Fred De Vries

2009

fred — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:35:00 GMT

Lists, who needs them (note the absence of a question mark). And why make them? Surely it’s nothing more than a little territorial pissing, to show the world how great and eclectic your musical taste is. They are time consuming, chest beating things that no one needs. Or maybe it’s a kind of closure, to use a nice psychological term. But they are fun to do. So here’s some kind of list of highlights of the year that was, and my one album of the decade.

1) jazz this year, which is like learning a new language. You hear words, some familiar, but mostly weird and strange and foreign. A great help was the English 70’s Jazz Primer that appeared in The Wire some time last year. Normally this would have been way too obscure for me, and I would have skipped it. But one day, I had to wait somewhere and had brought The Wire with me. Eventually I decided to read about English jazz (I mean, wasn’t jazz supposed to be black and American). It was an excellent read, with a few names and links that made sense (Soft Machine, King Crimson). As fate would have it I found an old Nucleus LP (Elastic Rock) in a second hand shop a couple of days later. Nucleus and trompet player Ian Carr were mentioned in the primer, so I bought it and played it. A revelation. It had none of the freaky see how clever we are virtuoso stuff that I dreaded. Instead there was adventurous music, largely understandable to my untrained ear. So from there I went, buying, borrowing, reading, browsing the internet, working my way back from the English jazz(-rock) to the black American experience and picking up some Dutch stuff along the way. So far it has been a great trip, and I do now speak a few words of jazz-lingo.

2) Barney Hoskyns’s Tom Waits biography Low Side Of The Road; A Life of Tom Waits was a great read. The first half, in which we see the rise and getting stuck of Waits as a proto-bohemian Beat, is superb biography. The downside of the book is that Hoskyns describes every single track of every single album, which takes away some of the narrative propulsion. But the really fascinating issue is centered on the question: why do Waits and his wife advise all the people that Hoskyns approaches against speaking to the author. It’s a question that is never really answered, but the email conversations at the end of the book are certainly illuminating. Not sure if I really like Waits that much, after reading the book.

3) Johan broke up. I missed them when they started out in the mid-nineties, or maybe I dismissed them as ‘typical Excelsior fare’. And how I regret. They only made four albums, but two of them (Pergola and ThxJhn) are classics, full of beautiful vibrant yet melancholic pop songs. The fourth (4) was released last year and is a poignant closer to their erratic career. Unfortunately I missed their farewell tour, for which they played a set list that was made up after fans has voted for their favorite Johan tune. Just for the record: mine is Day Is Done.

4) Uncuts or Mojo’s do you want with yet another Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd on the cover? Does this scraping the 60s and 70s mean that young bands have too little to say? And what does this mean for Uncut and Mojo in ten years time? Anyway, the internet partly made up for the main mags letting us down. My favorite blog this year was PHROCK, which specializes in obscure and less obscure and idiosyncratic and rare rock, with a preference for psychedelic sounds from the distant past. Every album that is featured comes with an extensive description and great downloads. Other favorites: Radiobutt for contemporary music, ABC Afterglow for Brit pop, punk and beat (wow, how I like The Rifles), and Ratboy69 for the more garagey bands.

5) The Low Anthem’s performance at the Crossing Borders festival in The Hague. Weird instruments, delicate harmonies and furious shouting, as if things might fall apart any second. But they never did.

6) XX by The XX, the ferocious rock of The Gaslight Anthem on The 59 Sound, and the old fashioned (in a good sense) song writing on Oh My God Charlie Darwin by The Low Anthem. I also discovered the tortured songs of Sam Baker. And then there was the glorious noise of A Place To Bury Strangers and the folky pop of She Swings, She Sways. And was Stephen Malkmus Face The Truth last year’s? There was a very interesting The Kinks box set, which according to some critics had too much post-70s music, but I didn’t really mind. Equally fascinating was the box set of The Band, a band that I always had largely ignored, much to my own detriment, the box proved. And finally, there was a superb box set that collected the early Los Angeles psychedelic scene, Where the Action is.

7) Cat Power didn’t make a new album. But then, with You Are Free she made my album of the decade. Too sad for words. The soundtrack to a break-up, full of wounds and hurt. It ranks out there with eternal albums by Joy Division (Unknown Pleasures), The Replacements (Let It Be), Einstürzende Neubauten (Silence is Sexy), Neil Young (On The Beach), Velvet Underground (Third Album).

PS Oh, and I totally forgot Rotterdam poet, jazz man Jules Deelder, who despite his narcotic habit turned the very respectable age of 65 and released a 10 inch lp to celebrate the occasion. It contains a couple of songs/poems that no one should miss: Jazz is, De Slag Om de Beurstrappen and the touching, unusually melancholic Ari. Here's looking at you Jules!

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes Bleek Berus to cry; Andries Bezuidenhout interview

fred — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Modest is the best word to describe Andries Bezuidenhout. Throughout our two hour interview he constantly tries to downplay the importance of his work as a singer/songwriter, as someone who carried the Voëlvry spirit into the 21^st century. But for me Andries is one of the most exciting and versatile characters in the alternative Afrikaans scene. Many will know him as the singer of the now defunct Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes. But he’s also a sociologist at Wits University and a columnist for Rapport, while last year he published his first volume of poetry, Retoer.

It took him five years to come with a follow up to his first solo album Insomniak Se Droomalmanak. But the recently launched Bleek Berus was well worth the wait. Largely produced by Andries ex-band mate Drikus Barnard it has a bleak, almost tinny sound and songs that tell tales of leaving, murder and ecological disaster. Discomforting tunes for an uncertain age, but always with a touch of humour.

We meet at a Thai restaurant in Cyrildene, Johannesburg, not far from Observatory where Andries lives. He says he’s not very hungry and orders rice and tom yam. I choose green curry with fish. We finish a bottle of Chardonnay. And let it be known: Andries laughs a lot – and loud.

The songs on Bleek Berus seem to fit together quite nicely.

“The theme is dry places, the Kalahari, the highveld as a desert. It’s about where I feel at home, places without people.”

How did the theme come about?

“I really love the Namib desert and I love the Karoo and the Kalahari. And also, to be a bit pretentious, it’s the only place where Afrikaans is really rooted, in those dry places. That’s where Afrikaans is mostly spoken. Parts of the Karoo, parts of Namibia. If you think of Afrikaans as a South African language, that’s not the case. There were Afrikaners in Angola. The history of the language is not the history of South Africa, it’s a much more regional process. Die dorsland trek, the people who trekked through the Namib into Angola. Also in the Karoo you can’t pretend Afrikaans is a European language, because there it’s rooted in the landscape and the Khoikhoi people.”

Die Laatste Brandwag is your ecological song. It’s based on Bobbejaan Klim die Berg, which over the years has become a bit of a controversial tune. How did that one come about?

“Die Laatste Brandwag was for a tv-programme about traditional Afrikaans music and where those songs come from. They told me I had to use Bobbejaan, a traditional song. So what the fuck do you do? I swapped the meaning around. No one knows what the original is about, but I wanted to get away from the racist connotations. This one says: humans should never have lifted their hands off the surface of the earth.”

It has nothing to do with Ossewa Brandwag?

“Not at all. Baboons have brandwagte when the troops move around. They have one baboon constantly on the lookout for lions. That’s my reference. It’s about baboon telling people that they’re fucking up the place. I had an interesting email from Koos Kombuis about that song. He said he only understood it after the fourth listening. It first sounded like gibberish to him.”

It references Koos Kombuis and the FAK parody he did on Ver Van Die Ou Kalahari. But the rhythm and melody remind me of De La Rey.

“Well, it also has a rolling tune, I guess. But it was recorded in 2004, way before De La Rey. I worked around the tune of the original song, but turned it into a waltz, which is the first change. And then I turned a lot of the major chords into minor, to make it a sad song. We also did a great video. It was very tongue in cheek, with a doom prophet. He kind of mocked it. He had a poster that said ‘Die einde is naby’. And one that said ‘Wanneer kom die einde nou?’ And one: ‘Die einde moet nou naby wees.’ You have to send it up, you have to put the tongue in the check somewhere.”

You often strike me as a romantic, in the best way. A bit like the old Germans like Novalis, with their Sehnsucht and melancholia or the Swiss born Jean-Jacques Roussou with his deep love for nature. A bit heavy too…

“Well, there’s less humour here than on Insomniak. But I hope people see the humour in the arrangements. Like Die Ritme Van Chaos, which is a dicey song about white fears. We send it up completely with the arrangements. I love the arrangements. It’s tacky, computer based, a complete send up. The drums are so Leonard Cohen tacky 80s style. That’s all intentional.”

For a listener it’s not so easy to get all that irony.

“That’s fine.”

I thought: the man is depressed. I mean, look at the cover with its spooky, silver blue picture of an empty shack and a leafless tree.

“I love the cover.”

Me too, but it did give me the wrong impression. I took it too seriously. Most people will.

“Jaaaa. I’m not bleak about life here, I’m bleak about life. Living in South Africa, you feel more alive than you do in other places. Yes, shorter, that’s the ‘berus’ part, haha. But when you make peace with that… Look, the lyrics are kind of serious. And you have to counter the seriousness with a bit of humour. And on this one I had to do that with the arrangements. And Drikus understood it. He did it really well. I love the job he did on it.”

Bleakness is usually not a great selling point.

“I don’t expect to sell thousands of copies. I like a song with a good tune, a good solid structure and interesting lyrics. Folk songs, that’s what I do. Anyone can play my songs. I learned to play the guitar to Koos Kombuis songs. He said he only know five chords, and I figured them out. I know a bit more than five now. But I have no ambition to become a jazz musician.”

Two songs (Dis Net Werk Toe Wat Ek Nog Deur Hillbrow Ry and Die Sprinkhane Se Begrafenis) are about people emigrating. Do you blame those who emigrate?

“No, I don’t. I can perfectly understand. It’s fine, as long as they can live with that decision.

You sound sad.

“Well, it’s tough when your drummer emigrates to Canada, hahaha. I have a sister in Australia and a drummer in Canada. But they both didn’t emigrate because of fear, but to live there with their partner. I also have a good friend in London. It impacts on your life, the fact that people make decisions about where they live.”

Which song was the hardest to do?

“Vernichtungsbefehl. It’s 12 minutes long. That was either going to be a roaring disaster or it was going to work. And I think it works. I changed the original poem around on order and I worked a bit more on rhyme. But generally it doesn’t rhyme, and it has a strange metre. It was a huge challenge. Also because the melody is repetitive. I never worked on melodic change. I sometimes do bridges. But that one has to roll, like a dune, it has to keep going. The variation is more in the rhythm. It works because it doesn’t bore me yet. I’m sure it will, but I can still listen to it. For me that’s the criteria.”

It’s based on a poem in your book Retoer. How did that poem come about?

“That’s the army. Ferdinand was with me in the army. He was one of my friends. The poem talks about Namibia and the Herero genocide and the Vernichtungsbefehl (the destruction order). We once drove through the desert and came across skeletons. It’s interesting how you bury a person in a dune and the dunes constantly move, and how the skeleton was arranged in a much longer pose. The feet come out first, and as the dune moves it leaves the skeleton almost strung out. That’s an image that stuck. The song is basically about what the dunes hide and what they reveal. And in the end it’s about die skuld van onskuld. If you go into the army you’re 19, 20 years old. You don’t really know what you do. That goes for the German troops who were there when they massacred the Herero. It’s the same for the South African soldiers who were there (during the Border War). That’s why they want them young. They follow commands and orders. That song has the most of me.”

Why did you choose that particular poem?

“Again, it’s a strong theme in my life: taking responsibilities for things that you did that you don’t maybe… (voice trails off). Look, also it’s an important balance. It’s the only song that really introduces a political theme, tired old South African politics. But I hope it doesn’t do it in a tired way. I have mixed feelings about the place, because it’s also where I had to face some… Let’s put it this way: I started to develop my own personality for the first time in my life there, in a very late stage. I was 19.”

Who was Ferdinand?

“A friend of mine who was also in the army, a bit older. He was a big influence in my life at that time. He had studied before joining the army. He was at a different place in his life and questioned things, whereas I as a youngster from school just accepted what people told me. So that’s part of the theme. The song also refers to his attempted suicide. He drove around with the hosepipe in the back of his car for the time when he had enough courage to do it. One evening he got enough courage and went to Lovers Hill in Walvis Bay. He parked the car and took out the hosepipe, but it was too short to reach out to back window, hahaha. So he told us about this the next morning at breakfast, and it was interesting to hear the responses. Someone said: but Ferdi you have a hatchback, why don’t you just put the hose into the hatchback? He hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that was the right response, that no-nonsense response. That was the end of the conversation about the attempted suicide. No, I’m no longer in touch with him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

Tell me about the story behind Dis Net Werk Toe Wat Ek Nog Deur Hillbrow Ry.

“That was another commissioned one, for a show we did at the Nelspruit Arts Festival, a Kerkorrel tribute with Stef Bos, Amanda Strydom, Jan Blom, Valiant Swart and I. They all had songs about Kerkorrel, so I wrote that one and decided to do it about the Voëlvry Generation, about where we are now. I reference (Kerkorrel’s) Donker Donker Land. He was very important, but not more than Koos. James Phillips was the first one really, with Hou My Vas Korporaal. He’s the original and he inspired Koos, who listened to Wie Is Bernoldus Niemand?, and then realised where he had to go. So James started the whole thing. Koos agrees with that.”

