A DISSERTATION ON AFRIKAANS ROCK MUSIC
Depending on which way you approach it, the concept of Afrikaans rock is either a tautology or an oxymoron. Or so it was for a very long time.
At the end of 2001 Dirk Uys, the man behind Trippy Grape Records, the Wingerd Rock events, veteran of the alternative Afrikaner movement and music scene and long-time running buddy of Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel from the days when Hillbrow, Johannesburg, was still a haven for penniless White bohemians, put out a press release to publicise a new album called Vloek Van Die Kitaar, a compilation designed to be a definitive history of the alternative Afrikaans rock scene, from its far off genesis in the late Seventies up to date, and in this press release he fulminated against the record company that had put out two volumes of a compilation called Alternatief op Sy Beste also designed to cover much the same round as Uys’s version although, according to Uys, the motives of the compilers of that particular album are highly suspect, not only in that they were trying to decide what “alternative” was without having his own impeccable credentials (after all he was the man who put together the seminal Voëlvry album on Shifty records in 1989), but he also as much as accused the record company of using material for which the artists were not going to receive royalties. I suppose Uys has reason to think that he is the most qualified person in this country to decide who does or does not belong amongst the alternative Afrikaans crowd but his attitude is uncomfortably reminiscent of the typical cultural fascism practised b the guardians of Afrikaner culture under the old Nationalist regime, that Uys and only Uys is allowed to make these kinds of value judgements. One aspect where I would strongly disagree with Uys’s viewpoint and selection criteria is that he appears to think that “Afrikaans rock” should include all Afrikaans speaking musicians, or bands that are formed completely by Afrikaans speaking musicians even if they choose to sing in English whereas the Alternatief Op Sy Beste compilers at least stuck to artists who sing only in Afrikaans.
Petty music industry politicking apart, the more important point to make here is that at the end of 2001 there were three different compilations of so-called Afrikaans rock in the Musicas of the country. Also there was Boland Punk, a career retrospective of Valiant Swart and a compilation of the best of Piet Botha’s Afrikaans songs, called Die Hits. The existence of these releases, more than the plethora of new Afrikaans bands, is the evidence that Afrikaans rock has arrived in the mainstream of South African rock.
Afrikaans speaking rockers have long been part of the local scene as member of bands that sang in English because that is supposed to be the language of rock and because it automatically gives any local rock band a much larger potential audience, both local and in the vast overseas market. The now defunct Springbok Nude Girls, the spearhead of what was almost a Stellenbosch invasion, was arguably the prime hard rock act in South Africa over the seven years of their existence but chose to go the English language route so that an assault on the foreign market could be an option not limited by using a language spoken and understood by a very small percentage of rock fans world-wide.
If one accepts the proposition that English is the language of rock, any rock band that chooses to sing in any other language automatically chooses to limit its appeal to other speakers of that language and if that community is small then the band’s commercial viability must be directly affected. If one looks at the potential market for rock music n South Africa, then at its widest it cannot be much larger than the 6 million or so Whites. Of that number say about 4 million would be Afrikaans speaking. A significant number of the Afrikaans speaking group will fall into the demographic that attends gigs and buys rock albums but their interest is likely to focus on the broad range of product from foreign sources, notably the USA and the UK and this means that the available cash for local product will be so much less. An Afrikaans rock band might attract a sizeable cult following in South Africa but even so it is likely to number only in the thousands. There are any number of regional rock bands in, say, Texas, who can command larger audiences, and thereby maintain a decent career in music, than even the most popular Afrikaans rock band in South Africa where it is struggle fir English bands to make a living purely out of music. At least the English bands can potentially relocate to the UK and try to make it there because their lyrics will be instantly understandable to the audience but an Afrikaans group will be at the same disadvantage as a Dutch or German band who insists on singing only in their native language. Koos Kombuis has played in London, where there is a substantial South African expatriate community but it is debatable whether the audience would be large enough t support him on his own, much less a group of musician. The most reliable foreign option in recent years has been to play in Belgium where the Flemish part of the country would give Afrikaans musicians a more convivial home. Kerkorrel has played there a number of times but then he has now become a serious, cabaret style artist and receives support from local and Belgian cultural organisations that might not be forthcoming t a raucous rock band.
