How Sampa The Great And Red Bull Pulled Off A Once-In-A-Lifetime Show

Before us, Sampa Tembo almost looks like she’s on fire.

Her sequinned jumpsuit catches the lights of Melbourne’s Forum Theatre as she moves, sending fractals of red and orange dancing and darting around the stage. Behind her, the Sunburnt Soul Choir sing in unison, while a brass band deliver melodies and drumbeats. Draped over the mic stand is a Zambian flag.

It’s no accident that tonight’s show looks this good. While Tembo — you may know her as Sampa the Great — always goes the extra mile with aesthetics, this performance is a particularly important one. The show, part of Red Bull’s week-long Melbourne festival, is Sampa’s first chance to show off her new album, The Return, here in her adopted hometown. Many of the artists joining Sampa in her set are her own friends and family.

As she explains: “The beautiful thing about the album is that majority of the people who worked on it are in Melbourne, so they could all jump up on stage.”

The Return became more than just an album to Sampa — it was a chance for her to assert her identity. Tembo was born in Zambia and raised in Botswana, before moving to the US for university at age 19. In 2013, she moved to Australia and soon after, her music career took off. 

She made waves with her debut release The Great Mixtape in 2015, dropped the EP HERoes in 2016, before following that up with the three-track HERoes Act 2 with Red Bull Sound Select in 2017. Next came her 2017 album The Birds and the BEE9, which won her that year’s Australian Music Prize. Soon, she was being called up to support Kendrick Lamar and Lauryn Hill on tour while, in a show of devotion, Jada Pinkett-Smith followed just one account on Instagram — Sampa’s. How that happened is still a mystery to Tembo herself (“I don’t know, man,” she laughs when asked about it. “I don’t know.”)

The rise was rapid but along the way, Sampa says, part of who she was began to get erased. She felt as though her African identity was being sidelined; press referred to her as an “Australian artist” despite the fact she’d only lived here for a few years.

So, with The Return, she saw an opportunity to set the record straight. She made her heritage impossible to miss: lyrically, she raps about black pride, home and heritage. The album features rhymes in Bemba, one of Zambia’s most widely spoken languages. The video clips were filmed between South Africa, Zambia and Botswana. Even the cover art of her singles was unmistakably African. It was, she says, a chance to be in control of her own narrative.

The visuals were a key part of getting that message out — she even put her parents in the (incredible) video for ‘OMG’, which was created together with Red Bull.

“I’ve always loved visuals. I’ve always loved music and media working together,” she says. “But I’d been saving the main story that I wanted to tell and I thought now was a good time to go home and actually show you the Sampa behind the Sampa The Great. To show people the actual human behind these stories and let them know that you can’t recreate anyone’s stories, because there’s one already there.”

So the Red Bull Music Festival show, then, became an extension of that. The vision, she says, was to “bring the stories of The Return to life”. To do that, she wanted to bring over one her childhood heroes to be part of the night: South African singer Thandiswa Mazwai, who showed Sampa how you could own your identity. “She was kind of the first woman I saw who said look, I can be an African woman. I can go on stage. I can sing in my language and I can be authentically me without apology.”

The pair hadn’t met before Sampa flew her over for the show, though they’d Facetimed. “I was pretty shook, I couldn’t speak properly!” Sampa laughs remembering the video call. “She really just wanted to hear from me why I wanted to fly her all the way to Melbourne just for a show. So I told her she was the inspiration for a lot of people of colour in the music industry be authentically themselves in a space where they felt they couldn’t be.” It was enough to get Mazwai on a plane out here.

Red Bull Music Festival became Mazwai’s first ever Australian show but if the crowd wasn’t as familiar with her work as Tembo, you wouldn’t know it: every face in the room was enraptured as Mazwai’s vocals filled every corner of the cavernous Forum Theatre, while her band dealt out a sound that fused funk, jazz and afrosoul.

Sampa put just as much thought into everyone who appeared on stage (“on a line-up level, I wanted the whole family,” she says). Supporting Sampa were a trio ascendant names in Australian music: there’s Noongar rapper Dallas Woods, before Canberra’s Genesis Owusu takes the stage to hair flip and hip swing his way through tracks like ‘Wit Da Team’, backed by a quartet dubbed his ‘Goon Squad’. 

But the very first act of the night was Mwanjé, Sampa’s little sister, who makes incredible neo-soul music of her own — when Tembo said she wanted the “whole family” here tonight, she meant it literally. On their own, any one of these acts would make an incredible headliner. Together, they form one of those once-in-a-blue-moon line-ups Red Bull has got so good at pulling off. 

Not content with just the choir, Tembo also recruited both Ecca Vandal (who appears on The Return’s ‘Dare To Fly’) and Krown (who appeared on ‘Time’s Up’) and REMI to join her on stage. After it all wraps up — once Sampa has wowed her way through ‘Freedom’ and ‘Final Form’ and ‘OMG’ — she gives a polite bow to the audience, who scream the house down in response. She’s being modest, but everyone here knows they’ve just witnessed something special.

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Katie Cunningham is a former editor of Junkee, a co-host of the money podcast Frugal Forever, and a freelance writer based in Sydney. She is on Twitter. 

Katie Cunningham travelled to Melbourne at the expense of Red Bull.