Divine Intervention

This is a story of a surprising friendship that sprung up in the midst of COVID-19.

It’s a story of one of the most talented and heartfelt people I’ve met in a long time - and culminates in a world-first achievement at 35,000 meters in the sky, that happened yesterday, Monday 26 April 2021.

In January 2020, I explained to my team at Heavy Chef that we needed to create a mnemonic for all the content we produce on the Heavy Chef learning platform. Heavy Chef is an entrepreneur education offering, with entrepreneurs sharing serious recipes on (mostly) entrepreneurial topics, spanning technology, leadership and creativity. With that as a backdrop, I figured that we required a piece of music to accompany all the entrepreneurial content that made the complexity of entrepreneurship more accessible and approachable. The piece needed to be instantly recognisable as a Heavy Chef song, as well as provide ‘stems’, individual sounds that can be taken out of the song and inserted into our content.

My favourite podcast at the time was Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, which has a cracking intro track. It’s a bubbly, catchy and classy guitar-driven jingle written by one of my favourite artists of all time, Jack White (of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs).

I told Randall, who oversees the editing and film-making at Heavy Chef: “We need something like that!”

The criteria I briefed Randall was that the tune needed to be light, friendly and accessible. It needed to be guitar-driven and authentic. It also needed to stick in your memory like an irritating (yet somewhat rewarding) earworm.

We kicked off 2020 joyfully searching SoundCloud, song libraries, video channels and social platforms. I contacted muso-friends of mine, including Louis and Mike, my long-term business partners and investors in Heavy Chef. As it happens, Mike is no slouch himself when it comes to songwriting and playing the guitar. I asked Mike, “hey dude, perhaps you can come up with something?”

By April 2020, our excitement turned to despair when our creative quest came up fruitless. Randall sent me dozens of sample tracks that kinda fit the brief, but nothing was quite right. Mike had not had the time to get stuck in to creative mode. I had poured countless hours on media channels looking for the right sound.

We couldn’t find (or create) anything that fit the bill.

I was on the verge of giving up. I figured “maybe it’s not that important” and we should just choose an arbitrary drum sound that we could repurpose into a Heavy Chef tune. You can hear the drum sound in the intros to Heavy Chef’s COVID-19 interviews from mid-2020. It’s cool, but you’ll agree it’s not great.

Side note: that’s me playing the drums, a clip that we sped up just a smidge in ‘post’.

That month, I had a conversation with Louis and Mike saying, “Guys, we’re going to need divine intervention here.”

The day after I made my plea for divine providence, I was reading in my hammock outside when a Whatsapp came through. It was from another muso friend Aron Halevi, co-founder of the iconic South African band Freshlyground. I hadn’t heard from or spoken to Aron since September the previous year and the message came out the blue. In early 2020 Aron moved to the small Western Cape hamlet of Greyton and we lost touch with each other.

The WhatsApp message was a voice note, “Hey bro, Divine and I just wrote a song together. It’s so cool. We’ll play it for you. Hang on a second.” - this is the original note:

Then, this:

Hey?

How cool?

It’s poppy, catchy and has ‘something’ - right?

I immediately messaged Aron back.

- Dude! What is that?

- I don’t know. I just recorded it and for some reason I thought of you.

- Who is that on the song? Who is ‘Divine’?

- Divine is a Zimbabwean singer who is staying with us.

- Do you think we could use it for Heavy Chef?

- Of course. I sent it to you for a reason, just not sure what. I’ll ask Divine now.

I started laughing. I told Aron about my conversation with Mike and Louis, asking for ‘divine intervention’.

“That settles it.”. It was meant to be.

A month later, Aron and Divine had produced the official ‘Heavy Chef song’.

Check this out:

This song, the result of a lightning-quick interchange of messages - and a healthy dose of serendipity - is now being played at every Heavy Chef event we hold, and features on every piece of content we produce for the Heavy Chef entrepreneur platform.

In the following months, in and out of lockdown I visited Divine many times in Greyton.

The first time I met him, at ‘The Hub & Spoke’ coffee shop, I was moved by his warmth and intellect.