If playing in a rock band as career can be a decisive choice then choosing to play Afrikaans rock is an even more decisive choice for you are then really limiting your options and potential market and will have to work twice as hard to break out of those confines, unless you are happy to be a big fish in the small pond of Afrikaner youth culture.
Anton Goosen’s first four albums (Boy Van Die Suburbs, 2de Laan 58, Liedjieboer and Jors Troelie) were arguably the foundations for any kind of Afrikaans rock that followed even if it took twenty years for this genre to mature and to produce a more diverse body of work.
Not that Goosen was particularly a rocker. He came from a song writing tradition and a culture where tune and melody were highly regarded and where tastefulness in musical accompaniment was almost de rigeur with loud guitars and thumping drums seen as rude and crude intrusions. Goosen was the all round entertainer who wanted to appeal to the 6 to 60 Afrikaner demographic that any local Afrikaans musician had to reach if he or she had any ambition to make a decent living out of their music.
As such Goosen wrote quite traditional songs with “story telling” lyrics on various local subjects that would strike a chord in he collective heart of his audience. He first came to prominence as a song writer for Sonja Herholdt with such hits as “Jantjie,” “Tant Mossie Se Sakkie-Sakkie Boeredans” and others; mostly songs about that far-off, romantic Western Cape and the perceived wonders and unique attractions of its people and places. One must remember here that both Goosen and Herholdt were from the Transvaal (as it then was) and to them “the Cape” was at most a remote summer holiday resort and it was quite easy for Goosen to create he usual “fairytale” image for a place that was not all that familiar to his audience either and anyway “The Cape of Storms” had always been more romantic than the northern provinces.
Once he’d proved himself as a song writer with an assured commercial touch Goosen as given his own cording contract and almost from the off he had a major single hit with “Kruidjie-Roer-My-Nie,” an uncompromising “boeremusiek” track that rose to the top of the Springbok Radio Top Twenty and possibly also made it to the Radio 5 chart. It was not really a rock song although the backing was electric and in many ways it was cocking a snook at the local rock industry that was still looking towards foreign influences as the be-all and end-all o hipness. Goosen brought not only an Afrikaans song to the Top Twenty but utilised a type of music that was despised by the hip crowd and derided as the very sign of the backwardness f Afrikaner culture.
The Boy Van Die Suburbs album followed and with it Goosen set the pattern for the next three releases. The songs were a mixture of boeremusiek, pop, rock, country, folk and whatever other musical influences had informed Goosen’s musical education. He recorded his own versions of a couple of Sonja Herholdt hits composed by him, added rock riffs to couple of tracks (although still rocking rather stiffly) and generally tried t make every track sound different from any other as if variety was vital t sustain the listener’s interest or maybe he just wanted to show off hi skills in adapting or parodying various musical styles to produce an album that was not boring.
Goosen followed this pattern on the subsequent releases but at least managed to grow in assurance and sophistication of arrangements so that by the time of Liedjieboer and Jors Troelie he can be regarded as having achieved a proper rock sound. In fact, on Jors Troelie, Goosen was backed by a proper rock band and on he could record talking blues that quite rocked in an AOR kind of way. He even went all avant garde with the adaptation of Breyten Breytenbach poems (adumbrating the Mondmusiek and Om Te Breyten albums of 2001) and using the fretless bass to add exoticism, although he was not above recording yet another “Kruidjie-Roer-My-Nie” style number in what seemed to be a blatant attempt to score another popular hit with the core Afrikaner audience who might have started abandoning him when he left behind the low brow, middle-of-the-road folksy pop songs to become a rocker who wanted to appeal more definitely to the younger rock audience. Goosen became an Afrikaans rock trailblazer but alienated his core adult constituency without attracting a sufficiently large hip young audience to sustain his career.
