Andrea’s journey through North North Social Club, the many hats she’s worn over the years, and the community of creators, curators, tastemakers, and rulebreakers that she has fostered.

We at VERVE have come to a realisation. That we are not VERVE. It is more than just Ntsika and I writing about our passions. VERVE is all of us.

We have stumbled across so many others who have found this calling, this innate desire to build a community, based around shared passions, art forms, an mediums of creativity.

Others like Andrea Davids, the person behind North North Social Club. We learned about Andrea through MasterKiii, when he invited us to watch his live set opening for In2une at One Park for the Sec_ndary Listening Session.

Now we had been to One Park before, but never for an experience like this. Intimate, grounded, warm. Just people gathered to experience good music, to commune with the artist and each other. MasterKiii was as energetic and animated as he always is, performing a half hour set from his recent album Anemoia. Heads were bopping, feet were stomping, and it felt like the 30 of us gathered in that room were one entity, flowing through his passion.

We came for that, but we got so much more. He plugged us through to Andrea, and we linked for an interview which turned into a 3 hour session exploring the nature and similarities of what VERVE and North North are setting out to do.

North North started as Andrea, Chuma-Sande Bentele and Wynton Mcallister, three friends from the Northern Suburbs who found themselves at Waiting Room almost every weekend. Running into other homies from the North at the same events and spaces, they realised that there were no real spaces in their own stomping ground for themselves and their peers to come together and enjoy the music and vibes that they loved. 

Setting out to make their own space, they started the North North Social Club. Fueled by the desire to fill the void of the lack of spaces for people to live their lives, they went door to door, bar to bar, restaurant to restaurant, searching for a venue. But door after door got slammed in their face. 

Experiencing constant rejection, and even almost having their idea stolen at one point, they remembered a poetry slam they had been to a couple years back in Stellenbosch at GUS, the Gallery for the University of Stellenbosch. They reached out, and when Heinrich Groeneweld, the curator at the time, saw three people of colour trying to bring Hip Hop and culture to a gallery with white walls took the opportunity to disrupt the space. 

As the pieces started falling together, the vision started taking more shape. They had a space at a gallery, so why not showcase some art? Kaapstad Supply had just started in Kuilsriver, so why not give them a platform to showcase their brand? But it wasn’t just as simple as that. They had to teach people how to install exhibitions, how to represent their brand, and thereby learn themselves. 

North North Social Club officially launched as a space to platform creatives and showcase their work. Not only that, but they had to be supporters, hype-men, and so many other roles inbetween. They hosted events, they did listening sessions, and they built the community. They asked themselves the real questions. What does it take to create a safe environment for artists? What does it take to host an event that’s impactful? What does it mean to actually connect people? How do they do that in an authentic way?

They realised that they had to collaborate as well. They had to work with people and learn how to make someone else’s vision come to life. They each had different dreams, with the same underlying passion, and they grew and developed in their own way, falling into different roles. For a solid year they ran things the way they were, until life did that thing that it does with the best laid plans of mice and men. Wynton went on to pursue his Honours, and Chuma went on to live out his dream of doing stand up comedy. Andrea was left running the show, and she found herself stretched a bit thin. After feeling like North North had achieved what it had set out to do, she found herself having a conversation with a friend one day in which he posed the question:“what do you want to do?”. So she reassessed, and narrowed the scope of North North a bit, and decided to focus on the impact of what she could achieve.

After keeping things going for a year but feeling herself stretched a bit thin. When she looked back at the progress of North North Social Club, and what she had set out to do, her own love of music narrowed the focus of  the project. The collaborative events would still run,the work would continue, but so much more would come.

Andrea has curated a myriad of different creative spaces, from Write and Share workshops with Xina, to HXME with Pop Up Collab, an experience cultivating the relationship between fashion and visual art, to to listening sessions for both Kujenga and Namakau Starr. She is also currently hosting Poetry Evenings in collaboration with That Eclectic and Zizipho Bam, on every last Wednesday of the month. Not quite an open mic, not quite a show, the Poetry Evenings are a laidback space where established poets such as Koleka Putuma, Siphokazi Jonas and Thandiwe Nqanda feature their work. Poets wanting to refine their craft and expand their audience also feature their work, with a selector curating the sets for the evening.