Divine is immediately disarming. He has a wide grin, bubbly countenance and an infectious laugh. He is an impossible romantic and fauns over his girlfriend Zuneid who is constantly by his side. At the same time, like any great artist, Divine is thoughtful, curious and smart - with a keen eye for picking up environmental details and including them in his art.

During this period, Divine grew quickly in confidence as a songwriter. In 12 months Divine has written an album jam-packed full of catchy, memorable songs. His style is an unplaceable fusion of pop, country and world music. He sings in both English and Shona (“I want to teach the world how beautiful the Shona language is!”). Divine’s guitar skills are gradually growing and, under the superb tutelage of Aron, Divine is becoming an extremely prolific tunesmith.

Divine’s real weapon, however, is his voice. Sounding like nothing you’ve ever heard, he ululates, twists and rolls words around in a mix of African accents, effortlessly bending phrasing to simple driving rhythms.

Revealing diverse influences, Divine will often slip cover-songs into sets, surprising audiences with The Gambler or Stuck On You. This is not what you’d expect from a kid from the suburbs of Harare, who looked up at planes in the sky, promising himself that he’d one day travel the world with his music.

I chatted with Divine several times, asking him questions about his process and his inspiration. I noticed throughout our chats that underneath his effusive exterior there lay a subtle sadness underneath.

Divine hints at this sadness in some of his songs. Rockstars is a song about his mom, fighting with him over his choice of career. His mom features strongly in his lexicon, but when I asked him about his dad his face immediately turned serious. “I didn’t appreciate my dad enough when I was growing up. He wanted me to sing gospel and not this stuff that I’m singing now.”

Divine’s mother passed away in a tragic taxi accident some years ago. “It was only when my mom died, did I realise how important my father was to my life and my career.”

Aron and Divine dug deep at the end of 2020 and early 2021. Playing regular live concerts was impossible due to the pandemic, but it was critical that Divine continued to practice his skills. Aron’s creative genius came in handy, coming up with ideas such as ‘Drive-by Jukebox’, where Aron and Divine would go around Greyton on the back of a pizza delivery vehicle, playing Divine’s song list to delighted pizza lovers.

We hosted the duo here in my home town of Hout Bay, after I introduced Aron and DIvine to our local hero Dario Mustarelli, owner of Dario’s coffee shop and pizzeria. In early 2021, Aron and DIvine, together with the Vespa-riding Dario, were delivering dinner and a show to happy homes in my village in March 2021.

Aron’s finest idea, however, was for Divine’s album launch. After a chance encounter with airline entrepreneur Gidon Novick, Aron suggested that Divine launch the album on an aeroplane. What better way to drop his debut than by fulfilling the destiny of that dusty kid looking up at the sky so many years before?

Gidon agreed to Aron’s wild idea and a date was set. The idea was all the more special due to the fact it would be Divine’s first time ever riding on a plane. The crew at Lift, Gidon’s new airline launched in the midst of a tourism-destroying epidemic, was ecstatic. This was a true coming together of dreamers. When Aron phoned me to tell me that the idea was coming to fruition he sounded almost in disbelief. “You have to be there bro!”

I arrived at Cape Town airport on Monday morning and was greeted by Divine’s wide smile. “I’m so nervous,” he said.

On the plane, Divine quickly overcame any anxiety over launching his debut (and of course, flying for the first time) and performed a beautiful set.

Here, finally, is the debut single that launched in April 2021 - and the accompanying video is incredible:

On a bright April Monday evening, a small audience gathered at Gidon’s hotel ‘Home Suite’ in Johannesburg to watch an intimate performance by Divine, showcasing all the tracks on his upcoming album.

Divine interrupted the setlist to introduce a song he had written especially for his father. The song is called Hey Boy, and honours the support his father has given him over the years. A few lines into the song, Divine broke down in tears. The emotion of the message, the song, the weight, the occasion - and the realisation that after so many years pursuing his dream of releasing an album, the moment had finally arrived.

Divine, your dad and your mom can be proud of you. We all are, my friend.

We love you, brother - your Journey has been amazing to witness and you, sir, are a Rockstar.

Here is Divine’s latest release, my favourite song of his so far: