Shining Bright

Lungi Naidoo dishes on her new album, messy public break-up, being raised in a mixed-race home during apartheid and what DJ Black Coffee taught her

- Molife Kumona

A NASTY, public break-up overshadowed this shining star for a few years − but now she’s back with a new album and sound. Back in 2014, songstress and writer Lungi Naidoowas making headlines for all the wrong reasons: she and her former fiancé, singer-actor Brian Temba, were involved in a widely-publicised spat backstage at the Gauteng Sports Awards.

However, if social media is anything to go by, it looks like the two have resolved their differences and are friends again.

Lungi chats to us just two weeks after the release of her album, Black Diamond. She tells us she’s very excited about it, but admits it was one of the hardest projects she’s worked on so far.

“When I started on this album, I struggled a bit with the new sound,” she says. “I am growing as an artist, and this album sees me doing a genre I haven’t done before [dance/electronic] so I wasn’t very confident about it. It took time for me to be fully comfortable with the new sound.”

The Away with Me singer recalls one particularly harsh reality check she received from DJ Black Coffee (real name Nkosinathi Maphumulo).