How did he react to your Hillbrow song?

“His first response was: heimelik es ik bly ek hoef nie door Hillbrow werk toe te ry. Hahaha.

Does it still evoke those feelings of melancholia and nostalgia when you drive there?

“Hillbrow is interesting these days. A lot of it is picking up and picking up really fast. There’s a lot of renovation going on. In fact the Chelasea Hotel has already been renovated, so the song is already dated. So the song a bit more swartgallig than reality. There’s also a tacky ending to the song, a naïve kwela that all these guys used to do in the 80s.”

How do you relate to the Voëlvry generation?

“Voëlvry was the first movement. A lot of people feel part of it, even though they didn’t play in a band. But they were there. It was a sort of collective ‘fuck you’ to the Botha’s. I was 19 when Voëlvry happened in 1989. I was in the army. I saw Bernoldus Niemand live, playing with Koos Kombuis, but I never met him. Kerkorrel moved into a different circuit when I met Koos and Valiant. [Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes] were the third wave, after Valiant and Joos Tonteldoos. I’m just a blip on the cultural scene.”

You’re so self-deprecating.

“No, honest. It’s not that I made a big impact music wise, people know me more as a newspaper columnist than a musician.”

What do you listen to these days for inspiration?

“I know it’s a cliché but still Leonard Cohen. I listened to New Skin For The Old Ceremony before I came here. I love girly backing vocals, especially with a boring voice like mine. You have to soup it up a bit.”

Leonard Cohen writes lots of love songs. There’s a lack of those on your album.

“My greatest fear is to be corny. I have tried, but I just abandon them. The love song is the most difficult one to write, especially in Afrikaans. That’s the strange thing about Afrikaans. English are more willing to be corny. Afrikaans comes across as soetsappig. It’s a gritty language and when you move away from that the contrast is just so stark.”

You now also study poetry at Stellenbosch University. How does writing song lyrics and writing poetry differ?

“I started writing poetry in order to get away from the discipline and the strong, fixed metre in writing lyrics. But there’s a bit of a snag there: if you do use metre in poetry it has to be more fixed there than in the song, because when you sing a song you can smuggle a bit with how you sing it. My approach to poetry is generally more free verse, so for me that’s an escape.”

Is there poetry in your lyrics?

“Die Sprinkhane Se Begrafnis is there purely for the line: ‘En die sprinkane hou begrafnis op my kar se voorste ruit, muggies as confetti vir die dood se bruid’. I was driving at night and stopped and wrote down the words. I often stop to write when I drive. Look, (he points at the lyric sheet, at the words of Hoëveld-Utopia), the same happened with Nigel and Balfour in winter, I love the highveld in winter. I so disagree with Toast (Coetzer, who wrote a song called The Highveld (Is A Shit Place To Be In Winter)). I hate the highveld in summer, I love it in winter, that’s when it’s beautiful, really really beautiful. The blue gums, the dry grass land, the broken fences, the smoke, the mine dumps. What more do you want? Fucking Table Mountain? I appreciate it when I see it as a desert. That smell of the veld fires. When you arrive from overseas and drive home from OR Tambo invariably there’s a veld fire that welcomes you back. That veld fire is home. Bleak? That’s who we are, a bloody mine town with poison in the soil.”

Weekender adieu

fred — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:07:00 GMT

The Weekender is no more. We, freelancers, heard about it via an sms from friends or vague acquaintances. Not a word from the management. A callousness that was probably quite symbolic for a paper that had enough writing quality, but lacked other expertise.

Anyway, all of that means that there will be no more Weekender interviews to appear on my blog. I will, however, continue to publish other interviews and stories.

Dreams of Leaving; Fiona Pole

fred — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:11:27 GMT

Theoretically Fiona Pole should have at least a million followers: all those people who have left the country since 1994 and who openly or secretly miss South Africa.

Benoni-born Pole knows all about the traumatic sequence of packing, farewells, leaving and building a new life in a strange land. Hers, however, isn’t a story of fear and loathing. It was love that brought her to Paris in 1999. She met her future husband ten days into a holiday on her way back from England, and decided to stay.

To say that she made a career out of ‘leaving South Africa’ would be unfair, but she has certainly used her experiences and emotions for her string of exhibitions, of which the recent Heartland I Handlines at Art on Paper was a subdued highlight. Initially the works look basic, almost simplistic. Like the black silhouette of a woman and a red dress next to it, called Leaving: winter coat. Or the black outlines of two naked feet on a map of Joburg, called Packing up: barefoot.

But this simplicity is deceiving. Pole’s prints are meticulously executed pieces of almost conceptual art. They play with basic universal sentiments, such as loss, sentimentality and memories. But they also go much deeper. They convey warped messages about transience, the inevitable and the apparent randomness of our movements and the lay-out of our tiny, insignificant personal maps, which slowly fade and will eventually be superseded by other people’s maps. Moreover, when seen as a whole the exhibition tells an intricate story of a multi-layered journey.

The idea of using maps on wafer thin Japanese paper for the series Packing up occurred when Pole was drawing old crumbling buildings in downtown Joburg many years ago and read about the new owner who found old maps in the safety deposit boxes of his collapsing mansion. “They all disintegrated upon being handled. So there were these maps that had once served as something and now had turned to dust, while the old buildings were crumbling at the same time. I like that idea.”

What’s equally striking is her use of faceless black silhouettes, which don’t show any emotion, apart from the poses that can easily be read as helpless or resigned, but in fact leave you guessing and force you to answer questions about your own emotions and experiences. And then there’s the white, which works as silence in a music piece, creating new visual hierarchies and a feeling of space and endless possibilities, things closely related to leaving and settling.

Pole is reluctant to talk about her own feelings during the conceptualisation and execution of these prints. When I wonder if she made them with a tear in her eye, she answers with a brisk “No”. And when I ask her if she doesn’t feel nostalgic, she says: “I suppose [I felt] sadness, but it’s quite twee to say that word nostalgia. Poignant is a better word. It’s a sense of loss, leaving things behind. When you live between two countries that’s how your life is. But there’s certainly a lot of emotion involved in making the works and getting into the subject, because it’s tender and raw. It’s work that touches on raw nerves.”

When I say I want to hear a bit more, she sighs: “That’s because you’re a journalist. You want exact answers: it’s this, and because of this I feel this way and I do it.”

My turn to sigh. We flip through the catalogue. This is very sad, I say, pointing at a print called Packing up: heavy bags, which shows the back of a transparent woman, carrying two suitcases. “Very sad,” she answers dryly.

But you don’t want expound? “It’s not that I don’t want to, but putting things in little boxes is dangerous. I’m not trying to depict a certain thing, there’s all these things happening out there and this is my response to it.”

But surely the viewer is stuck with all these questions: what went through her when she made this? Is she sad to have left? Certainly. Does she regret? Perhaps. She nods and says: “Yes, you can ask me. But if you’re looking at the exhibition to find answers about how I felt when I did my work, that’s not interesting.”

She pauses to think. “Look, I’m not being deliberately mysterious. But the work spills over into all kinds of areas, and it’s dealing with emotions that are messy and not clear cut. I can’t say: this is how I felt when I made this work. Of course I felt sadness to leave South Africa and go to a land where I am a foreigner, where I don’t fit in, and where my passport is the wrong passport. And it’s a struggle to stay there. People don’t know me and I don’t express myself as easily in French as I do in English. And there’s regret… No, not regret, I don’t know if that’s the right word. But there is sadness about the time that has passed and that you can never make up because you’re somewhere else.”

Here I must say that I’ve portrayed her much more snappy and moody than she actually is. She comes across as a warm person who jokes and laughs a lot, and has a pleasant mellifluous voice with an accent that betrays both her Benoni roots and her two year stay in England. But like many artists she’s weary of giving away the mystery of her work by being too prescriptive. This is, after all, not a session on a shrink’s sofa.

So we talk about all the misconceptions that surround settling in a foreign land. How we at the southern tip of the world have this romantic idea about life in Paris, full of magnificent art, flaky croissants, well-dressed women and flamboyant men. Reality is much more prosaic. Pole, her husband and their 3-year old son live in a tiny apartment near Gare du Nord, one of the less salubrious parts of the city. She did have a gallery in Paris, but it closed down because of the recession. And like everybody else in France she had to fight tough battles with the notoriously unhelpful civil service.

“South Africans tend to think that there are only traffic jams in Joburg, that no other city in the world suffers from traffic congestion. They think they’re the only people that stand in queues for passports. Well I would say: come over to Paris and try and get through. It’s not a picnic.”

She laughs. “Ja, a girl from Benoni, educated in a Boksberg convent, what is she doing there hey?” Then, on a more serious note that refers to her work again: “I think you tap into loneliness, a well of loneliness that you never knew existed. When I came I didn’t speak a word of French. You can’t communicate. It’s a very strange sensation to be cut off without your language.”

I point at her series of prints called Holidays, in which we see a child jump into a swimming pool. What does she miss most about South Africa? “Family,” she says. “But I also miss the light, and the energy of Joburg. I love to drive to the city on the M2 highway, looking out over downtown. And drink up this light. It’s something I can’t get enough of: that blinding light. And I miss the space, this huge open space. I miss these thunderstorms, and the way the rain stops and the sun will come out. In Paris it can rain day after day and it seeps into your bones, into everything.”

1974Born in Benoni

1993 Bachelor of Fine Art (honours), Rhodes University

1999 Moves to Paris

2000 Diploma in printing, l’Ecole Supérieur Estienne, Paris

2008 Exhibition The long goodbye, Atelier Leblanc, Paris, Olivier Sultan Collection at Drouot, Paris, African Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium, Art on Paper (2007).

2009 Exhibition Heartland I Handlines, Art on Paper

Heroes/influences:

Alexander Calder, The Circus (1926 – 1931); “The Pompidou Centre held a Calder exhibition this year, so I queued for hours with my 3-year old son to see it, having previously only seen it in books and films – we were both blown away.”

George Coutouvidis: “My first year Fine Art lecturer 1993, Rhodes University.”

Bridget Baker: So it goes, tins, photographs, Vicks VapoRub, 4 tins each 3.5 cm x 2 cm. “This work stays in my mind. I have only ever seen a photograph of it in the book Art in South Africa, the future present by Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal. The work consists of four tins of Vicks, each with the same photo of Baker and her father in a swimming pool. In each tin, the photos are covered with a layer of VapoRub which gradually gets thicker and thicker.

Rembrandt: Hendrickje bathing in a River, 1654, oil on panel, 61.8 x 47 cm, National Gallery, London. “This small, intimate painting of a woman bathing in a stream is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.”

Adieu rock and roll dream; Dave Chislett writes a book

fred — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:04:16 GMT

Music journalist Dave Chislett has written a book. Or: the doyen of Joburg alternative culture has assembled over a dozen of short stories he has written over the last fifteen years and with the help of Ge’ko publishers has turned them into a collection.

Chislett himself would prefer the second depiction, because one of the reasons for him to publish this anthology, he stresses repeatedly, is that he’s eager to move away from the limiting label ‘music writer’.

“I do a lot more than that and always have’, he says in a coffee shop in Linden, not far from his flat. “I far rather have people know me as a writer who does music and other things as well. I’m interested in so many other crazy things that I don’t wanna get stuck as a music writer.”

Despite the typos and self-published look, the fifteen stories from A Body Remembered make for a riveting, if dark read. Chislett writes about desperate housewives and erotic fantasies with fatal endings; he describes Kafka-esque nightmares; he reworks myths and revels in twilight scenes and shady joints where anything can happen and nothing is strange.

Most of it is written from the point of view of various dispassionate characters whose interior monologues and streams of consciousness Chislett tries to capture in words. And although there’s very little music in the book, most of the stories do have a rock & roll feel, with lots of late night/early morning fatigue and emptiness. The overriding theme is that of people feeling trapped – in their body, in their mind, in their place of work, in their existence -, which makes it a rather bleak book for someone who comes across as jovial and gregarious and who goes out of his way to help others.

He laughs and emphasizes that the stories are not autobiographical. “But that disengagement is a function of me, as someone who grew up in a place and time where I’d never thought I’d fit. I grew up as a privileged white South African being told to fuck off and go home by Afrikaans kids because I wasn’t wanted. And I was exposed to that same mindset by black people when I went to university. Then I travelled back to England, where my family comes from, and realised that I didn’t fit there either because of me growing up here. So I came back to South Africa and tried to find a way of making myself belong.”

The waitress arrives with our coffee. Chislett takes a sip. “There’s a psycho-emotional component to this as well,” he continues. “I’m the youngest of five children, so I’ve always been on the fringes when I was growing up. As a social being I’m what I call a ‘satellite friend’. I don’t have one great group of mates that I’m the middle of. I have lots of groups that I rotate between. That disengagement is part of that.”

Some stories work better than others. The vacuous housewife in Maid of Honour is too clichéd to be gripping. As a reader you’re waiting for the twist, but it never comes. Chislett shrugs. “It’s about the role available to women, but also about the fuck up of living in the northern suburbs behind high walls. Her husband is as much a cliché as she is, working all the time, doesn’t give a shit about the kids. As you drive through those northern parts of Joburg, you wonder if these people who live there have an idea what complex to drive into, because they all look so identical. They are battery farms for yuppies. It’s disgusting architecture, not suited to our climatic conditions, poorly built on areas with no infrastructure. This is the ideal world that’s being sold to us. It’s what you must aspire to. That scares me a lot, because it’s turning our rainbow nation into a nation of grey people.’

