In July 2008 five of South Africa’s top musicians - Danny K, Kurt Darren, Craig Hinds and Tasha Baxter - got together to record a special song for Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. What makes this video so remarkable is that the whole production from conceptualization to release took under a day.

Nelson Mandela at 46664 concert in London 2008

The recording started at around 5:30pm on the eve of former South African President Nelson Mandela’s birthday (18 July). All the artists had agreed to participate in the project at very short notice and had gathered at the Jacaranda 94.2fm radio studios in Midrand, South Africa.

Music and lyrics were hastily written by Dean Konidaris, then producer of the Jacaranda 94.2fm Just Plain Darren Breakfast Show. Dean also played sound engineer and produced the final mix of the track.

Buzz editor Leoni Kok filmed and edited the “making of” video and both the productions were broadcast live and on the web during the course of the next morning. Danny K was unable to make the afternoon recording so had to be accommodated to lay down the final voice track about two hours before the production was scheduled to go to air!

Despite several technical obstacles, including having no timecode for the video, which meant the video and voice track had to be manually synchronized, the song was broadcast live at 7:30 am on the morning of 18 July and the video was posted on YouTube a little after that.