Made Possible by Saba Salman

Author:Saba Salman [Salman, Saba]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783528271
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2020-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

There’s this game I love playing with people, because I always win hands down. You ask someone, ‘Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?’ No one can beat me, and I think my answer shows how successful I’ve been. Because I met Nelson Mandela. I met him through the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which, until it closed in 2012, used to support Heart n Soul. One of the perks of that was meeting the great man himself. When Mark told me I was going to meet him, my knees just turned to jelly and I dropped to the floor. ‘What do I say?’ I asked Mark. ‘Hello would be a good start,’ he joked. I met him in 2002 at Althorp House, the family home of Princess Diana. Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, and this frail old gentleman walked in. He said to me, ‘It is an honour and a privilege to meet you.’ In my head, I was saying, That’s the opposite way around, surely?

Meeting Mandela was such a significant moment in my life. I remember I was thirteen years old when I heard he had been freed from prison. I went to the Notting Hill Carnival with my mum not long after, and everyone was shouting and screaming his name. So it was an incredible moment to meet him. There is a photograph of me with Mandela, and my dad took it back to Nigeria to show the relatives. After I met Mandela, it was like my dad accepted me as someone who really knew what she was doing.

There was a time, you see, when Dad wasn’t so certain about my preferred career plans. He worried people might take advantage of me because of my disabilities and said the industry would rip me to shreds. Just after I released my first album, Dad was in hospital for a routine operation and he saw me on the television they had on in his ward. I was being interviewed on the local London news about how we made the album, and they showed one of my music videos. He just couldn’t believe it. I think he realised then that I was successful. My mum said to him, ‘I told you what she could do,’ and my dad just kept saying to the nurses, ‘That’s my daughter, that’s my daughter!’ Dad knew I could sing – he encouraged me to strive and told me not to give up – but it was only when he saw me on television that I think it sank in and he saw what I could do. Dad was so proud of me.

The reason I’m here, the reason I am successful, is my voice and my music. When I am on stage, I do not have a disability. I come alive on stage, like someone’s plugged me into the mains. My music is really different because you can have me as the big jazz-hands thing with a big band, or I can put together a down-tempo five-piece outfit.

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