Forged in the fires of the Time2Shine gospel talent competition, Divine Divine earned themselves a top reputation with their debut album Edge Street. iBelieve caught up with David, Neresa and Nadine
“Time has flown!” exclaims Neresa Maye, one third of Divine Divine. The gospel group came together to win the 2011 series of Time2Shine and have grown from strength to strength since, releasing an album produced by MOBO award winning producer Victizzle and gaining a broad fan base with their unique infusion of styles and silky smooth vocals.
For Nadine Caesar, though, it’s a happy accident that she’s in this position.
“I was encouraged to enter the competition, but I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no!’” She explains. “I used to think I wasn’t perfect enough to represent God in that way.
“On the last day, my mum told me to come for the experience, but there was a lot of fear in me. Then my mum asked me to drop her off where the auditions were happening.”
As a result of this cheeky request, Nadine found herself sitting in the auditions. Before long she was singing, and the rest is history.
For David Balogun, it was more of a natural progression. “I’m a singer songwriter and I’ve been doing it since I was 14,” he says.
“But all this time I wanted to be a doctor – or that’s what I thought. I went to medical school, but from my first day, I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I have a passion for caring for people, but my mind was always on music. I think I was scared about the possibility of doing music for a living.”
Having switched from medicine to music management, David pursued his passion and found himself making it all the way through Time2Shine.
Divine Divine took part in the Time2Shine Christian music TV talent show in 2011, which launched their career
Neresa’s journey has a few more twists and turns to it.
“I’ve been singing for a long time,” she chuckles. “I’m the oldest member of the group and I’ve been singing for well over 20 years. I started not as a Christian, doing R&B and soul music. My family have always been in church and I found myself wanting to call on God. I gave my life to him and that was when I started to sing gospel music. I would say that it’s been much more fulfilling as a singer. When I sing now, I’m not just singing, I’m ministering. To see it having an impact on people’s lives – that for me is just phenomenal.”
And impacting people’s lives is certainly what Divine Divine are setting out to do.
“What I would like to achieve is to bring people back into the church,” adds Nadine. “And I also want to take God’s message and God’s Spirit out into the world. For people that are intimidated by the church environment – I want them to be able to feel the Spirit of God. I’d love to perform on the Glastonbury stage, say, and for people to feel, ‘There’s something here; there’s a Spirit here and it’s good.’ I’d love for them to feel that, buy into the music, buy into the lyrics and then buy into the Word. I’d like us to be an induction into the Word.”
David adds, “It’s how we’ve made people feel. When we went to Barbados to play at the Gospelfest, we had loads of people coming up to us and talking about how our songs touched them and that we helped them to believe again. When we played at the BigChurchDayOut this year, there were lots of people that wanted to meet us to tell us that we are helping them.”
Read about Divine Divine and lots more in June’s issue of iBelieve
“We get to see people’s lives change,” Neresa adds. “I’ve got one particular instance. I went to a friend’s choir in Essex. It’s people from the community who aren’t necessarily Christians. I sang one of the songs they were practising, and sang it like I would normally do. Afterwards, one of the ladies came up to me and she was actually crying. She said, ‘It moved me so much.’
“After that, I’ve been getting messages from some of the other ladies asking me to pray for them and their situations and things like that. I still get messages and that was a year ago. They really remember that moment. You don’t realise the impact you can have.”
And Divine Divine are set to create more waves in the not-too-distant future, with a new album, music video and plenty of performances all in the pipeline. “We’re really looking forward to making more tracks and producing another album,” Neresa confirms.
Gospel fans everywhere will be delighted, as the fresh flavour that Divine Divine have brought to the British scene has breathed new life into the genre.