By 1981 and the release of Jors Troelie Anton Goosen was at the type of career peak that comes just before the rather steep decline. He was successful, well-regarded, critically acclaimed, even found a slot in the “Musiek & Liriek” movement aspired towards a larger and more broadly appealing cultural role and produced a movie called (I believe) “’n Brief Vir Simone” and the Jors Troelie was kind of the soundtrack for the movie but the wheels came off before the movie was released, if it was ever finished, and suddenly Goosen’s career landed in the doldrums where t slumped in a very low key for the better part of the next twenty years. In the late Nineties he made something of a come back with a band called Kommissie van Ondersoek and lately (2001) he’s returned under his own banner with ‘n Vis Innie Bos, by all accounts a full return to vintage Goosen music and the album includes a collaboration with new Afrikaans rockers Beeskraal. Anton Goosen is, after all, in his own way the Father of Afrikaans Rock and it is only fitting that the new young upstarts should pay their respects.
It was not quite a case of handing on the baton but at more or less the same time as Goosen was fading into the background David Kramer suddenly made a spectacular splash on the music scene with his version of Afrikaans music with “Hak Hom Blokkies” and The Royal Hotel mini album of 1981, coinciding with a dramatic and tense Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand.
The Jewish Kramer grew up in the very Afrikaans atmosphere of Worcester and in due course became a standard folk musician who at first aped overseas model but while spending time in Europe came to he realisation that he needed to write about South Africa if he were to be true to his muse. He released his debut Bakgat! In 1980 as a mixture of English and Afrikaans songs, some with sole acoustic guitar accompaniment, some backed by a rudimentary band. Almost from the first the record attracted unfavourable scrutiny from the political authorities and guardians of South African culture and some of the tracks were banned from air play on the SABC stations, for example “Botteltjie Blou” which was deemed to contain blasphemy although it was a very stringent and unsentimental social commentary. The more folksy “Biscuits En Biltong,” an equally wonderful though more light hearted song, did get some airing on the Western Cape regional radio station Radio Good Hope. In general, though, Kramer was still seen as really a South African English folk artist and as such would not have been able to make the career break-out he managed a year later.
“Blokkies Joubert” was actually an English song that resonated in Afrikaner hearts and became a massive hit and the chores of “The Royal Hotel” title track of the subsequent album became a national catch-phrase and suddenly Kramer became the darling of the same Afrikaner audience who had earlier embraced Sonja Herholdt and Anton Goosen. Not only that but Kramer utterly surpassed both of them in commercial success by becoming an icon, the persona “David Kramer” as a distinct show biz entity separate from the private individual.
Also, though Kramer recorded with backing musicians he was not much of a rocker either preferring to remain within the parameters of folk based pop with strong emphasis on entertaining lyrics and memorable tunes that could be radio friendly but were definitely tailored to entertain the middle-of-the-road Afrikaner audience who attended his shows in droves and bought his records and Kramer the performer became a kind of Afrikaner mascot clown, a nice friendly Englishman who had a feel for the kind of song and subject matter that would engage with Afrikaner sensibilities.
The breakthrough was made mostly with humour, though there was also a sprinkling of subtle, socially conscious songs t show that he remained true o his folk-activist rots, and it was only in the late Eighties and from the time that he reverted to English as the main language of his lyrics in album such as Delicious Monster that Kramer addressed the social and political issues he had refrained from touching on in his Afrikaans music. This was deliberate step away from the clownish David Kramer image pandering to Afrikaner tastes and as a result his records sold in fewer numbers and eventually that core Afrikaner audience turned its back on him. In turn Kramer turned his back on the japery and focused on writing and producing the hit “District Six – The Musical” which was more successful than his previous recording career and he has since concentrated on the stage with varying degrees of commercial success. In this way David Kramer truly fond a mass South African mainstream audience whereas Anton Goosen remains within the Afrikaner community, although with more selective appeal, despite efforts to broaden his appeal to include an English language audience.
Even so, Kramer’s ascendancy was complete and in a way he was the first White popular entertainer to achieve true mass popularity in South Africa, becoming a brand name along the way. His trademark costume of loose shirt, wide tie, big jacket , baggy trousers and red “velskoene” became iconic to the extent that he endorsed and marketed the David Kramer brand “rooi velskoene” and in the process was attacked by A peeved Anton Goosen who claimed that he’d been wearing “rooi velskoene” long before David Kramer but obviously had not thought of the marketing opportunities until Kramer started making money from it. Kramer, as “himself,” also became the face, and spokesperson, for the Volkswagen microbus radio and TV advertisements, a first in the South African entertainment industry.