Two stories are very different. Cerebus and Waiting for the God-Boat both have surprising religious overtones. One is about a priest who “acts as the guardian of a hell hole”, in this case a shopping mall. The other is about a priest waiting to die. These sacrosanct references sound strange coming from someone who is a self-confessed anarchist.

“I grew up in a fairly religious household”, explains Chislett. “My mother is still a firm church goer and I became a server. I got confirmed, Anglican. Then I went to high school and discovered rock and roll and walked away form all of that and never looked back. I spent three years studying philosophy at university and got very interested in counter culture and literary anti-social activities and thoughts. But one of the things I do like to do is play with myth and meaning. There’s a lot of mythology that I rework, but I don’t always use mythological identifiers. In those two cases I’ve used Christian religious ones instead.’

So he lost his religion. And a couple of years ago Chislett also lost his belief in the irreverent alternative lifestyle as an engine for change. “I no longer believe in the rock and roll dream or that being a anti-social outcast is having any kind of effect and would change anything for the better,” says the man whose occasional leather jacket and huge tattoos serve as signifiers of his punky past. “Commercial culture has way too efficiently subsumed and absorbed youth culture for that to ever be the case. The revolution did never happen. The hippies never took over the world, the punks never did.”

He admits that ‘the underground man’ is actually just as boring and stuck in his ways as your average office clerk or suburban housewife. All of whom feature in his stories, and all of whom seem equally unhappy. It’s all about living the lie, says Chislett. “Being a punk or a yuppie or whatever, is fundamentally underpinned by a series of lies that suit other people and not you. And by adhering strictly to a punk or alternative lifestyle you’re buying a series of stories that are no more true than any other story. So yes, there is a lot of disillusionment in there, even in the ones that do resonate with my lifestyle, because I no longer belief in those things.”

So what does he believe in? He orders another coffee, thinks for a while and harks back to the interbellum when French authors Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the rage and wrote masterpieces such as The Plague and Nausea. “I guess if you’d call me anything, you’d call me an existentialist. I don’t believe there is an inherent meaning out there. And if one’s actions are not designed to give meaning, existence can be completely meaningless. Look at modern life: if they’re not drugging yourself with tv, drugs, alcohol or extreme sex most people live lives that are very mundane. A lot of stories toy with those ideas. It’s about western civilisation. We’ve divorced out intellect from our spirituality and physicality to such an extend that many people seem to inhabit either one or other of those things and are bad at reconciling the three.”

Reading those dystopian stories and hearing Chislett talk leaves you with slightly weary feeling. Here’s this relatively young writer, someone who once believed in alternative rock as a unifying force, someone who still has a lot of belief in the country, someone who is always full of ideas, energy and plans for the future. And yet he comes out with a collection that paints a decidedly detached, pessimistic picture of human kind.

He nods. ‘My message is not about belonging to anything like this at all, but much more about the pursuit of personal meaning.’

“Sjoe,” I say.

“Yeah, hahaha,” he laughs.

1970 Born in Johannesburg

1991 Plays bass guitar for punk band The General Woodheads

1994 Freelance journalist for print, tv and radio

1994 Moves to the UK

1997 Client liaison officer for ESPN Legends

1998 Moves to Cape Town

1998 Wins Ernst Van Heerden Creative Writing Award for short story: Pinstripe Punk

1999 Web editor for iafrica

2000 Web editor M-Web

2001 Launches Urban 1, short stories by unpublished SA writers

2002 Marketing communications manager New Africa Books

2002 Launches Urban 2

2003 Project manager The Cake Group in London

2003 Launches Urban 3

2004 Senior accounts manager Adele Lucas Promotions

2005 Senior manager for PR bureau DCPM

2009 Publishes A Body Remembered (Ge’ko)

Heroes/influences

Henry Rollins: “Never gave up, never sold out. Changed his game to go with the times. What energy and power!”; David Bowie: “The ultimate chameleon and trend setter.” Ian Banks: “The man is a writing machine!” Philip K Dick: “Sci fi of the interior!” Martin Amis: “Who said post modern literature couldn’t be popular?” TS Elliot: “A master of words and deeper meanings.”

Ex-singer with The Ex

fred — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:00:50 GMT

Het klonk als een onthoofding: na drie decennia van vitriool spuwen en ruim 1300 optredens besloot Jos om ex-zanger van The Ex te worden. Als GW Sok schreef Jos de teksten en zijn uit duizenden herkenbare woordenbarrages bepaalden voor een belangrijk deel het geluid van de punkgroep die hij samen met schoolmakker Terrie in 1979 oprichtte in de Zaanstreek.

Voor de band was het vertrek van Jos minder verrassend. Zijn aanwezigheid was als die van een manke poot. Het enthousiasme was weg bij Jos. Hij had de pest gekregen aan dat altijd maar onderweg zijn en dat eeuwige wachten. Hij wilde andere dingen doen, grafisch ontwerpen en schrijven. Hij kon die ‘200 procent inzet’ die spelen bij The Ex vereist niet meer opbrengen. ‘Zijn creativiteit was al een poos tanende en dat werkte remmend’, zegt drumster Kat.

Uiteindelijk, vult gitarist Terrie aan, begon het gebrek aan initiatief, teksten of muzikale ideeën zich te wreken. ‘We zijn een enorm loyale band, maar het is geen “baan”, het is geen veilige haven. The Ex kan alleen vooruit als alle leden echt nog iets te zeggen hebben; je kan alleen maar eerlijk spelen als het echt is, als het uit je hart komt. Voor Jos was het blijkbaar op. We hebben het er maanden over gehad en uiteindelijk lijkt ook Jos opgelucht.’

Jos beaamt dat. ‘Ik wil nog meer dingen doen, andere dingen waar ik met/door de Ex niet voldoende aan toe bleek te komen. Toen ik dat eenmaal echt besefte, was de stap naar stoppen - enigszins tot mijn eigen verbazing, want dit was wel dertig jaar mijn prachtige leven natuurlijk - niet zo groot meer.’

En zo werd de onlangs verschenen overzichts-CD 30 onbedoeld een afsluiter van een tijdperk. Van al die Nederlandse punkbandjes die eind jaren zeventig en begin jaren tachtig opkwamen is The Ex de enige die erin is geslaagd een stempel te drukken op de nationale en internationale scene, constant vernieuwend, constant op zoek naar uitdagingen, al snel ver uitstijgend boven het perkamenten etiket ‘punk’. Terrie: ‘We speelden dit jaar voor vijfduizend mensen in het Lincoln Center in New York, het mecca van de jazz. Maar we spelen ook gewoon weer in de Bakkerij in Castricum.’

The Ex klinkt als grijs behang met fraaie gitzwarte patronen, maar ook vol Jackson Pollock-achtige spetters geel en rood en blauw - jazz en folk en Afrikaans. Improvisatie, maar geen eindeloos gepiel: hard, energiek en voorwaarts.

Ook al vat 30 een belangrijke episode uit de Nederlandse popgeschiedenis samen, het is niet meer dan een poging om de diversiteit van The Ex te benadrukken. Want ook al zullen ze de term haten, The Ex heeft in de loop der jaren een heus ‘oeuvre’ opgebouwd met ontelbare muzikale, tekstuele en conceptuele hoogtepunten, eigenlijk al vanaf Human Car uit 1980, dat Jos beschouwt als het eerste nummer waarvan hij dacht ‘hebbes’.

De CD doet bijvoorbeeld geen recht aan een project als 1936 The Spanish Revolution dat de band in 1986 uitbracht als 144 pagina’s tellend fotoboek en twee singles. De foto’s waren een selectie uit tienduizenden nooit gepubliceerde afbeeldingen uit het archief van de CNT, de Spaanse anarcho-syndicalistische vakbondsfederatie. Het project gaf The Ex tevens een moreel kompas (en een anarchopunk label). Jos: ‘Er bestaat een soort anarchistisch ideaal, en dan zie je een moment in de geschiedenis waarin de anarchisten de verkiezingen winnen en dat ideaal in pratktijk brengen. Dat vond ik fascinerend. Dat dat kon gebeuren, dat er zoveel mensen op basis van gelijkwwaardigheid daarvoor gaan.’

Evenmin doet de CD - twee ordinair blinkende schijfjes in een plastic doosje - recht aan de imposante lijst van muzikale collaboraties die The Ex in staat stelden zich keer op keer te vernieuwen en het muzikale blikveld te verruimen. Een kleine greep uit de schier eindeloze lijst: de New Yorkse avant-gardistische cellist Tom Cora, jazzmusici Han Bennink en Ab Baars, de Koerdische groep Awara, de Congolese band Konono No. 1, de Amerikaanse filmmaker Jem Cohen, Sonic Youths Thurston Moore en Lee Ranaldo, de Chicago postrockband Tortoise, schrijver Jan Mulder, kunstenaar Rick van Iersel, anarchopoppers Chumbawamba, Nirvanaproducer Steve Albini en de Ethiopische saxofonist Getatchew Mekuria.

Terrie ziet het als zijn grootste kracht dat hij ondanks zijn technische beperkingen op hoog niveau kan samenspelen met heel verschillende muzikanten, en toch gewoon ‘Terrie’ blijf. ‘Ik speelde laatst met een Duitse klassieke celliste, Johanna Varner, en het werkte. Maar ook met Paal Nilssen-Love, een ongelooflijke nieuwe, jonge jazzdrummer uit Noorwegen. Als er openheid en karakter is, lukt het wel.’

Het gaat The Ex om vrijheid en dwarsigheid, om de hokjesgeest te vermorzelen en open te staan voor invloeden die ver buiten de vierkwartsmaat van rock liggen, om ‘anders’ en ‘vrijer’ te zijn. Naast het ritmische, abstracte gitaarwerk van Terrie en het Engelse Ex-lid Andy Moor, spelen de drums een prominente rol in de anti-rock van The Ex, die hen onderscheidt van tijdgenoten als Sonic Youth en The Fall. De van oorsprong Duitse drumster Kat, die eind 1984 bij de band kwam, was een autodidact. ‘Ik heb geen klassieke drumopleiding gehad, dus ik had weinig last van clichés’, zegt ze. ‘Mijn grootste kracht is mijn originaliteit en mijn liefde om te pionieren. Ik hou van de uitdaging van verschillende maatsoorten, van trance en van dynamiek. En ik kan gelukkig ook in de maat spelen.’

Ook de tekstuele ontwikkeling blijft, mede door de afwezigheid van een tekstboekje bij de CD, onderbelicht. Aanvankelijk schreef Jos punky tirades. Maar weldra slopen er andere invloeden in, werd er een andere canon aangeboord. Op de hoes van de dubbel-CD Instant duiken teksten op van situationist Raoul Vaneigem, beeldend kunstenaar Barnett Newman en muzikant Misha Mengelberg. De schrijfstijl van de aartspessimist Louis Ferdinand Céline maakte indruk op Jos, evenals het werk van de Duitse kunstenaar Georg Grosz, die in 1920 een stukje schreef over reclameborden en fietsen door de stad. Voor Joggers & Smoggers uit 1989 vertaalde Jos dat idee naar een fietstocht door Amsterdam en de ‘lappendeken van een dag in de stad’, waarin hij citaten van Grosz verwerkte.

En dan was er Kurt Tucholsky, de joods-Duitse auteur die eind jaren twintig anti-nazistische furore maakte. Jos kocht in de ramsj Tucholsky’s Deutschland Deutschland über alles met collages van John Heartfield en was verkocht. ‘Tucholsky zag de shit aankomen. Hij waarschuwde er hard voor. En toch liep iedereen met open ogen in de val.’

The Ex gaat dus een Jos-loos tijdperk tegemoet. Zijn vervanger is Arnold de Boer van Zea, een band die talloze malen samen met The Ex optrad. Jos ziet het doorgaan van The Ex niet als verraad. ‘We hebben altijd gezegd dat als er niet genoeg inspiratie meer zou zijn we zouden stoppen. Dat moment is voor mij gekomen, maar de anderen niet, die hebben er nog steeds veel zin in, dus waarom zouden ze dan stoppen? Als ik ze zie spelen, jeukt het natuurlijk nog wel een beetje...’

Terrie klinkt opgelucht. ‘Arnold heeft zich met open vizier volop in de strijd gestort. Hij is volop bezig met teksten schrijven. Elke keer als we oefenen heeft hij nieuwe. Hij is goed, origineel, inspirerend en veelzeggend. The Ex voelt ergens als een nieuwe band, die nog vreselijk veel heeft te doen en nog wel een tijdje mee kan!’

The ageless fight of Zapiro

fred — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:59:48 GMT

Project leftovers? Andy Warhol loved them. He wrote: “I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humour in leftovers.”

‘Leftovers’ contain the mistakes, the asides, the flirts, the failures, the secrets, the anger and the embarrassments. A leftover bin after my meeting with Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro), would contain the endless correspondence with his assistants, as well as my initial fury (my swearing at his ‘arrogance’) at not being able to meet him because he was either working on a book or on some overseas trip. Then, when I finally manage to pin him down, he’s suffering from a bout of flu. But despite looking pretty haggard he does leave his bedroom and does give me two hours of his time. So instead of a flatulent Capetonian I find a funny, sharp and mischievous artist with a melancholic touch.

After some coffee I tell him I’m curious which cartoon character he identifies most with. He tells me about a little boy called Chip in an American strip called Hi and Lois. “He was always stealing something, and I said liked him. I thought he was a great little kid. That faded very fast.”

His real hero, however, is Tintin. “I was about seven and went to my cousin’s house and somebody was reading a Tintin book to him, and my world opened up there. It was The Secret of the Unicorn, one of the most profound influences. I was hooked completely, hooked for life - on the whole thing.”

I notice a little Tintin figurine in the studio. Zapiro nods. “What’s brilliant about Tintin is that he’s a kind of a cipher. He’s far less caricatured than some of the other characters in the stories. He’s got that face where you can read your own face in. And of course he’s idealistic. You don’t get much background for Tintin, where he comes from or where he is. He could be you as you try to find out what to do with your life. So for me as a 7-year old I identified with him, as a 15-year old I identified with him, and even as an adult, when he’s fighting his various good fights, you identify with him.”

Fighting the good fight has been the overriding theme in Zapiro’s work since the mid-80s. The problem is the concept of the enemy. In the past it was clear: the apartheid government. These days it’s murky: the good guys of yore are often the bad guys of now, and touchy subjects such as race and ethnicity are used in the increasingly nasty fights. Like the time when he was dragged into the discussion about the ‘racist’ Tintin in the Congo, and the Cape Times summarized his (very nuanced) opinion with a steaming headline: ‘Zapiro says racist comic should be published’. “That’s when you want to go into the newspaper, find the guy and smack him at least around the knees a bit,” says Zapiro.

“Then the next thing that happens is a reader of the Cape Times says: ‘Who is this Jewish cartoonist who tells us what we should and shouldn’t see or know, why doesn’t he speak for his own people?’ Which is very ironic considering that my record on issues Jewish is chequered to say the least.”

Then, in September last year, came the cartoon, that cartoon: The Rape of Lady Justice by the tripartite alliance, which he had to explain before the Human Rights Commission and possibly in court, since there is still a R7 million lawsuit from Jacob Zuma pending.

Whether the case will ever be given a hearing is doubtful. It would be a novelty to have a president suing a cartoonist. But the knives are out, and Zapiro is now seen as the enemy of the establishment and subsequently has had to endure accusations of being right wing (Jesse Duarte) and racist (Baleka Mbete). “I’ve been somebody who’s been criticising the ANC from the Left for as long as I can remember and they’re trying to paint me as a right winger and a racist...!”

Nowadays he receives letters advising him to get a one-way ticket out of the country. “They say I can’t think of anything positive with a black government,” he sighs. “It has nothing to do with a black government! It’s has to do with a particular group of people and a particular kind of politics. I still stand by all the cartoons I have done. I don’t regret any. I do think it was the wrong thing for the ANC to push Zuma into the presidency. But I don’t want the government to fail, I want the country to succeed, I want him to succeed.”

Hence Zuma has lost the shower head, or at least it’s no longer attached to his head, but ominously floating somewhere above.

Zapiro talks about how things have changed, how Mandela encouraged him, how Mbeki, despite his prickliness, never reacted, how even Vavi phoned him one day to say that he couldn’t stop laughing. But now, with the Zuma nomenclature, things are grim. “I used to love the fact that when I was a cartoonist for The Sowetan, I’d occasionally go to Joburg and would meet readers, and they would do a double take. They said: ‘You can’t be the cartoonist! You Zapiro? I thought you’d be a black guy.’ I was so happy, I felt I was able to tap into a mindset they wouldn’t expect, a mindset based on my experiences in the struggle and my perception of where South Africa was going, that made them think that I was somebody who was part of the broad movement towards something else, not part of a white minority.”

His cartoons are biting and cynical. Has ever made any real personal ones? He takes out a drawing called Ballot Box Blues, about a disillusioned strugglista. “When you’ve started out in the struggle it’s a sad day if you start to feel you no longer part of that,” he says, voicing the feelings of many former activists. “The lawsuits leave me completely unphased. What does affect me more is where I stand politically.”

Which begs the question: in these days of political and ideological chaos, what does he use as his moral compass? “My politics was really shaped by non-racial egalitarian politics of UDF (United Democratic Front) between ’83 and 88. I look back to that and I remember the people I was guided by then. When I was 23 I went into the army and I wanted to fight the system in some way. The UDF formed and the ECC (End Conscription Campaign). That’s where I got my political education, on the ground, working with organisations. And I think back to that period and the things I learned then.”

He looks frightingly pale now, so I say goodbye and leave.

One more leftover though. On my way out, I buy The Mandela Files, which he signs, drawing a cute picture of Madiba who says “You finally spoke to Zapiro? ...He’s harder to get hold of than I am!”

1958 Born in Cape Town

1982 Conscripted into the army

1983 Politically involved with the UDF

1987 Cartoonist for South

1988 Detained

1988 Studies media arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York

1991 Returns to South Africa, produces educational cartoons with Story Circle

1994 Cartoonist for The Sowetan and Weekly Mail

1996 Publishes The Madiba Years, first of his yearly collections

1998 Cartoonist for The Sunday Times

2001 Wins a CNN African Journalist of the Year Award

2005 Cartoonist for The Star, Pretoria News, Mercury and Cape Times

2006 Sued by Zuma for R15 mln (dropped to R2 mln)

2007 Wins the American Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award.

2008 Wins Best Humorist Cartoon

2008 Sued by Zuma for R7 mln

2008 Publishes The Mandela Files

2009 SABC refused to screen a Special Assignment feature on satire (including Zapiro)

Heroes/influences

“[As a cartoonist] my first influence was Giles. Then came Tintin and Peanuts. As a teenager I admired the political cartoons of David Marais in the Cape Times. In my twenties I was influenced by the English graphic cartoonists Steadman and Scarfe, and also stylistically by their South African equivalent, Derek Bauer. There was some influence from these styles in my early cartoons, but I moved to a more accessible style, being influenced in drawing and writing by Doonesbury, Oliphant, Steve Bell, Tom Toles and Mike Peters.

“I’m with most South Africans in regarding Madiba as a hero. Archbishop Tutu certainly also remains a hero for me and I’m saddened at those factional fingers now pointed at him because he stands resolutely by his principles. I hope if I'm asked this question in five years time that Obama will still be up there…”

The dark side of black and white; Jo Ractliffe

fred — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:57:25 GMT

Inevitably there are those cringe moments when you listen back to your taped interview. You hear yourself rudely cutting straight into the elaborate argument of your subject. And with equal dismay you notice that you forgot to ask that obvious follow-up question.

So through my headphones I hear myself talking to photographer Jo Ractliffe in a Parktown North restaurant. I have ordered seafood pasta and she, dressed entirely in black, prefers lamb chops “with big pieces of fat down the side”. We have a bottle of shiraz and we chat for two hours. Outside it’s freezing cold, inside it’s cosy. She talks in a deep voice. I interrupt. She talks more. And I, in my eagerness, change the subject - again and again, giving the conversation a random spin that somehow suits her work.

Example? Ractliffe expounds on her latest project, which involves a series of photographs based around the Angola Border War (1966-1989). She talks about her plans of going into the area with famous ex-combatants such as general Jan Breytenbach of 32 Battalion. And me? I ask her if Beat writer Jack Kerouac is still an influence.

“Ermm,” she says, frowning. “Yes, I think he’s still under my skin.”

That Kerouac query didn’t completely come out of the blue though. It’s just that my mind worked in a delayed fashion. Because earlier she talked about how she started photography, while studying painting at Cape Town’s Ruth Prowse School of Art. And that’s where the Beats come in.

“I bought a secondhand Nikomat for R135,” she begins the tale of her epiphany. “I had a boyfriend whose brother was a doctor and lived in Noordhoek. He wrote poetry, had met (poet and Beat publisher) Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco and introduced me to the Beats. He was this very romantic character. I took all these pictures on his farm, and I knew straight away there was something about my relationship to the word and to the world in a photograph that just made me feel very much at home. I realised that my interest was about seeing, not about the material.”

With hindsight I can say that this quote summed her up for me, and as a result destroyed any sense of structure in our conversation, because there was just too much that got me going. The quote contained the element of chance, the fascination with the written word and cut-up Beat narratives, the romantic idea of solitude, and the wrought relationship with the world, which centers around longing, desire and loss, all pointing at an outsider’s view. Or as she puts it: “A big part of my life has been this longing for redemption.”

Here I do manage a follow up question: Redemption?

“Redemption for the way life is,” she adds and explains that both her parents came out from the UK, which makes her a first generation South African. “For a long time I didn’t have a sense of how I could belong, certainly in childhood. My parents didn’t speak Afrikaans. Where is home? You live in Cape Town, cut off, not connected to any South Africaness at all. For a long time I felt I didn’t have a history, not even a memory that I could frame in a particular way. I had an unhinged non-thing. I was horrified at what an ignorant childhood I had. There had been no political conscientising until I got to university.”

Before the lamb chops arrive she shows me some of her older work: the vicious dogs of Nadir (1987), the N1 road trip to Cape Town (1996), her first Angola adventure (2008) and the photographs taken with her Diana camera, a toy instrument she acquired in 1990 after all her equipment had been stolen. These are hazy, out of focus and blurred, but strangely enticing. The recurring narrative is the attempt to capture something that isn’t there, a sense of loss, be it a dead donkey near Beaufort West or the post-Apocalyptic visions at Boa Vista, Angola - somewhere beyond social documentary and art photography, an anti-classical aesthetic with the overarching theme of solitude. The images are scary and mystifying, yet strangely beautiful.

Her work is an neverending exploration of ‘Elsewhere’, the space between real and fiction, which only she with her awkward sensibility sees, and tirelessly tries to capture. “I work from a space of dissatisfaction with what I’ve done,” she explains after chewing on some lamb.

Although her photographs are now part of important private and public collections, they existed for a long time without being reviewed or receiving official acknowledgement. Often it seemed as if they weren’t meant to be seen. Like when they were bound to make an impact at the 1995 Joburg Biennale, but literally crashed to the floor. Or when her gallery, Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary, recently closed down, just as she was preparing for her Border War adventure.

As an amateur boxer, she takes it all in her stride. “I remember having a conversation with artist Alan Alborough. Everybody wanted him. And he didn’t want to exhibit. He said he wasn’t ready. That was very profound for me. I thought: make the work and the rest will take care of itself. And that’s what I did for years: just make the work, have exhibitions in the middle of the Karoo. I did what wanted to do.”

For the next months she’ll work with that uncanny landscape north of our border, and she’ll come up with more broken tales told through blurry black and white images - part of her lonely artistic mission, for which, I suggest, she must have sacrificed quite a bit. She shakes her head. “I wasn’t aware that I had any other choice. I don’t know that I made sacrifices. I’m not interested in things like ‘getting ahead’. I don’t pitch myself. I’m competing with my own rather fucked up little self. It doesn’t interest me to be ‘famous’, but it does interest me to be seen in a particular way. I’m not interested in my work if it’s just fashionable or trendy or idiosyncratic. I’m interested in that it has something solid behind it, interested in that it’s an individualistic way of thinking and seeing the world. That is important.”

I hear my voice through the headphones. Instead of digging deeper into her Border fascination, I ask her about her collaboration with composer Philip Miller. I cringe.

1961 Born in Cape Town

1978 Studies at Ruth Prowse School of Art, Cape Town

1988 Master of Fine Art: University of Cape Town

1989 Solo exhibition Nadir, Metropolitan Life Gallery, Cape Town

1991 Lecturer in print making and photography at Wits University

1995 Solo exhibition reShooting Diana, Market Gallery, Johannesburg

2000 Founder member, curator of the Joubert Park Project

2002 Solo exhibition Snow White, Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Vallais, Switzerland

2004 Solo exhibition Selected Works 1982 – 1999, Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, Johannesburg

2005 Solo exhibition Selected Colour Works 1999 – 2005, Warren Siebrits

2008 Solo exhibition Terreno Ocupado, Warren Siebrits

Heroes/influences

Frankie Laine - Hell Bent for Leather. “This was my very first record ever - a collection of cowboy songs, given to me by my grandfather when I was 9 and the start of my romance with all things lonesome and travelling.”

Jack London. “I must have read White Fang and Call of the Wild a hundred times as a child; I loved the idea of wild men and dogs in the wilderness.”

Johnny Cash. “We had one of those big reel-to-reel tape players when I was young and Lay Lady Lay was on it. It’s that dark voice and the idea of him - the flawed man in search of redemption. He reminds me of the kind of men I knew in childhood, at my dad’s brickworks…”

Jack Kerouac. “All because of the line, ‘the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time…’ I was still a teenager and I remember identifying so closely with that shambling desire of his – always on the edges of things…”

Russell Hoban. “His book, Riddley Walker, is in my top ten books of all time and alongside Kapuscinski’s, Another day of Life, was key for the Nadir images; I took all those mad bad dogs from his ‘Bernt Arse’ pack and put them in my images.”

Robert Frank. “The Americans gave me a sense that what I wanted from photography was possible – a way of seeing and a sensibility, as well as the kinds of things I was interested in making pictures about. That photography could be like writing…”

Manuel Alvarez Bravo. “Someone said if Cartier-Bresson epitomises the ‘decisive moment’, Manuel Alvarez Bravo is the ‘eternal moment’. I love how he heightens and stills the world at the same time. And his photograph of a dead striking mineworker has to be one of the most compelling I’ve ever seen. When I first saw it, I fell in love with that dead man.”

