It took about three seconds for Denver Apollus to convince me the Cape Argus should get involved with his Heart FM initiative #16DaysForYouth, writes Gasant Abarder
|||It took about three seconds for Denver Apollus to convince me the Cape Argus should get involved with his Heart FM initiative #16DaysForYouth, writes Gasant Abarder
IT TOOK about three seconds for Denver Apollus to convince me the Cape Argus should get involved with his Heart FM initiative #16DaysForYouth. Okay, maybe it was a minute.
But there wasn’t much to think about. That’s because both Heart FM’s energetic programming manager and I wear our (excuse the pun) hearts on our sleeves.
The plan was incredibly ambitious, but it had Denver written all over it: shut down Heart FM’s Green Point headquarters for 16 days as the entire crew hits the road to do good for the youth from June 1 to Youth Day, June 16.
Activities include supporting soup kitchens, cleaning up the street, reading to children, a free mobile dentist and helping the people who help the youth in their communities.
The journey takes the team from Vredenburg to Darling, Mitchells Plain, Grassy Park, Bonteheuwel, Bredasdorp, Imizamo Yethu and everywhere else in between.
As we sat in a briefing on Monday, with Denver animatedly taking all the partners through the programme – just two days before launch – I sensed there had been much apprehension to the plan.
But what Denver and I know is that in our respective spaces we have to innovate and disrupt. It’s the only constants in our line of work.
Here’s the rub: it’s not enough for newspapers like the Cape Argus to just be purveyors of news or for Heart FM to be a music radio station for entertainment.Readers and listeners want – no demand – a whole lot more.
Our brands have the power to change the world and to connect people as the conduits between those who want to give, and those who need it most.Denver’s plan fits squarely into this ethos.”I tried to create something for Youth Day.
Then I thought, what if we did something for the youth on a larger scale?
If it’s one day, it pops up and then disappears.”I went online to see if anyone was doing anything like a 16 Days for Youth and it occurred to me there was no website or social media – nothing.
That sparked an intention to do this for 16 days for the kids.
”It’s about being in a position to be able to tell the story. I want to tell the story of what’s going on out there. When we realise we are able to tell the story, and we’re in that position – not to find content for one day and it disappears – you can do something more meaningful; something that is going to have a life.”We could do something so simple, said Denver.
I used to do this ‘Reading for the Red Cross’ thing many years ago. Just going there and reading for kids made such a difference.”This is an opportunity for us to hit the road and do things selflessly in a way I like to do things all the time.
”Denver, 36, is a senior exec at one of Cape Town’s leading commercial radio stations, is happily married to Hayley and they have three children. But it could all have been very different. His rise in the music and entertainment business was meteoric and took off almost straight out of high school.
It was almost too meteoric. At 25, he hit rock bottom and lost everything.
”I started DJ’ing at the age of 14, off the back of doing Standard 5 class parties with black paper on the windows and making my own lights. “I’ve always had the passion for music and throughout my high school career at Rhodes High School I was on the media portfolio.”It was a wonderful school with great leadership. I would always find myself in the space of the technical stuff, scratching here and putting wires together, making things and dismantling them.”After matric I started this company with a mobile disco.
Two of my buddies partnered with me and we were called DSC – Denver, Shaun Harry, and Che Joemat. We were the mobile DJ crew.”Later, they pursued other opportunities and I was left to start a company called the Wrecking Crew. It was that excitement where the first thing you do is make a batch of 10 or 20 business cards. I did a crash three-month engineering course and I was found by CapeTalk and taken into the radio space as an engineer.”Denver was one of the founding crew of a CapeTalk event now called Moonstruck, which still runs today.
While at the station, he met his mentor, radio personality Martin Bailie Bailey. “That’s where it all started from a radio perspective. Martin was a great mentor for me and still is. I’m in contact with him regularly.”Around that time GrandWest opened and there was a media launch. The marketing director took us through the site of the review bar and the nightclub.”Martin Bailie then turns around and says, ‘Hey, Hectic D (he used to call me that) is a good DJ’.
The marketing director asked for my card and I had this lone business card as a new, young business owner.”I got a call a couple of weeks later to say the contractors were coming in later and could I come in? I went there with a few buddies and we DJ’d at Hanover Street.