In essence both Goosen and Kramer were pop entertainers in the old storyteller, singer/songwriter tradition and although the music contained elements of rock it was mostly little ore than a flirtation. Both wanted careers in the popular entertainment field in that precluded full-blown rock.
Throughout the Eighties there were plenty of Afrikaans speaking musicians in local rock bands but the lingua franca of rock is English and this was the language they chose to write and sing in. It took yet another English speaker by the name of James Phillips to release an album with mostly Afrikaans rock songs although even this record was in he Anton Goosen tradition of adopting a different musical style for each song. Unlike Goosen, Phillips was not aiming to gain an audience amongst the Afrikaner mass, and he did not. Phillips no doubt counted a number of so-called alternative Afrikaners among his fans but they were not a large enough, or influential enough, grouping to ensure substantial commercial success.
There was a brief fad for bands that otherwise wrote in English to include one or two Afrikaans songs in their repertoire in a kind of anti-hip contrary hip way. These bands were, amongst others, Khaki Monitor, The Kêrels, Teenage Botha & The Blacks, Duck 4 Cover, Artvark (who boasted of having written the first Afrikaans “rap” song) and the Genuines.
Probably the first Afrikaans rocker to nail his colours to the mast was Valiant Swart who started gigging in the Western Cape in 1988. Not only was he a rocker but he took the almost revolutionary step in those days of alternative rock that took great pains not to be good old-fashioned rock’n’roll, to play loud, raucous, tuneful country rock, sounding unlike almost anybody else on the Cape scene at the time. Thirteen years later he is still going, having released a number of albums and most recently a career retrospective, and he is an influence on many local rockers, especially the Stellenbosch bands, and an ubiquitous presence on their recordings sometimes as player, most often as producer.
Valiant Swart was in some ways preceded by Koos Kombuis, the third of the influential Afrikaans singer/songwriters of the Eighties. Koos started his career as all-round alternative Afrikaner icon as the writer Andre Le Roux du Toit who on the one hand wrote funny little short stories for populist mainstream magazine Huisgenoot and on the other hand more serious poetry and literary prose. As Andre le Toit he published a couple of volumes of poetry and two Afrikaans (and one English) novels and was one of the first serious writers to employ the wholesale use of colloquial Afrikaans with its many imported English words, to write as he spoke, that is in a strange way a return to the slogan of the original and first Afrikaans language movement of the late Nineteenth century. Even so, Andre le Toit would have been nothing more than a minor footnote in the history of Afrikaans literature had he not sent Shifty Records a demo tape of himself singing his own compositions and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. Shifty released the demo as the 1987 tape only release, Daar Ver Van Die Ou Kalahari (now available on CD.) The facility with language but lightweight touch that made Le Toit a minor poet was admirably suited to the semi-autobiographical lyrics, and he wrote some intriguing tunes, sang them in an endearingly sweet, amateurish voice and played rudimentary guitar, all the elements that combined to make him the legend he became. Unfortunately it was also a row that quickly became monotonous and he has not really progressed much beyond that demo tape although he eventually recorded with a full band and has had a great deal of commercial success, not bad for someone who came from a truly alternative angle to the then prevailing Afrikaans pop market.