Breyten turns seventy

fred — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:55:36 GMT

Breyten Breytenbach… For three generations of young South Africans even the shadow of a whisper of the name felt like a forbidden fruit. Writer Fanie de Villiers (1956) remembers discovering Breytenbach’s poetry when he was a student at the University of Pretoria. “It was like a blow in the stomach … radically different to anything I had ever read! He wrote from another world, about another world, and yet he was steeped in his mother tongue. He used it so powerfully!”

Wits academic Michael Titlestad (1964) grew up in Verwoerdburg. His Afrikaans teacher, meester Grobbelaar, did something unusual: he made the boys read Breytenbach’s poetry. “The shock of those surreal texts in Verwoerdburg with its military base! It had an enormous impact.”

   For poet Danie Marais (1971) there was no way of not knowing about Breytenbach. His name was everywhere. Staunch Nationalists saw him as ‘Public Enemy no. 2’. Some considered him even worse than Mandela: not only a “communist”, but also a “verraaier”, who had been jailed for terrorism and who had ridiculed volk and taal.

   “I remember how astonished I was to read the man’s tender love poetry, when what I really expected to find was a Che Guevara of letters,” says Marais. “I fell in love with his lyricism, his rich otherwordly imagery and dark romanticism – the intoxicating mixture of sexuality and a poetic death wish.”

South Africa’s most important living poet started his artistic life fifty years ago –as a painter. “Painting taught me about the physical importance of texture, colours, silences, resonance, patterns, structure and perspective, synchronism and dissonance... of words. It made me aware of the materiality of the medium. On top of that, many of my poems are just little pictures. Painting continues to inform my approach,” explains Breytenbach in an email.

Young Breyten grew up in rural Western Cape. In 1960, he packed his bags and boarded a Portuguese ship that took him as a fourth class passenger to Europe, where he ended up in bohemian Paris. Life there, I suggest, must have been an epiphany for a young artist whose encounters with la vie bohème had been restricted to Cape Town.

“Epiphany? Maybe,” muses Breytenbach. “Youth is always the high point of ecstasy, no? Yes, I certainly bathed in the general atmosphere of Paris as movable feast and laboratory of inventiveness, experimentalism, transgression, new thinking (with Camus probably finally more influential than Sartre) - and all of these linked to avant-guard political internationalism and to theories of transformation. We were poor but happy (to quote Hemingway.) It was a true privilege to walk the same streets and drink in the same bars as Beckett and Giacometti and Ionesco, to count among one’s friends artists and writers and runaways from Russia and Argentina and Mexico and Cuba and Morocco and Mali and Holland and Denmark and Brazil and, and...”

Breytenbach soon got rid of his Afrikaner cultural baggage. In Paris he met the Vietnamese Yolande whom he married. Additionally he developed a serious interest in Buddhism, which would inform his world view and writing – trying to solve the unsolvable. In Paris he joined the community around teacher Sensei Deshimaru.

“He eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver. I used to enjoy a whisky with him every morning after meditation. It appealed to me because of its teachings of non-attachment and of being responsible, oneself, for doing away with the self; also, beyond ethics, because of its aesthetic. I could imagine no greater freedom. It feels ever more important to me. I sense that my dreams and my work are a continuous deepening of meditation practices.”

Paris, Buddhism and exile widened the gap between Breytenbach and his fatherland. Progressive forces saw him as a faraway friend, while his conservative compatriots considered him a traitor, certainly when he was arrested in 1975 as a member of the white revolutionary cell Okhela. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment, of which he served seven, manically writing.

After his release, he took on the persona of the cynical outsider which he coupled with the knowledge of the insider. While his contemporaries André Brink and Nadine Gordimer remained ANC supporters for a long time, Breytenbach is a freethinker, too much of an anarchist to join any political party. Last year the American magazine Harper’s published his scathing open letter to Mandela, in which he lambasts the ‘Mandela industry’ and his country of birth.

‘Love/hate’ barely captures his fraught relationship with South Africa. Nowhere is home for Breytenbach. Like a modern nomad he moves between Paris, Senegal, New York and South Africa, an inhabitant of what he calls the “middle world”. He’s a man without a fixed abode who observes the destruction and beauty around him with a feeling of impotent anger and wonder. At the same time he’s a prisoner of his language and of his memories of this odious country that he turned his back on half a century ago.

Asked if he can describe his deeply ambiguous relationship with South Africa, Breytenbach answers: ‘Probably not succinctly. What is clear though is that I was always, and remain, an outsider for all practical purposes - bringing with it the inevitable misunderstandings, seizures of involvement and concern and rejection. South Africa has always been a land of tremendous ‘vigour’, but also one of enduring shit. It is, by and large, parochial and hypocritical - accounting, largely, for its endemic corruption. It also has an enduring strain of nearly limitless cruelty - in its mad constructs like apartheid and crude greedy capitalism (and now affirmative action) as also in the personal and inter-personal violence. Morally it is a failed state.”

He fought bitterly with English South African critics, who butchered his latest novel A Veil of Footsteps and find him arrogant and whimsical. Breytenbach: “I admire the work of J.M. Coetzee and I’ve had the good fortune to meet a number of good English language South African writers - Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndebele, Jo-Anne Richards, Gus Ferguson and several more. But by and large SA English language writing is the expression of marginalized imperialist subjects, of colonial snobs and dolts.”

The Afrikaans scene doesn’t offer solace either. “I’m an oddity among Afrikaans writers, a detribalized and probably decadent uncle that has to be humoured sometimes when he brings inappropriate presents while gaudily dressed, but not part of the daily discourse. And I really am out of touch with what’s happening in the writing. (For instance, I have no understanding of the obsessions with God and religion and church and homosexuality and grovelling guilt and kindergarten sexual fantasies and political obsequiousness.)”

“But then,” he continues, “the Afrikaners no longer exist as a recognizable, autonomous entity. We are of the generation who witnessed the passing of a people and now, inevitably, also the agony of a language. There is no question of right and wrong in the matter, no historical inevitability or whatever - just stupidity and cowardice.”

In September he’ll turn seventy, still adding to that extraordinary oeuvre of thousands and thousands of pages that can be laid as a skin over his life, a fearless expression of his attempts to solve the unsolvable.

“I’m sure that I've since many years been a caricature of myself and of what (I imagine) people like myself are supposed to be like. Luckily I’m getting to be too old to know when I'm repeating myself. Let’s say the muse and I have grown old together, but in my dim eyes she still remains as sexy as ever. But also, I (whoever that I is or has been) have always experienced writing and painting as process, as other formulations of breathing. You could say I’m like the worm who believes he has created the world just because he ate and eats his own environment.”

1939 Born in Bonnievale

1958 Studies at Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town

1960 Leaves for Europe

1962 Marries Yolande

1964 Publishes Die ysterkoei moet sweet

1973 Calls the Afrikaners “a bastard people” and Afrikaans “a bastard language”

1975 Arrested for ‘terrorism’ and sentenced to nine years imprisonment

1982 Released

1984 Refuses to accept the Hertzog Prize

1984 Publishes The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist

1987 Takes part in the Dakar negotiations with the ANC

2007 The Breytenbach Center opens in his parental home in Wellington

Heroes/influences

According to friend/poet Charl-Pierre Naudé: “I would say his structuring influences were the surrealism of painters like Magritte and the fantasies of someone like Henri Rousseau. He also appears influenced by Lucebert, the Dutch poet. But a main influence seems to be the kontrei language of his particular Afrikaans region, the Boland. I see a lot of Boerneef in Breyten.”

The Fred de Vries Interviews longlisted

fred — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:12:26 GMT

Hi there. Sorry I've been so quiet for the last six weeks, but family circumstances forced me to go to Holland and take care of 80+ parents.

The good news is that my book The Fred de Vries Interview; From Abdullah to Zille has been longlisted for the Sunday Times non-fiction Jonathan Paton Award.

Let's hope it will also make the short list!

Jeremy Gordin; from Zuma-apologist to Zuma-expert

fred — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:08:31 GMT

There’s an air of vindication when you speak to Jeremy Gordin, author of Jacob Zuma; A Biography. During his work as a reporter for The Sunday Independent, covering the Zuma trials and tribulations, he was regularly branded as a ‘Zuma apologist’. He went through hard times when ‘rape victim’ Khwezi told him blatant lies about her sexual encounter with Zuma in 2005. His book was slashed by various reviewers, while David Beresford blasted him in the Sunday Times for underplaying Zuma’s communist past.

Oh, and just when the book was about to be launched, there was a plagiarism issue, with accusations that Gordin had lifted chunks of Paul Holden’s book about the arms deal. “The irony is that fifty percent of the stuff that Paul was claiming copyright over was taken from articles that I wrote”, he says in a Parkview coffee shop.

The communist allegations also proved to be flimsy. “Zuma as a follower of the historical materialism or the dialectic is pushing it a bit,” says Gordin. “It’s just not his interest intellectually, it’s just not where he is. Zuma comes from trade unions and I’m sure they had the usual Marxist back and forth when he was with the ANC in exile. But when they realised this split was looming, he and Mbeki were out like flint in 1990. It’s all there in the book.”

He grins. In fact he grins a lot - vindication is a strong emotion. Suddenly everyone wants to talk to him about the new president. He went from ‘Zuma apologist’ to ‘Zuma expert’. And yes, he’s happy to admit that he’s quite fond of his subject. “I wrote the book partly because I thought he really was getting a shit deal, especially in 2006/2007. I liked him, and as far as I knew he was always reasonably straight with me.”

The book is largely based on the various encounters Gordin had with Zuma, the court cases and the Polokwane saga. Biography therefore is too big a word; the first fifty years of Zuma’s life cover only 60 pages. Gordin agrees that his work is “a bit thin” on Zuma’s younger days. Partly this had to do with deadlines and pressure, partly with Zuma himself. “You can talk to him, but he likes to tell a discursive story and you can be stuck on one hour for three weeks. He likes to tell a long story, sit under the tree, describe it in detail, that’s his modus operandi.”

It’s not a psychological portrait either, providing little insight in the mind of Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. Yet there must be so much to tell and ask. Like, does he bear grudges after all he went through, from the persecution to the cutting cartoons? “He does feel bitter,” says Gordin. “But it’s kind of complicated. Personally, and that’s one of the nice things about him, he’s not bitter and not small minded. He’s not an intellectual, but in the old sense he’s broad minded. But, as I try to hint at the end, there is somewhere inside that landscape a sense of: don’t fuck me around because I’m a herd boy. And if you do, I won’t forget that. He did play a role in removing Mbeki. But I don’t think he has petty grudges. Revenge is not a big deal. He is ostensibly, remarkably un-fucked up in any kind of way. Tony Leon always says it and it’s true: he’s so comfortable in his own skin.”

Asked to sum up Zuma in one paragraph he thinks for a while. “Erhm, I would define him as charming, broad minded, tenacious, and a very, very shrewd politician. There’s this phrase people love using: he’s a player. That’s him, he’s a player within the ANC. He understands the ANC very well and he understands the people in it very well. And also he has this kind of tenacity of the herd boy who wants to know why he can’t have some of the butter as well.”

And on the downside? “He’s too laissez faire, he doesn’t understand that in politics you can’t have a discursive chat. People want you to have views, want you to be firm. There are dangerous people around him, dangerous to the health of the country. Who? People who are very keen on power for money reasons. It’s all about money and patronage. I can’t name them, that would be defamatory.”

But obviously he must have a steely side as well, otherwise he wouldn’t be where he is now. “Yes, but it’s very well hidden. But he is steely and he can be very dismissive. I’ve seen him do it a couple of times with lawyers. He can be quite hard assed.”

Zuma is a traditionalist, in Gordin’s words “South Africa’s first real African president”. This traditionalism goes hand in hand with a conservatism which has enraged the feminist and gay community, who remember his sexist remarks during the ‘rape trial’ and his scathing comments about gay men and same sex marriages.

Gordin shakes his head. “Nah. He’s not against women’s rights. I just don’t think he has thought it through.” He also dismisses the rape allegation. “I don’t think he raped her, but I also don’t think she was a willing participant. I think she was a passive participant. You and I might have said: this person doesn’t want do it with me, I think I might go to bed. But in terms of the law he didn’t [rape her]. Although I don’t think it was a jolly experience.”

And the gay issue? Gordin laughs. “He didn’t even know he was committing a sin [when he said that ‘a gay wouldn’t have stood in front of me, I would knock him out.’]. He got a terrible shock. He just didn’t get it. What was the fuss about? You’d always hit effeminate boys who would come to stick fights. I mean isn’t that what you do?”

What makes Zuma so successful and enigmatic is that he manages to inhabit various spaces simultaneously, and effortlessly flits back and forth between the different ones. He’s the traditionalist who spent his formative years in rural KwaZulu-Natal. He’s the angry young activist who was arrested and spent ten years on Robben Island. He’s the exile who worked with NAT, the feared intelligence branch of the ANC. He also knows the party and its trappings inside out. All this gave him a kind of holistic street education which made him savvy and resilient, tenacious and shrewd.

A related thing, which gets curiously overlooked in the book, is the impact of Umshini Wami. In that simple yet complex song it all came together: the struggle credentials, the traditional beat, the modern use as a ring tone and the imbedded desire for change, which appealed to the underclass and frightened or enraged the bourgeoisie. From a struggle song it evolved into victorious anthem, giving people something to hold to and to in dire times, a kind of We Shall Overcome.

