Bulawayo Boy on James Blunt's radar

A REMIX of James Blunt's song 2005, taken from his latest album Afterlove, has seen 17-year-old Bulawayo producer Mxolisi Lunga take a step towards worldwide fame, as his rendition of the track is in the top 10 list from a list of submissions from around the world.

According to the rules of the competition, all hopefuls are supposed to use Blunt's vocal contribution to the song and construct a beat around it.

The winner of the competition will have the song professionally mastered and released across platforms such as Beatport, Soundcloud and Spotify. The song will then be uploaded to the James Blunt YouTube channel, a platform which already has over a million subscribers while it will also have social support from Atlantic Records UK.

Lunga's success however, is not a bolt out of the blue as he is a talented beat maker and instrumental composer.
Lunga is also a voice over artiste on the Byo Show, where he plays the Ratu character.

"My parents bought him his own desktop computer and this in my opinion is what made him even more skilful. He'd spend hours in front of the computer and even my parents were happy that he wasn't spending time on the streets anymore."

"Mxolisi would say that he was as good as any international beat maker so a few days ago I challenged him to enter a beat maker competition online. We opened the website and that's when we stumbled upon the James Blunt competition. Mxolisi started working on it right away and it came out very well and so he uploaded it into the competition page," said his older brother Bruce Lunga.

For his part, the younger Lunga said that he hoped that the competition would help propel him towards stardom.

"Winning will definitely get me the recognition I need but win or lose this is just a start. I intend to do more of these competitions and take a shot at international scene on a professional level," he said.
Submissions and voting for the competition end on 22 August.