It was on his next Shifty Records release, Niemandsland & Beyond, a proper vinyl LP, that Le Toit changed his nom de stage to Koos Kombuis, according to him it was a sly reference to the old insult to Afrikaans as a “kombuistaal”) and recorded with a rock band including inter alia James Phillips who also backed Koos Kombuis when he toured the country to promote the new release. Koos did not completely abandon sole acoustic performance though and still performs solo on numerous occasions. He has released several CD albums of new material (though he has continuously recycled some of his best loved tunes) and there are currently even two “best of” compilations on competing labels, as well as the live album Blou Kombuis where Kombuis is backed by Albert Frost, a collaboration with Valiant Swart called ‘n Jaar In Die Son and his most recent studio effort, Equilibrium. The music varies from the solo, folky stuff to quite hard edged rock and along the way he has also recorded some English songs. These might be an attempt to reach out to an English rock audience who otherwise might not “get” what he was going on about but unfortunately he does not have the same facility with English as he has with Afrikaans and the lyrics, and performances, are always more stilted and awkward than the Afrikaans songs where he is clearly more at ease. Along the way he has recorded a number of “classics,” among them “Lisa se Klavier” and “Onder In My Whiskeyglas”
The big news in Afrikaans rock at the close of the Eighties and on the cusp of major political changes in South Africa was the Voëlvry Tour of 1989 with Die Gereformeerde Blues Band (GBB), Koos Kombuis en Khaki Monitor. The main mover and shaker behind GBB was one Ralph Rabie who used the stage name Johannes Kerkorrel and who worked as a journalist in Johannesburg where he met Andre le Toit (before he metamorphosed into Koos Kombuis) and the two of them collaborated in a stage show called “Piekniek By Dingaan” one of the first, if not the first, big statements of the then burgeoning alternative Afrikaner movement. It set out to slaughter a bunch of holy cows and entertained a vast number of people along the way, even enticing the hip English speaking crowd and garnering a heap of critical praise. Some of the songs performed by the ensemble eventually found their way onto Koos Kombuis and GBB recordings.
Kerkorrel decided that a smaller band would be a better vehicle to put across his musical vision and formed the GBB as a “real” rock’n’roll band, with Willem Moller, now also an important producer and session player, on guitar, Gary Herselman, previously guitarist of The Kêrels, on bass and Jannie van Tonder, trombonist in various projects, on drums. A veritable Who’s Who of Afrikaans rock musicians.
GBB was (obviously) not a blues band and not quite a true rock band either; it would be more accurate to refer to it as cabaret rock or rock cabaret. Kerkorrel’s musical aspirations were to a somewhat higher cultural plane than mere common or garden rock and he simply devised GBB as a framework and vehicle to put across his musical ideas that actually could easily have fitted into the Musiek & Liriek frame of reference. The rock elements came from the odd Chuck Berry riff and Moller’s blues drenched rock guitar, and titles like “Rock’n’roll Ossewa,” but on the other hand there were leftovers from “Piekniek By Dingaan” such as “Ons Ry ‘n BMW” and “Hillbrow” that bordered on cabaret schmaltz, the latter with weepy, pseudo-Parisian accordion and all.
The Voëlvry tour was preceded by the eponymous Shifty Release, a compilation of Afrikaans songs by acts on the label in an attempt to show that there was in truth a serious alternative Afrikaans rock movement. The whole concept was little more than a flawed hype of the type one would have expected of the large, reactionary record companies anxious to make a buck from a trend and not from a perceived enlighten small independent label. GBB was represented by two tracks and James Phillips’s Bernoldus Niemand track “Snor City” got a place and these slots were deserved because at least the two records represented by these three rocks were predominantly Afrikaans albums, but The Kêrels and Khaki Monitor also each got a track and this is something of a misrepresentation since these are the lone Afrikaans songs recorded by the bands at that time and neither of them can by any stretch of the imagination have been called Afrikaans rock bands except insofar as thy might have had Afrikaans speaking members. The Genuines, a Cape Town based jazz funk rock band was represented by an example of their “ghoema” songs and once again this track was an exception to the basic output of the band. Even less than he other two bands mentioned The Genuines was in no was part of an alternative or otherwise Afrikaans music movement, whether rock or mainstream. With the Voëlvry album Shifty Records tried to present a snapshot of a burgeoning movement but it was a fake, a trumped up and inflated and dishonest picture.
The 1989 “Voëlvry” Tour became something of an alternative Afrikaans crusade aided by the intransigence an stupidity of Afrikaner authorities and the resultant media attention. The tour schedule included concerts on a number of university and college campuses around the country and would serve as a typical promotional tour by GBB to generate interest in its Shifty Records album Eet Kreef. The support acts were Khaki Monitor and a solo Koos Kombuis. Almost immediately the authorities who ran the very conservative Afrikaans universities and colleges banned the concerts from taking place on campus grounds. The media interest was so intense that the tour received the kind of publicity that money cannot buy. The Voëlvry Tour played two gigs in the Cape Town area. The first one was scheduled for Stellenbosch University campus but was banned and was then switched to the Drie Geuwels Hotel just outside Stellenbosch. The second gig was at the Three Arts Theatre in Diep River, Cape Town. Both concerts were well attended and probably he biggest rock events in Cape own that year.