”I thought to myself I could be the only DJ here and then I’ll have a lifespan. Alternatively, I take a step back and I bring in together folks and supply the DJs and put bands together… I became a small time promoter.
Denver paved the way for a number of young people to get gigs at Hanover Street. They are now big names on the commercial music radio scene of Cape Town.
Soon Denver opened his own nightclub Bunker 9 on Edward Street in Tyger Valley. It became the place to be and be seen a decade or so ago.
”I met amazing people along the way. I was very young and at the same time very irresponsible. At a young age, with the business I had, and the opportunities I had, it was too fast for me.
”I found this space with a buddy of mine and started this nightclub from building the furniture ourselves, making the bar, putting the sound system together… I like to put things together myself.”It grew to become the most popular club on the strip. " he added.
"I was still in radio and by then a technical supervisor. But I was reliable. They would call me at 3am, knowing I’d be partying up the road and I’d go in just to switch on a button.” But in the blink of an eye life came crashing down.”I wiped my eyes out one day and then it collapsed on me – the club business, " he said.
"I messed up my whole life with alcohol and drugs and it was tough. I lost everything. There were people who worked for me and in the industry that wanted what I had.”One day I came home and I couldn’t even put 50 cents of electricity in my house. My daughter was crying, Hayley was crying and I was lying on the bed – now out of my job in radio too.”I took some empty bottles from under the kitchen sink to exchange for cash to get electricity, buy milk for my daughter," Denver remembers.
Hayley and I were emotional. She then said to me, ‘Why don’t you go back into radio?’
The hardest thing for Denver was when the calls stopped. He was the guy you called for business advice, when you needed a break or just wanted to know what colour car to buy.
Now, when he was down and out, no one called. But he had Hayley and old friends Shaun and Che.Che couldn’t deal with seeing Denver in the state he was. But on Fridays, Denver would get a call from Che to come to the door.
There would be no one there except a bag of groceries hanging from the gate.”But no one called me for anything. It got to a point where I needed my worth, I needed someone to need me for something – a purpose. I just lost my cars and lost the house. The banks fetched everything.”
So I’m sitting there and Hayley says, ‘Why don’t you go back into radio?' I made contact and said I’d work for free; as long as someone can need me for something. But I didn’t hear anything. One day I was driving around when Shaun, who lives in Joburg - and didn’t really know what I was going through, phoned and said, ‘D, you remember what we did at Hanover Street back in the day? I want you to come do that for me at the Classic Cape Town Parties in Joburg’.”I was in disbelief because no one had called me for anything.
He offered to pay for the gig, my accommodation and flights. It had been months since I had earned anything and I was doing nothing. I put the phone down and I bawled my eyes out there in Sirius Road, Surrey Estate, driving my sister’s car.
”I promise you I went to that party, stood in front of those decks and I started playing. It was like it never left me. I thought to myself I can start over. People can pay me R200 to DJ and I can come home and give it to my wife.”I hugged Shaun and said to him he had no idea what this meant for me, "said Denver.
When I eventually told him he couldn’t believe it. I’ve remained humble ever since and I enjoy that I’m doing something that I love. “But I do it to make sure I will never stuff it up again.”If Hayley didn’t make me realise what I was doing and how she stuck by me, I don’t think I would have been motivated to do what I do today. I do what I do for her and for my kids. I do what I do for me because it feeds my soul.
“Denver was soon lured back to radio – and has never looked back. On the launch of #16DaysForYouth he received accolades from far and wide. But he knew – we knew – he could pull it off. It’s his unassuming way. He knows what needs to be done and does it with minimal fuss, but with all heart.When you’re looking for the guy in charge you’ll walk past Denver. He’ll be the guy with the sleeves rolled up, getting his hands dirty.
“I turned this station into a station that talks to Cape Town, that resonates with Cape Town. The station used to flag RnB as a staple. But what is RnB to me? What is it to you? It’s one of the genres that did not have a proper identity. So you attach yourself to an identity that nobody knows, and that’s the problem," he remarked.
* Gasant Abarder is the editor of the Cape Argus.