Yet Gordin doesn’t see the song as relevant. “It irritated Terror Lekota, so Zuma definitely went on singing it. And he felt it was a struggle song, fuck you guys. The crowd love it. I don’t think it’s enormously insignificant. The acid test is: will he sing it when he’s inaugurated?”

1952 Born in Pretoria.
1971 Studies English and philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem

1977 Reporter and sub-editor, Rand Daily Mail, Cape Times, Sunday Express
1981 Publishes With my tongue in my hand (poetry)
1984 General Manager & Managing Director of Exclusive Books group

1987 Publishes Hard On (poetry)

1987 Wins AA Mutual Life/Vita Poetry Award
1988 Moves to the United States and works as sales manager for various publishers and as a writer/editor for Northern California Jewish Bulletin

1993 Editor of The Executive Magazine and Playboy South Africa
1998 Publishes Pomegranates for my Son (poetry)

1998 Publishes A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State (with Eugene de Kock)

2000 News and Managing Editor Argus/Independent Newspapers

2006 Associate Editor The Sunday Independent

2008 Wins Mondi Shanduka SA Journalist of the Year Award
2008 Retrenched from The Sunday Independent

2008 Publishes Zuma; A Biography

Heroes/influences:

“Dennis Silk, now dead, an English/Israeli poet whom I knew well in Jerusalem when I was at university there; former local teacher and present anthologist, Robin Malan; Peter Wilhelm, the South African writer.
”The main authors/books - i.e. people I don't know personally - have been Isaac Babel, George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Kingsley Amis, Mordechai Richler, Saul Bellow, SJ Perelman, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and American poet John Berryman (sadly, all dead).

“A number of local editors - I would not call them ‘heroes’, but they each had different powerful strengths from which I learnt a lot while working for them - also influenced me: news editor at the Cape Times when I was there, Wessel de Kock; Rex Gibson and Koosie Viviers at the Sunday Express; and Stephen Mulholland at the Financial Mail.”

Aspirations:

1. To be present - in the front row - at the executions of a number of local journalists,
especially of a few whom I shall not name but who are involved in producing and writing local books pages.
2. To write a novel as beautiful and interesting as James Joyce's Ulysses.
3. To be rich enough to spend a third of the year in Amsterdam, the second third in London, and the final third in San Francisco - doing absolutely nothing except drinking coffee, watching people, and irritating my family.
4. To live an orderly and disciplined life in terms of which X happens from 6am to 8am, Y from 8:01am to 10am, and so on. I have tried for 56 years to achieve this but have failed dismally.

30 jaar Rondos, Red Rat en Raket

fred — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:05:29 GMT

Rotterdam in de jaren zeventig kun je in een woord samenvatten: grauw. Havenkranen in grijze mist. Terwijl Amsterdam zich koesterde in de nagloed van de sixties, trachtte Rotterdam de wederopbouw af te ronden. Aangezien de jaren zestig goeddeels aan de stad voorbij waren gegaan, was ze een culturele woestenij, een uit zijn krachten gegroeide provincieplaats, goeddeels doof voor wat er in de rest van de wereld gebeurde.

Het decennium was veelbelovend begonnen met Feyenoord dat op 6 mei 1970 de Europacup won. Maar datzelfde jaar maakte Rotterdam de grootste havenstaking uit zijn geschiedenis mee. En twee jaar later haalde de stad de voorpagina’s met ’s lands eerste ‘Turkenrellen’. Arbeidersbuurten verpauperden, het spook van de nakende crisis stak hier al vroeg zijn kop op.

Cultuur in Rotterdam, dat was Jules Deelder op een desolaat Doelenplein, kankerend op een initiatief om Rotterdam ‘gezellig’ te maken. Pas toen het decennium ten einde liep, kwamen er lichtpuntjes. In de Eendrachtstraat ontwikkelde Eksit zich tot de Rotterdamse evenknie van Paradiso, zij het vier keer zo klein. De Sex Pistols traden er op voor een schare voetbalsupporters die in plaats van ‘we want more’ luidkeels Hand in Hand Kameraden inzette. Om de hoek zat Backstreet Records, de piepkleine platenzaak van Peter Graute, waar iedereen met een interesse voor punk, new wave en no wave op zaterdag rondhing en luisterde naar obscure singles en lp’s.

En ineens, als uit het niets, waren daar in 1978 de Rondos, vernoemd naar de goedkope kantinekoek. De Rondos waren een groepje obstinate studenten van de Rotterdamse kunstacademie die een punkgroep waren begonnen omdat er ergens een feestje was, maar nog geen band. Zanger John had foto’s van Engelse punks gezien in de Panorama en hij had daarna de lp Live at The Roxy gekocht. ‘Alles viel in een klap op zijn plaats: punk.’ Op 31 maart 1978 maakten de Rondos hun debuut in het Noord-Brabantse Dussen.

Hoewel ze slechts een lp maakten (Redrock uit 1980) zouden de Rondos uitgroeien tot de meest invloedrijke en meest politiek punkband van Nederland. Ik ontmoette ze voor het eerst in Paradiso waar ze rondliepen in stugge leren jacks en ansichtkaarten uitdeelden met de mysterieuze tekst ‘Polio uit Holland’. Later verspreidden ze buttons: twee met hamers en sikkels en een met een rode driehoek. Ook publiceerden ze de muurkrant/fanzine Raket, een ongecensureerd open podium en uitlaatklep voor iedereen die vond dat hij wat te melden had.

Ze opereerde vanuit een monumentaal pand in de 2^e IJzerstraat in Delfshaven, Huize Schoonderloo. Voor 250 gulden per maand mochten ze het van de gemeente gebruiken. Ze hadden het zelf opgeknapt, woonden en werkten er als collectief, en nodigden jonge punks uit om vooral eens langs te komen.

Het was een droompand met onder meer een doka, een drukkerij, een kantoor met een portret van Beatrix, een groot atelier en een gemeenschappelijke ruimte met drie op elkaar gestapelde tv’s. Samen met wat gelijkgestemden opereerden de Rondos ook als KunstKollektief Dubio, dat voor zijn interventies (een op ware grootte nagebouwde modeltank die door de stad werd gesjouwd en later door verontwaardigde PSP-jongeren werd vernield) putte uit dada en situationisme en probeerde de gevestigde kunstkliek te irriteren met anti-elitaire, ‘waardeloze kunst’.

Maar het pronkstuk van Huize Schoonderloo was de oefenruimte in de onderaardse bunker. Daar stond ook een tweesporenbandrecorder die beginnende bandjes tegen geringe betaling konden huren om demo’s, singles en lp’s op te nemen. In een Raket deden de Rondos precies uit de doeken hoe je je plaatjes in eigen beheer kon uitbrengen.

Weldra werden ze een fenomeen binnen de ongestruktureerde Rotterdamse scene: een stel onconformistische artistiekelingen die het voortouw namen en lieten zien dat in tijden van crisis zelfwerkzaamheid uitkomst biedt. Niet zeiken, zelf doen. Zo wisten ze het bestuur van Eksit ervan te overtuigen lokale punkbands een kans te geven: dinsdagavond punkavond. Wat later kreeg Rotterdam mede dankzij de Rondos een heus punkhol, Kaasee, waar onder meer het roemruchte Rock Against Religion werd gehouden, met Jules Deelder die verbeten stand hield in een regen van spuug en rochels.

Ook als band ontmantelden de Rondos de rock-cliché’s. Ze kleedden zich eenvormig in zwarte en donkergrijze crisisoutfits. Op het podium stonden ze strak en strijdbaar, als een militaire formatie. Bewegen deden ze nauwelijks. De meeste aandacht ging uit naar de giftige zanger John (aan achternamen deden ze niet), met zijn diepliggende ogen en broeierige blik. In tegenstelling tot andere punkbands speelden zij geen opgevoerde rock & roll. Rondo-nummers waren ultrakort, en denderden razendsnel voorbij. Het geluid lag dicht tegen de hoekige artpunk van bands als Wire en Gang of Four, met messcherpe staccato gitaren en geëxalteerde zang. Maar ook hoorde je dat ze een jaar of tien ouder waren (de oudste Rondo is van 1951), en naar Captain Beefheart hadden geluisterd.

De songs waren volgens de heersende etiquette basaal en confronterend: Gotta Kill a Cop Tonight, King Kong’s Penis, System, Fascist Dreams, Throwing Bricks Just For Kicks, The Russians Are Coming, Fight For Your Country.

Hun System blijft relevant: ‘It’s their crisis / why should we pay it / it’s their sick games / why should we play it.’ Maar het onbetwiste lijflied, de beginselverklaring, was Black and White Statement. ‘No establishments art / no deadmans heart / no bourgeois illustrations / no ruling class frustrations / but art out on the street / a new heartbeat / a new art passion / class war aggression.’

In deze van marxistisch jargon doorspekte regels die kunst, muziek, The Jam en klassestrijd met elkaar verbonden, lag de essentie van de Rondos. ‘De wereld moet huiveren’, schreef gitarist Allie in een KK Dubio pampflet.

Maar de wereld trok vooral de wenkbrouwen op. Punk met hamers en sikkels?

Zelf zijn de Rondos altijd ambigu geweest over hun communistische sympathieën. In de Rondos-biografie zegt zanger John, zoon van een havenarbeider, dat sommige bandleden inderdaad lid waren geweest van de maoïstische KENml (voorloper van de SP), maar dat hun politieke betrokkenheid niets met staatscommunisme of de ‘burgerlijke CPN’ te maken had. Het waren immers de radicale jaren zeventig, het hoogtepunt van de stadsguerrilla. Anarchisme was te vrijblijvend. ‘We neigden meer naar de standpunten van de Rote Armee Faktion in Duitsland, die de wapens tegen het imperialisme in navolging van bijvoorbeeld de Vietcong had opgenomen. (...) Niet dat we zelf de wapens wilden opnemen, maar met gitaren kwam je ook een eind.’

Elders noemen ze hun hamers en sikkels ‘een provovatie’. In een fiere arbeidersstad als Rotterdam was dat allemaal geen punt. Het vertoog en de werklust van de Rondos waren aanstekelijk. In 1979 was er sprake van een heuse Rotterdamse lente, met ontelbare bands: Rode Wig, Sovjets, S5, Tändstickorshocks, The Toilets, Zero-Zero, Revo, Railbirds, Bunker. Dankzij de Rondos met hun Gesamtkunstwerk van muziek, beeld, imago en manifesten streefde Rotterdam Amsterdam voorbij als Nederlandse punkhoofdstad. In de weekends was het centrum plotseling vol rattige jochies en meisjes met oude leren jacks waarop met een spuitbus ‘Raket’ was gekalkt. Dit was het Rondos-legioen, dat gehuld in Feyenoordshirts in een toeringbus naar Amsterdam toog toen de band daar op 9 juni in Paradiso optrad.

Iedere week was er wel een prachtig optreden of een opwindend nieuw bandje. Totdat de middelpuntvliegende kracht te groot werd en de boel uiteen spatte. Terugkijkend kun je dat omslagpunt exact vastpinnen: het moment waarop Peter Graute in Backstreet Records de Rondos zijn jongste ontdekking liet horen. Hij legde de plaat, 45 toeren, op de draaitafel. Eerst een tijdje stilte, dan een ‘verpletterende’ collage van lawaai, ratelende drums, woede en scheldkanonades. Het voelde alsof er uit de luidsprekers een lang verdwenen tweelingbroer galmde.

Die plaat was The Feeding of the 5000, die broer was Crass, een anarchistisch, pacifistisch, feministisch Londens collectief dat in 1977 was opgericht door Penny Rimbaud, een verbitterde ex-hippie. Crass nam punk nog serieuzer dan de Rondos. Punk was een manier om idealen over zelfwerkzaamheid en autonome leef- en werkstrukturen in praktijk te brengen. Het Crass-collectief leefde in een commune in Dial House, net buiten Oost-Londen. De band trad op in zwarte kleding, tegen een achtergrond van videobeelden van Hiroshima en Nagasaki en een reusachtige zwarte vlag met het omineuze Crass-symbool, waarin een kruis, de Britse vlag en een zichzelf verorberend hakenkruis waren verwerkt. Crass kreeg honderden, duizenden navolgers. Het werd de bestverkopende autonome punkband ooit. Een politieke machine met een prachtig vormgegeven, geheel in eigen beheer uitgebracht oeuvre. De optredends waren beangstigend en spectaculair, Nurembergbijeenkomsten voor krakers, hardcore punks en skinheads.

De Rondos namen contact op met Crass en voor ze het wisten waren ze op uitnodiging van Crass op weg naar Londen voor een bezoek aan Dial House en een gezamenlijk optreden. En ook al keken de Londense veganisten en de Rotterdamse rauwdouwers elkaar in eerste instantie wat vreemd aan, dat concert kwam er. Op 8 september 1979 werd in het historische libertijnse bolwerk Conway Hall een benefietconcert gehouden voor een groep gevangen anarchisten, met optredens van Crass, Poison Girls en de Rondos.

De Rondos logeerden in Dial House en de volgende dag gingen de bands met aanhang in de Crass-bus naar Conway Hall, Londen WC1. Het zag er onheilspellend uit. In de pubs in buurt hingen nazi-skinheads rond, die eerder die dag een bijeenkomst van extreemrechts hadden bijgewoond.