At Drie Geuwels Koos Kombuis played along to a beat box and thereby transformed his somewhat staid, boring guitar accompaniment that had become a liability. At Three Arts he had no beat box and performed a low key, dull, perfunctory set. At both gigs he received a hero’s welcome.
GBB played a slickly programmed set where rock numbers were interspersed with the more cabaret-like tunes in a seamless whole. It was certainly powerful and effective. It was only after seeing the two concerts that one realised that one was watching a tightly rehearsed, scripted show rather than a standard rock gig. Kerkorrel repeated his “ad libs” from performance to performance. Once one came t grips wit this reality, the truth dawned that GBB was not a rock experience at all but simply a theatrical show using elements of rock music to dress up mainstream high culture to appeal to a young audience who would otherwise run a mile from the concept of Afrikaans Cabaret. GBB returned to the Three Arts the following year with the same set, or show and to a smaller audience and they really sounded like a band that was going through the motions for the sake of the money. No further GBB album was released and it was disbanded shortly after to allow Kerkorrel to pursue a solo career in cabaret and the high culture arena, completely abandoning rock music and opting instead for the more broadly defined popular music. Moller owns his own recording studio and is a well-respected producer and session player, Van Tonder kept on playing with all and sundry and is at present a highly regarded Cape Town based jazz musician, and Herselman reconvened The Kêrels in 1994 for a pretty mediocre album (again with only one Afrikaans track on it.)
An interesting contrast is the Houtstok double album of 1990, an Anton Goosen Production, which features acts that appeared at “the first predominantly Afrikaans rock festival” (non-Afrikaans acts on the album are Jennifer Ferguson, No Friends Of Harry and Jack Hammer, Piet Botha’s country rock band before he recorded Afrikaans songs as a solo career move) held in Pretoria that year, no doubt as a fall out of the popular success of the two GBB tours. Goosen’s new aggregation Kommissie van Ondersoek is prominently featured as well as Koos Kombuis (along with Koos and Randy Rambo the only hold-over from the Voëlvry tour), with some mainstream Afrikaans vocalists and the legendary Joos Tonteldoos & The Dwarstrekkers. James Phillips and/or Bernoldus Niemand were absent. Houtstok was repeated maybe once more and was then subsumed in the general rock festival thing in South Africa although Wingerdstok in the Cape came closest to replicating it, although Wingerdstok was about local, Cape town or Stellenbosch based bands, and not purely Afrikaans music. That Houtstok was first and foremost a celebration of the vaunted emergence of Afrikaans rock outside of the mainstream of Afrikaans music is underscored by the feted performance of the re-united remnants of the Briels, a long forgotten but cult Afrikaans country ‘n’western vocal group I the tradition of the American Cater Family, that specialised in heavily sentimental narratives of the tragic lives of the White working class. Their song on the album (“Trein Na Pretoria”) had been spoofed by Anton Goosen (or was it Casper de Vries in the mid-Eighties?) during his performances in Stellenbosch under the Musiek & Liriek umbrella and even Andre le Toit had written parodies on the theme. The Briels were a cult that would have been cringeworthy, and was cringeworthy to a generation of Afrikaans speakers, as examples of the lowest depths to which popular culture can sink, especially working class culture, but as always there will be a hip group who will adopt the previously unacceptable as also hip, i.e. the Briels ran so much counter to standard mainstream Afrikaans culture, the high culture of the Afrikaner establishment, that the so-called new Afrikaners adopted the Briels almost as mascots and the parodies were affectionate rather than approbation. This is not to say that the new Afrikaners would actually have accepted the Briels, or their kind, into their own special lager. It was only the outsider tag that linked the Briels wit Koos Kombuis, not any common understanding. This is underscored by the fact that Kombuis is now part of mainstream Afrikaans culture whereas the Briels never became part of it, not even in their heyday as recording and performing artists.