More recently she has been approached to get into artist management, and that has been transformative in and of itself. She now manages i_SO, an experimental Jazz, Funk and Neo Soul artist, even occasionally accompanying him on drums for performances. Finding herself in that space and managing her personal strengths and weaknesses, figuring out how to get the best out of herself while getting the best out of the artists that she manages. 

While interacting with a producer she met called In2une, she decided to approach the listening session format from a new light, and reignited the desire to create experiences combining art, photography, documentation, and even promotion, while at the same time tailoring the experience to suit the artist, and the community. She found the love of the space again, and the confirmation that there is a need in the culture for spaces like these. 

The inspiration for the new event series comes from the personal desire to find out more about the people behind the music, and to give them the opportunity to ask them questions which delve deeper into the passion and motivation behind what they do, questions that they don't usually get asked as producers and beat makers. The result is a beautiful confluence of passion for the art, and love for the underground culture, which acts as a platform for talented individuals to speak on what they do. 

We have witnessed this first hand, going from In2une’s Sec_ndary listening session to the follow up titled Listening Session Vol. 1 the following month. The first was a lot more intimate and laid back, a perfect environment to experience the beat tape, white the second was perfectly curated to expand by featuring North North co-founder Wynton opening the session with his work on the decks as group_therapy_global ,as well as introduce 3-Six, a producer and beat maker with a boom-bap aesthetic. All the performers were dressed by Lazy Stacks for the evening, which just completed the whole experience, each fit suiting the artist and their sound

But Ntsika is the music man, So I’ll let him speak on the experience. 

Being our second time attending North North’s event, we were beyond excited, having already witnessed what the organization was capable of producing.

Walking up the steps of One Park, we were immediately hit with a wave of smooth elementary beats, provided by the brilliantly minded Wynton, warming the room for Master Kiii’s eventual presence.

If there’s one thing we love about what we do at VERVE, it’s experiencing new music from artists we have yet to come across, and we were fortunate enough in being in the presence of the talented 3-Six, a man who mastered the art of production. We were treated to fresh sounds, building even more hype for the awaiting acts for the night. I don’t want to say too much, but we’re definitely going to delve deeper into his work soon.

And of course, having previously witnessed the ingenious mind of the gifted poet, Master Kiii delivered yet again, blowing the crowd away with his wondrous yet intense poetry, reciting his hits off his latest Anemoia project, providing an enhanced performance since the first time we watched him perform. We have to also give props for his performance, the broer knows how to bring out an incredible show, constantly engaging with the room while spitting his explosive bars.

In2une hit the decks shortly after, having the crowd bop their heads to his newest album release, titled Sec_ndary, showcasing some of the most stunning beats to come out of the Mother City. It’s incredible how the complicated yet pleasing production of these joints were able to easily land on our ears, bringing out an emotion of joy. There were many times Jeriah and I found ourselves mingling with the crowd, but having to both pause and give each other that look, both squinting our eyes and mimicking the “ooh” sound at multiple moments of In2une’s performance, appreciating the sounds we were hearing.
Overall, the entire experience was everything we expected and more, truly understanding more about NNSC, the people that surround themselves around the group, and most importantly, the feel good vibes we were honoured in receiving from the event. The immersion, connection, and reception that transcended within everyone who had attended the event was spectacular, and I look forward to experiencing a million more events from NNSC.

North North Social Club is not a club, but a community, with the simple intention of supporting the passions of the art and the artists. Andrea goes into everything she does with the intention of preserving not only the hip hop culture, but Cape Town culture, channeling her pride in her heritage as a coloured woman. That intention flows into everything that she does, from the spaces she curates, to the artists she works with, the people she engages with, and the community that she has molded. 

Andrea is yet another person that we have met that channels VERVE, ‘the spirit and enthusiasm which animates artistic composition or performance’, and one of so many people that we have yet to meet that make up VERVE, the spirit and enthusiasm that makes up our vibrant Cape Town Culture.

VERVE is so much more than Ntsika and I, so much more than Andrea and North North Social Club, so much more than the artists that we meet and the ones that reach out to us. VERVE is the people, it is the art, it is the passion. VERVE is this city, this country, this continent. 

We are merely here to tell the story of VERVE. We are here to document these moments, so that people one day can read and remember and be inspired the way we are inspired every day.