Nog voor er een noot gespeeld was braken er bij de toiletten vechtpartijen uit tussen groepen hooligans. Het Rondos optreden verliep vrij probleemloos, evenals dat van de Poison Girls. ‘Toen brak de pleuris uit’, schrijft John in de Rondos-biografie. ‘Alles ging razendsnel. Er vielen klappen en er werd getrapt en geschopt. Paniek. Het publiek stoof uiteen. We tilden kleine skinheads op het podium, zodat ze niet in het gedrang raakten. Ze huilden van schrik en waren niet ouder dan een jaar of elf, twaalf. Er bleven mensen liggen. De politie kwam en ontruimde de zaal.’

Voor Crass was dit het begin van het einde. Hun concerten veranderden steevast in slagvelden. Over hoe en waar het misging verschillen de meningen. Toen ik Crass-voorman Penny Rimbaud een paar jaar geleden in Dial House sprak wees hij hautain naar de Rondos. Volgens hem probeerden die over te komen als harde jongens die niet in de zon wilden zitten vanwege hun street credibility. Bovendien zouden ze wel even afrekenen met die rechtse skinheads. En dat, betoogde Penny, wilde Crass juist niet. Crass wilde dat iedereen, ongeacht zijn politieke affiliatie, naar de concerten kwam. Penny snoof verontwaardigd. Toen het inderdaad ontaardde in een massale knokpartij, waren de Rondos volgens hem nergens te bekennen. In het boek The Story of Crass doet Crass-bassist Phil Free er nog een schepje bovenop: ‘Die Rondos waren maoïsten – verdomd heavy. Jezus, ze waren angstaanjagend. Werkelijk! In vergelijking met hen waren wij een veaudeville show! Waarschijnlijk zitten ze nog steeds in de bak wegens een of ander vergrijp.’

De Rondos-versie is anders. De band had op verzoek van Crass zelfs de hamer-en-sikkelbanieren thuis gelaten. John beschrijft Crass-leden als ‘ongelofelijk vriendelijk’. Goed, als nuchtere Rotterdammers keken ze even verbaasd op toen Penny zei dat de theepot was ‘geleend uit het universum’. Maar met ‘de pleuris’ in Conway Hall hadden de Rondos niks te maken. Dat was van een georganiseerde actie van extreemlinks die de nazi-skins eens fysiek mores wilde leren. John: ‘En wij waren in de zaal toen er zo werd gevochten, terwijl Crass veilig in de kleedkamer zat.’

Het zou nooit meer goedkomen tussen Crass en de Rondos. Crass liet per telefoon weten niet meer met de Rondos en hun communisme geassocieerd te willen worden. De Rondos betoogden dat het alleen maar een uitvlucht was, en dat Crass gewoon bang was voor dreigementen van rechtse skinheads. ‘Penny houdt ervan de geschiedenis naar zijn eigen waarheid te herschrijven’, zegt John nu.

Het getergde Crass bracht de single Bloody Revolutions uit, waarin ze uithaalden naar de Rondos en er voor het gemak meteen maar de holocaust bij sleepten: ‘Cos the truth of what you’re saying, as you sit there sipping beer /iIs pain and death and suffering, but of course you wouldn’t care / You're far too much of a man for that, if Mao did it so can you / What’s the freedom of us all against the suffering of the few? / That’s the kind of self-deception that killed ten million jews.’

De Rondos werden na hun reis uit Londen in Rotterdam op handen gedragen, als soldaten die terugkeerden van het front. Maar ze wisten wat het Conway Hall fiasco symboliseerde: nu wordt het menens. Ze hadden inmiddels een legertje volgelingen die hun helden kritiekloos volgde, ook al viel er volgens John ‘niks te volgen’. Maar als de Rondos tijdens een concert van de Engelse Only Ones in Eksit om onduidelijke redenen boos met hun rug naar de band gingen staan, dan draaide de halve zaal zich ook meteen om, alsof ze pionnen waren in een experiment rond massa en macht.

Huize Schoonderloo veranderde in een toevluchtsoord voor punks, vluchtelingen, activisten en zelfs spionnen die probeerden uit te vogelen in hoeverre de Rotterdammers contacten hadden met schimmige groeperingen als Rood Verzetsfront. Ook neo-nazi’s waren geïnteresseerd in de Rondos; ze waren immers zo goed georganiseerd.

Gaandeweg werd het communisme, begonnen als spielerei, een loodzware albatros. Steeds kregen ze er vragen over, steeds vaker werden ze erop bekritiseerd. En steeds venijniger beten ze terug, want de kritiek raakte aan de identiteit en geloofwaardigheid van de Rondos. In Raket verschenen moeizaam geschreven defensieve verhandelingen over het communisme. Oude kameraden van de Tändstickorshocks stapten over naar de Nederlandse Volks-Unie van Joop Glimmerveen en gooiden stenen door de ruiten van Huize Schoonderloo.

Intoleratie vierde hoogtij. Het was links tegen rechts. Skins contra punks. Zuipers tegenover geëngageerden. Rotterdam versus Amsterdam. Humor en ironie waren tot stof vergaan. Het Rondos dilemma was dat van alle geëngangeerde bands. Uiteindelijk blijft het entertainment, een wild avondje stappen, aangedreven door testosteron en adernaline. Het hoogst bereikbare is inspirator: een mentaliteitsverandering bewerkstelligen en culturele en artistieke barrières doorbreken, terrein openleggen voor ander talent.

Tijdens een gezamenlijke vakantie in de zomer van 1980 naar Spaans Baskenland hadden de Rondos hun openbaring: hier zaten zij, in de stilte bij van een prachtig bergmeer, mannen van eind twintig. Ze realiseerden zich dat honderden kilometers verderop een schare pubers op hen wachtte, hunkerend naar leiding en richting, terwijl een andere groep erop gebrand was om die communisten eens een lesje te leren. ‘Ineens stond het ons heel erg tegen: de gedachte aan zo’n donker hol en stoer moeten doen om de mensen van je af te houden’, zegt John, inmiddels Johannes van de Weert.

In september 1980, een jaar na dat concert met Crass, hief de band zich officieel op. Ze brachten nog een single uit Fight Back! met op de hoes een afbeelding van Mao met een rode Rondos-driekhoek op zijn pak. Een van de nummers op het plaatje heette Which Side Will You Be On. Het was hun afscheidssneer naar Crass, dat het tot 1984 volhield. ‘Which side will you be on / with your intellectual pacifism / with your love and peace and anarchism / in times of riots and guerilla-warfare/ in times of armed struggle do you care.’

De Rotterdamse punkscene zonk weg in een peilloos diepte, aangevoerd door bands als Debiele Eenheid en Kotx. Maar in Wormer ging The Ex door waar de Rondos waren opgehouden: koppig, politiek geëngageerd en muzikaal vernieuwend.

En op 11 april 2009 waren ze allemaal weer eens in Rotterdam: Allie, John, Maarten, Wim, Kees en Frank, vijftigers nu. In cultureel centrum Worm werd een Rondos box gepresenteerd, met twee cd’s, een stripboek, een fotoboek, een biografie en alle teksten.

Johannes: ‘We hadden geen strategie of doel. We begonnen gewoon. Dan zaten we rond de tafel en zeiden we: moeten we niet eens een lp maken? En dan deden we dat.’

Overlooking Robben Island with Dr. Mamphela Ramphele

fred — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:03:02 GMT

We’re not even past the first four questions when she warns: “You have ten more minutes.” Fortunately those ten become twenty-five. But there’s no time for tea or coffee, and a number of subjects remain untouched. After the last answer has been jotted down, she walks to the mirror, examines her hair and golden dress, and tell to her secretary: “Call them to say I’m running late.”

The subtext is obvious: Dr. Mamphela Ramphele is a busy, formidable woman with a severe time problem. After years of political activism and an impressive academic career she is now the chairperson of the investment company Circle Capital Ventures. Additionally she’s also one of the most outspoken critics of the African National Congress (ANC) and its coalition partners, writing regular stinging opinion pieces for the newspapers.

When I ask her about the coming elections, she says: “For me it’s just incredible that as South Africans we can devalue our democracy by voting into power a party that thinks it’s not important to clear the name of its presidential candidate, which should be essential to issues such as integrity, anti-corruption and human rights. This is not someone running a cornershop. This is the face of South Africa! I don’t want him to be that face until he clears his name.”

She waits until I’ve finished writing, then continues, as if lecturing a class of students: “It’s not a question of denying him (Jacob Zuma) that right, but it’s a right for people like me, who fought and who lost people during the struggle, to say: I don’t want someone who faces charges, some of which have been tested in court.”

Ramphele receives me in her office on the 28^thfloor of the LG Building in Cape Town. “Just sit here,” she said, pointing at a chair. “Then you can enjoy the view.” That view is indeed breathtaking. The Waterfront, the harbour, a far away bay, and right in front of us, as if to accentuate the not so distant past, Robben Island, where many black activists, including Zuma, spent long years in prison.

A copy of her recent book Laying the Ghosts to Rest sits on the table. She began writing it in 2001, after her four years as vice-chancellor at the University of Cape Town, the first woman in South Africa to fill that post. ‘It was the most exciting job; I worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.”

But for her book she needed time and distance, both physically and mentally, which is what she got when she moved to Washington in 2000 to work for the World Bank. She wanted to dissect the new South Africa that was blatantly ruining its chances of a structural transformation, complacently basking in the afterglow of the ‘Mandela miracle’.

She wrote and wrote, but couldn’t find the thread to link the various chapters. She went back in time, to the village of Kranspoort in what is now Limpopo, where she grew up. She remembered how she was afraid of the dark, afraid of the ghosts of her ancestors, who were hiding in a haunted tree and in the graves of the Seakamela people who had been forcibly removed. The only way to lay those ghosts to rest was by naming them and communicating with them about all the unfinished business.

That was it! The key to her book: the ghosts who need to be fully heard before they can be laid to rest. “When I thought of that everything fell into place. It enabled me to be critical in a constructive way.”

The book was finally published last year, receiving glowing reviews. The only critique she heard, she says with a self-assured smile, was that it was so hard to criticise her book. That’s only partly true. The style is occasionally dire and repetitive, that of an academic attempting to write for a wider audience. But the range of subjects and her analysis are challenging. Ramphele covers virtually all the dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa: race, Aids, leadership, corruption, vandalism, apathy, forgiveness, education, unemployment, affirmative action, discrimination, health. The holistic approach. She nods. “My mind works like that. I don’t separate the political, the personal and identity. It keeps me sane. It comes from my political history. I was introduced to Black Consciousness when I was a student.”

BC permeates her analysis: the black pride of Steve Biko, the man with whom she had a long affair and two children. “I’m very proud of my BC background, because it has liberated me. I can live anywhere in the world. I have no chip on my shoulder.”

Ramphele abhors political correctness and isn’t afraid to offend the new rulers. In her view the failures of South Africa’s democracy are largely related to a dysfunctional, corrupt leadership and the lack of articulation with the poor. “Look at the hospitals! Look at the schools! Women in childbirth are left to die because the nurse has her team time. Look at the level of filth in Johannesburg. How can you explain how a mayor cannot worry about that?”

She fulminates against the MPs and the cover-up of their ‘travelgate’ scam. She lashes out at the messy business with government tenders. ‘My village was supposed to get a tar road to Polokwane. We’re still waiting. Every time there’s a new tender! But now we do have a ‘Tender Park’ in Polokwane.”

She propagates a ‘retro-gardist approach’: go back in time and deal thoroughly with the past before you plan for the future. “It wasn’t my intention, but having participated in the avant-garde I realised that these ghosts can only be laid to rest by going through a retro-gardist phase. It’s about how the past reflects on what we do. Some reactionary views may be correct, but we don’t want to hear it. One of the human abilities is to be reflective. That’s what we must do: be reflective, try to understand why this person is acting like this.”

She argues, for example, that not everything from the apartheid era should be dismissed as negative and unworkable. During apartheid the civil service was competent, teachers arrived in time and service delivery was efficient – albeit for a small minority. The new civil service, she writes, is often sluggish, corrupt, unmotivated and rude. She stresses it over and over: we shouldn’t take mediocrity for granted, we should strive for excellence. “We have to fight that culture of impunity and make people pay for their failure to deliver. But no one stands up. How to stop it? Well, the tax payers should ask: why are we voting for the ruling party if they don’t deliver. But there’s a sense of powerlessness. And the bottom 40 percent have given up, saying: ‘They only come here when they need our vote’.”

I mention Cope. She sees it as a beacon of hope, “the best thing that happened.” “Not because of what they stand for, but it’s a break from that monolithic thing. It supplies transformative energy. It has great potential for democracy. It already has had an impact: the ANC has to work a lot harder.”

But doesn’t the country need people who can transgress that excluding struggle legacy, with all its shadowy relationships and secrets? How long will it take until the ghosts of the struggle have been laid to rest and someone without a tainted past, a South African version of Barack Obama, stands up?

“That shouldn’t take that long,” she says. “Initially Obama wasn’t given a chance. But he had the passion to believe he could make a difference. He was connected with the poor through his community work and went ahead against all odds. The black community disowned him, but he pursued, with a clear conscience. He’s a great example for South Africa. We can do it. We can have a higher, more transparent version of democracy. We have to. We’re living in a world where they don’t take prisoners. We’re no longer the miracle people.”

