the slow-mo visuals of the video.