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  • Cassette do the retro, quite well

    28 Dec 2007 | 4 comment(s)
    Being a good pop musician these days doesn’t just mean captivating the world with catchy tunes. It also entails being professional, dealing with issues like brand, image and name. Oh, and lest we forget: publicity. Jon Savage is a very good modern pop...
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  • The Chameleon said Chris

    21 Nov 2007 | 79 comment(s)
    The story of the incredible rise of Chris Chameleon from androgynous indie-rocker to golden pop boy should begin on the 2 nd of January 2004. Chris is in his bedroom in Linden, naked, fast asleep. Two men climb in through the open window. Chris wakes...
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  • All revved up, but where to go? Laurie Levine...

    21 Nov 2007 | 1 comment(s)
    To paraphrase Linton Kwesi Johnson: da music industry eeza bitch. It seduces, cheats and ultimately deflates. The cut-throat battle for distribution, radio play, gigs, interviews, publicity and image has made the music itself secondary. Hence folk singer...
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  • Buckfever Underground - Saves*

    03 Nov 2007 | 1 comment(s)
    It took The Buckfever Underground nine years to come up with a classic album. With Saves they can now join the canon of great idiosyncratic South African music that stretches from Koos Kombuis’s Niemandsland via Lesego Rampolokeng, Kalahari Surfers and...
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  • Buckfever Underground release brilliant third album

    09 Oct 2007
    Some day someone will make a film called Being Toast Coetzer. The story will be about how to be positive, humble and successful as a white male in post ’94 South Africa. And after seeing the movie, everyone will envy Toast. Here’s the basics. Being equally...
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  • Somerfaan and retro-futurism nostalgia

    27 May 2007 | 49 comment(s)
    The undercurrent of Somerfaan’s second album KykOfSyKyk is a yearning retro-futurism that goes hand in hand with approaching middle-age and looking back. At Nel, a.k.a. Somerfaan has turned 39. Recently he has bought a house in Melville, where he lives...
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  • Black Hotels, next big thing?

    18 May 2007 | 374 comment(s)
    The Black Hotels are Joburg's latest great discovery. They claim that the Velvet Underground was their biggest influence. But actually it's The Feelies and Dream Syndicate, although they never heard of them. And a sexy bass player too.
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  • Bok van Blerk and De la Rey

    24 Mar 2007 | 216 comment(s)
    Who exactly is Bok van Blerk, the singer of that new Afrikaner anthem De la Rey? Is he a political activist? Or just a boet from Pretoria who happens to have come up with the song that signified the old adage of right time, right moment, right place? An interview.
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  • Steve Hofmeyr

    14 Mar 2007 | 58 comment(s)
    Steve for president? Nonsense he says. He's issue driven, not party driven. And yes, he's sad that it wasn't him who wrote De la Rey. And yes, he did beat Leon Schuster. That makes him something of a good thug. An interview.
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  • Jim Neversink

    22 Feb 2007 | 34 comment(s)
    This was one of the first ever articles on the seminal Jim Neversink to appear in the South African press. Inspired by an early gig at Joburg's Bohemian.
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  • Fokofpolisiekar

    11 Feb 2007 | 3 comment(s)
    Prudish media refer to them as ‘Polisiekar’. The fans prefer ‘Fokofs’. This, in a nutshell, encapsulates the ambiguity and controversy that has surrounded Fokofpolisiekar since the early days. Here was the Afrikaans equivalent to Sex Pistols: a name that is bound to cause chaos and provoke reaction.
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  • Those damn Warholian leftovers

    10 Feb 2007
    A little story about Warhol, Performance and Justine Frischmann of Elastica...
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  • Jaxon Rice and The Diesel Whores

    23 Jan 2007 | 9 comment(s)
    Jaxon Rice, frontman of Joburg punkabillies the Diesel Whores, is a great man. He embodies the rock & roll dream of the awkward goth kid at high school who used music to get laid. That's, of course, after a career that involved gem smuggling, busking in London and buying half a nightclub. Oh, and let's not forget the binges and disappearances, which infuriated his band members. But at 35 he now works for Microsoft, rocks with the Diesel Whores, has a staggering music collection on his computer, and has been working for three years on his great Southafricana project. "My big dream is to have an album in Uncut magazine that gets 3 or more stars."
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  • Rian Malan

    19 Jan 2007 | 7 comment(s)
    With his eleven times translated bestseller My Traitor’s Heart (1990), Rian Malan wrote a disturbing and prophetic book in which he not only incorporated his own wrought Afrikaners history, but also the mix of empathy and fear he felt for black South Africans. Since then he has built himself a reputation as a contrarian who has questioned the alarming Aids statistics. In his last latest litany Not Civil War but Sad Decay, which appeared in the The Spectator last year, he paints a distressing picture of his country, with little hope for white South Africans. That the local progressives hate him leaves him cold. “I have an indestructible ego."
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  • Righard Kapp

    07 Dec 2006 | 6 comment(s)
    Righard Kapp is the driving force behind South African indie label One Minute Trolley Dash, which has released wonderful CDs by Wild Eyes and Nikhil Singh and improvisation CD-Rs by Moranga and Kapp himself; music that in an ideal world would have featured in The Wire. Beware, these are all potential collector's items, lovingly packaged and individually numbered. “Where this idealism comes from? I have no idea. Some vague socialist leanings from the past? Maybe it’s an idea of politicising the personal.”
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Fred De Vries

Fred De Vries

This site contains a selection of my writing over the past few years; reviews, travel, interviews and footloose and fancy free pieces, both in Dutch and English.

Most of it has been published somewhere in some form.

Afrigator

Current bands

Guilty Pleasures

Hidden Treasures

Records

Writers

Desirables

These are little jewels, found listening, watching, tasting, visiting and reading

  • Check out the blog of my buddy siebe thissen! and also www.siebethissen.net
  • Also check the website for great Australian band The Triffids with many beautiful downloads
  • Check the interesting story about British graffiti artist Banksy on the website of the New Yorker, and also one on the Guardian's website
  • Anyone who's interested in whatever happened to that great punk band The Zounds must check out Steve Lake's website and buy his great new cd 'Northampton General Lunatic Asylum' by Thee Evil Presleys, which contains great and furious rock 'n' roll, and can be ordered from Beverly Recordings bevrecordings@btinternet.com
  • Anyone interested in the acetate tapes of the first Velvet Underground album (mentioned in the epiphany section of the August issue of The Wire) can download the tracks for free from the WFMU website (lots of crackles and hiss, but worth it!)
  • A couple of years before Alice Coltrane died, The Wire carried a long interview with her. An unedited version can be found here
  • Also a excellent Alice Coltrane mix on my friend Siebe Thissen's site
  • Great site for anyone interested in garage rock and beat from the sixties is garage hangover
  • Compulsary read: Remake/Remodel by Michael Bracewell, about the individuals, the scenes and the art/historical context that gave us that beautiful, stunning, groundbreaking first Roxy Music album
  • Check out http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/ for a real underground British publisher that specialises in science fiction, pj proby and lots of other quirky things
  • When in Cape Town, please visit the Book Lounge cnr Buitengracht and Roeland St.Tel +27 21 4622425 Fax +27 21 4622424 E-Mail: booklounge@gmail.com