I have so many memories of my friend Taliep Petersen, but one of the best was when we were in the west end with Kat and the Kings. President Mandela came on to the stage to congratulate and embrace us. He made an impromptu speech about his memories of the area in Capetown that we were writing about, District Six, and said he felt we had done a service to South Africa. It almost felt like we'd been fighting a war.
I met Taliep about 30 years ago when we were both on a concert bill together. Taliep was in a famous folk duo in South Africa and I was singing more social commentary songs - I was a bit of an angry young man at that point. We were quite dissimilar and we came from completely different backgrounds but what we had in common was an interest in Cape folk music.
Ten years later, having seen him on and off, I had an idea to write a musical about District Six, which was an area destroyed by the apartheid Group Areas Act. Taliep grew up there and knew the place intimately. I happened to bump into him at a film about District Six and we both seemed to have the same idea. That's when our working relationship started, and then our real friendship started.
In our working relationship he was very much responsible for the music. He had an incredible ear for harmony and arranging instruments. He was a great raconteur. He grew up in this fascinating place, this cosmopolitan island in the middle of the apartheid nightmare. My childhood was quite bland and boring, so I used to love listening to his stories. He could tell them very vividly with a great dramatic flair, jumping on his feet and gesticulating. Sometimes in rehearsals I would try to get him to start telling a story because I knew if you could get Taliep to talk about his past you wouldn't have to do any rehearsals. He was very funny when he got going.
When I first met him he could lose his temper quite easily but in the last few years he learnt to control that. I had a really close relationship to him and we understood each other. In all the years I was with him we never had the kind of fight or disagreement that I sometimes saw him have with other people.
The last time I saw him was on opening night of our musical Spice Drum Beat in London last Monday. It was an enormously proud moment for us both. I said my farewells to him after the show. In a way, we all had an opportunity to say goodbye to him so that was good - sometimes things happen and you haven't seen that person for a while. He did all the things that he really loved doing in his last week. He loved being in London, he saw the opening of his show, he went to the theatre as often as he could and then he went home and sang in a charity concert. The next day he was murdered.
Taliep was very well loved in Cape Town: he's been a well known singer, particularly within his community, since he was a teenager. The songs and the musicals we wrote together with be the best tribute to him whenever they are performed, and they'll be the way I'll remember him too.