Than she looks at her watch. Time’s up.

1947 Born in Kranspoort

1968 Studies medicine at University of Natal

1969 One of the founders of Black Consciousness Movement

1974 Has child from Steve Biko, Lerato, who died after two months

1977 Banished to Tzaneen by apartheid government

1978 Has another child from Biko, Hlumelo, born after the death of his father

1991 Deputy Vice-Chancellor at UCT

1991 Co-editor of Bounds of Possibility: The legacy of Steve Biko

1992 Editor of Restoring the Land

1993 Publishes A Bed called Home

1995 Publishes Mamphela Ramphele – A Life

1996 Vice Chancellor at UCT

1996 Publishes Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader

2000 Managing Director of the World Bank.

2004 Voted # 55 in the Top 100 Great South Africans

2005 Chair person of Circle Capital Ventures

2008 Publishes Laying Ghosts to Rest: Dilemmas of the transformation in South Africa

Heroes and influences

Dr. Mamphela did not reply to a request to cite her heroes and influences.

KOOS Retrospective

fred — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:16:00 GMT

Hey hey hey, after a great launch party at Warren Siebrits' gallery in Joburg it's officially out: the KOOS retrospective, lavishly packaged (design by Righard Kapp) and released by One-F Music. It should be available from all good music shops.

The sleeve notes were written by yours truly, as was the press release, which you can read below. Enjoy the nostalgia...

KOOS RETROSPECTIVE CD

Finally it’s available again: the long lost album of the legendary South African band KOOS, which at the time, 1989, was only released as a limited edition black tape, packed in a brown paper bag. It became known as The Black Tape.

Forget about Johannes Kerkorrel and his Koos Kombuis, KOOS was the truly innovative band whose music defined and reflected South Africa’s increasingly dark eighties. The band was formed in 1986 by conceptual artist Neil Goedhals and actor Marcel Van Heerden, who were joined by Gys De Villiers, Megan Kruskal, Velile Nxazonke and Kendell Geers. The country’s original punk poet Johan van Wyk wrote some of the lyrics.

KOOS was a highly personal reaction to the chaos and despair that had engulfed the country in the mid-eighties. States of emergency, burning townships, murder, bomb attacks and people who ‘fell from the window’ of a police station or ‘slipped on a piece of soap’. That was the subject matter KOOS sang about in songs like Sing jy van Bomme, Tsafendas and the menacing Suid Afrikaanse Herfs, which referenced the German terrorists of the Rote Armee Faktion.

Musically they were miles ahead of the 12 bar blues and folk that had inspired their alternative Afrikaner contemporaries. Their sound was artful anti-rock, fuelled by the noises that had reached Johannesburg from Berlin, Sheffield, Melbourne and Cologne: the metallic motorik and madness of Einstürzende Neubauten, Cabaret Voltaire, Birthday Party and Can. But all done in a unique style that has aged surprisingly well, and would now probably be called post-punk. Van Heerden sang, spat and whispered. Sometimes he used pebbles to distort his voice, while Goedhals punished his guitar.

KOOS disbanded in 1990. They had lived through the states of emergency of 1985 and 1986, they had been attacked, their name had partly been appropriated by Andre Letoit who became Koos Kombuis. But they had survived, battered but unbowed. Then, in 1990, around the time of the release of Nelson Mandela, the group imploded. The country was going through monumental changes. Goedhals didn’t want to perform anymore. There was no big fight, no drama, together they decided to call it a day. The raison d’être was gone. The band had made its statement: that one black tape, wrapped in a brown paper bag to accentuate its illicit content – a nod to the way the American bum must drink his alcohol

Later that same year, on the 16^th of August, on Elvis Presley’s dying-day, Goedhals jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a flat in Yeoville. A few days later came the news that the Johannesburg Art Gallery had bought some of his works. It sounded like a Goedhals prank.

The legend of Koos wouldn’t rest though. I wrote about them in my well received 80s underground book Club Risiko (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2006), where they share pages with international luminaries such as Sonic Youth, Laibach and Einstürzende Neubauten. Second, American underground label S-S Records intends to release some of Goedhals’s experimental pre-Koos recordings later this year.

But most important: here’s the re-mastered version of that legendary collector’s item that Shifty Records released twenty years ago.

KOOS 1986- 1990

personnel:

Christo Boshoff – bass, sax and keyboard

Gys de Villiers- bass and sax

Neil Goedhals – guitar and synthesizer.

Megan Kruskal- vocals.

Velile Nxazonke- drums and percussion

Marcel van Heerden- vocals

Kendell Geers- keyboard on Cowboy, tape loops on Wil ons Oorlewe and Tsafendas.

All music by KOOS

Sing jy van Bomme

- Ryk Hattingh uit sy toneelstuk dieselfde titel.

Ek is my Dilemma

- Johan van Wyk

In detention

- Christopher van Wyk

Is jy ŉ Moegoe?

- Marcel van Heerden

Zebra in Paris

- Megan Kruskal

Sloper

- Johan van Wyk

Delilah

- Les Reed and Barry Mason

Published by Hal Leonard

Breed like Rats

- from the play Oudisie om die Einde van die Aarde te Verhoed by Johan van Wyk

Wil ons Oorlewe

- na die gedig Hieronymus Bosch se Koringwa deur Johan van Wyk

Tsafendas

- Marcel van Heerden

ŉ Bietjie Dom

-Johan van Wyk

Cowboy

- Nikos Konstandaras en Tertius Meintjes na die gedig Cowboy Jan deur Johan van Wyk

Karel & Jansie

-Margaret Roestdorf

Vlêrmuis

- Johan van Wyk

Suid Afrikaanse Herfs

- Marcel van Heerden

Bonus tracks:

Honderd-en-een persent Bang

- Johan van Wyk after a performance by The Plastic People of the Universe

Too Heavy to Rise

- Marcel van Heerden

Sticky Antlers and the desire for the melody

fred — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:39:01 GMT

Every once in a while a CD lands on your desk that helps you to uncover a scene that you were completely oblivious of. More specific: a friend gave me an album by a local band called Sticky Antlers, and it opened up an artistic universe that I was completely unaware of. In Pretoria, nogal.

“It’s a noise band,” he said. Now ‘noise’ is not my favourite genre. Often it’s just an excuse to hide lack of musicianship under layers of distortion, screams and static. And since I was in a contemplative mood, I put the CD on a shelf and forgot about it. It was months later, at an art exhibition, that I accidentally bumped into two members of Sticky Antlers. They were bright, funny and clever. So the next day I slotted the CD into the player and listened.

It wasn’t noise. These were proper songs, with hypnotic, tribal rhythms and vocals that veered between sensuality and anguish. Sure there were slabs of distortion and needles of feedback, but distortion in the same way Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine used it: to conceal delicate melodies. This was distortion as an extra instrument, to upset expectations and to create a different level of consciousness.

The lyrics weren’t what you’d expect from a spiky band. In 1977 The Clash boasted they “didn’t have time for love songs”, but thirty years later Sticky Antlers have no problems with the whimsical and the vulnerable. Their song In Company is about a wasp sitting on a guitar string, while Blind Horse is a proper love song, written by the bassist for the guitarist.

“I sing: ‘Now I’m your blind horse, feed me sugar cubes and I’ll follow you everywhere’,” confesses singer/bassist Martinique Pelser when I meet her in a Pretoria restaurant. She immediately lights a cigarette.

Pelser is a curious mix of nervously hiding behind her long hair and eagerly explaining the motivations of the band that she started in late 2006 with her boyfriend/guitarist Andreas Schönfeldt, drummer Jaco Wolmeraans and second guitarist Damon Civin. “Our music is ‘unpopular music’,” she says. “Unpop. It could have been popular music, but we went and put it through a blender.”

That blender is an assembly of primitive recording devices that the Antlers use in their home studio: tape decks, old video cameras, “anything we can find to magnetically store something.”

Pelser spent part of her teenage years in the cultural wasteland of Polokwane, which at the time didn’t even have a record shop. “I loved music ever since I was little. The first album I liked was The Platters Gold, when I was five. Later Nirvana was the big thing. I heard them through an ex-boyfriend, and I thought: this is so cool. I had never heard someone scream like that. They made me want to play music; if he can scream and play three chords I can scream and play three chords.”

She got her first guitar when she was twelve, and taught herself to play. “I made up my own tuning. Later I learned later that it was ‘wrong’. But it came out sounding ok. And I just screamed over it.”

Back in Pretoria she met Schönfeldt, an awkward outsider who had an incredible knowledge of weird and wonderful music. “We met through mutual friends but didn’t really talk. I liked him, but we were a bit shy. So we didn’t talk for about a year. Finally had the guts to ask him if he wanted to make some music together.”

That was 2002, and they started their long journey through bands with wacky names. They started as Ecto Kid and Plasma Girl. Then they found a drummer and changed their name to If You Are What You Eat I Could Be You By Tomorrow. The drummer moved to Ireland and Pelser and Schönfeldt continued as PoodlePiss. In the beginning of 2007 they hooked up with Wolmeraans who was a novice to the drums and Civin who wasn’t exactly a Jimmy Page, and formed Sticky Antlers.

“In Pretoria you get very muso people,” says Pelser. “If you don’t play the scales it’s not good. We got sick of that. So we thought let’s ask musicians who like the music but never really played and see what happens.”

But that’s not all. Pelser and Schönfeldt also improvise in When Animals Attack. Damon plays in Immaculate Afterbirth. Additionally Pelser has a solo project called PeggyOkiKareoki. She also features in the hiphop influenced Vulva Underground, a project of drummer Jaco.

Meanwhile Schönfeldt has a side project called Suicycle and is currently working on a comic book. And if all this wasn’t enough, they also formed their own record label KRNGY. Initially it was an outlet for all this creative lava, but it quickly evolved into a proper independent label, which has released 19 CD-Rs and one ‘real’ CD. “We look for bands we like. We’re music snobs; we won’t sign something we don’t like. We look for music that’s different. We try to give the other bands a hand and put them on our label and sell their CDs at our shows. It’s just a friendly hand.”

The real KRNGY gem is that beautifully packaged Sticky Antlers CD that landed on my desk. Since they’ve found a proper distributor in Paul Riekert’s One-F Music, it should make them contenders for a place in the Great South African underground canon, which stretches from 70s legends Suck via Koos, Kalahari Surfers and Live Jimi Presley to Battery9 and Buckfever Underground.

All this activity is happening entirely outside mainstream culture. With the closure of clubs like Nile Crocodile and alternative music shops, Pretoria has become a disaster zone for anyone with a slightly off-beat taste. If you want to achieve something, anything, you must do it yourself.

Pelser nods. “We can burn our own CDs at home and sell them ourselves. Some of the CD-Rs we sell for R10. Then we have R30, R40, R50, R70 and R100. We design our own sleeves and make them all individually.”

Sticky Antlers are a desire driven entity, where music is the vehicle to explore emotions and a chance to travel and meet like-minded people. Pelser dreams of going to Iceland, Norway, Canada, dodgy American towns, play music, see bands.

But for the time being they’re stuck in South Africa, not exactly fertile soil for this kind of indie ethic. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I never thought there was much of a future until we started KRNGY and people actually bought the stuff. So maybe there is [a future]. All in all we sold about R5000 worth of stuff, everything together over the last year. It was enough to cover out cost of petrol and making the CDs. Things will expand, it just takes time. Honestly I’ll be happy if I can play music and tour.”

1984 Born in Pretoria

1996 Lives in Polokwane and has her Nirvana epiphany

2002 Studies film and video at Tswane University of Technology

2002 Meets Schönfeldt and starts Ecto Kid and Plasma Girl, recording two CD-Rs

2003 Forms If You Are What You Eat Then I Could Be You By Tomorrow, recording four CD-Rs

2005 Forms PoodlePiss

2006 Forms Sticky Antlers

2007 Starts KRNGY label

2008 Releases Sticky Antlers CD

Heroes/influences

“This is hard because the honest truth sounds corny, but Andreas really was a major influence on me, He wanted, just like me, to do something different and not worry about putting on a stage performances or sounding just like some other popular band of the moment. He also played me music that blew my mind. It’s not so easy finding likeminded people here as far as music is concerned. Also my mom, step dad and Andreas’s parents. They never stopped us, they are very supportive even if some of our stuff isn’t completely in their taste and they help us out a lot in many different ways.”

Music: “Early Butthole Surfers: I would have given my left foot to have been at one of those early shows!; X-Ray Spex, singer Poly Styrene she has one of the coolest voices; OOIOO: very tribal driven stuff. I love the way she structures her songs, the rhythms and use of drum beats; Monkey Chant (Track from Traditional music from the Bali People): we have a recording on a CD that we have on a permanent lending basis from Andreas’s parents. Over 500 people getting into trance-like fever, each screaming their own vocal rhythm, its indescribable, it truly makes me think of the sheer power that lies behind music, the intensity of this religious get together is unbelievable; I also love many bands and musicians because of the ‘Woman Power’ thing: Kim Gordon, L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, Björk…”

“And then exhibition shooter Anna Okley: she was forced to hunt food alone since I think she was twelve, because her dad died, and they had no cash. She learned to be an accurate shooter this way. It’s like a dream: 12-year old girls with guns going through the woods alone.”

“Finally, Bitterkomix. It’s always nice to find others swimming against the stream along with you. Trying something different, even if people hate it.”