The other noteworthy aspect of the Houtstok album is the first track, Anton Goosen’s “Wit Kaffers Van Afrika” which represents another spin on the then fashionable New Afrikaner repositioning of themselves as “the first freedom fighters in Africa,” being a reference to the war between the Boer republics and the British Empire and the subsequent Afrikaner fight for political supremacy in their own country. That this struggle culminated in the suppression of the majority of occupants of that same country was never mentioned, for obvious reasons. In any event, New Afrikaners wanted to distance themselves from the old Afrikaner Christian-Nationalist, segregationist policies and worldview and wanted to present themselves as Africans as much as any Black freedom fighters – in fact there as a brief fad for replacing Afrikaner with the supposedly neutral and more inclusive Afrikaan – so that they could embrace hipness and be regarded as hip, as politically correct as any ANC supporting English-speaking White radical “alternative” conscientious objector or feminist. The irony is that these sentiments were expressed by remnants of the old order – Goosen was as much an example of the old Afrikaner, bohemian edition, as any member of the Afrikaner Establishment – who were keen to reposition themselves as a more acceptable face of Afrikanerdom, and were fond of repeating the mantra that Afrikaners should not surrender any of their gains simply because they were made to feel guilty, especially now that liberation was at hand, and the true new generation of Afrikaans-speaking youth had already disassociated themselves from this particular cul de sac and were more intent on redefining themselves as sophisticated, coincidentally Afrikaans-speaking hip citizens of the world and as such were beyond trying to defend the indefensible or to change the facade of an Establishment to which they did not yet belong and from which they were also alienated.
Koos Kombuis went from strength to strength as a recording artist, even releasing a couple of albums on the Stellenbosch based Trippy Grape label run by Dirk Uys. Along the way Kombuis wrote a number of songs in English but to my mind these are not as successful as his Afrikaans songs because Kombuis has an ear for Afrikaans vernacular and the rhythms of he language that he does not have for English. To day he is married, has a child, has published a autobiography, charges large amounts for concerts (ha even played overseas) and is contemplating taking up serious writing again. All in all he has moved from the fringes to the mainstream.
Valiant Swart was the only Afrikaans rocker to emerge from the shadow of GBB and to maintain a presence on the local music scene through the Nineties. He released a number of albums and became a ubiquitous presence as producer, session player and general booster on the Stellenbosch scene. The music varied in quality but was generally interesting and he gains plus-points for sticking to a Country rock sound that was somewhat at odds with the “indie” or “modern rock” ethos of the post-Nirvana Nineties. He was blues and country based without debasing either, had an ear for a hook and obviously valued a tune above simple power chords. His influence can be heard in the music of Akkedis, obvious acolytes, on their debut album, but also on the likes of Billygoat, yet another bunch of Stellenbosch country rockers who sang mostly in English but included two Afrikaans songs on their debut album, one of which was written by Valiant Swart. It is not uncommon to find him name-checked on releases from Cape Town or Stellenbosch based bands.
Stellenbosch was a growth area for rock bands in the mid-Nineties after a long drought. It all started with the Springbok Nude Girls and as a result of their success the trickle down theory dictated, like Liverpool in 1963 or San Francisco in 1967, that there was a sudden interest in the commercial possibilities of bands from Stellenbosch. This resulted in the founding of the Trippy Grape and Afrimusik labels albums from The Led, Billygoat, Drain, White Trash, Garden Variety and others. All of these bands contained Afrikaans speaking musicians and as such are likely to fall in Dirk Uys’s categorisation of Afrikaans rock, although in most cases the songs were in English and at best there would be a couple of 1Afrikaans songs on each album. As far as I know the Springbok Nude Girls recorded only one Afrikaans song (“Pappa, Ek Wil ‘n Popster Word”) that was included on the Wingerd Rock 1 compilation on Trippy Grape but never made it to any full length SNG release on the Epic label, their official home. Billygoat had two Afrikaans tracks on their debut (and so far only) album, one of which was a secret track, and both were collaborations with Valiant Swart. White Trash had a few more Afrikaans tracks and as such their debut (and thus far only) album is more or less bilingual. Wingerd Rock 1 has a mixture of Afrikaans and English tracks and from this compilation one would guess that White Trash only has English songs and that Brolloks en Bittergal is simply an Afrikaans band and that SNG and Koos Kombuis make a habit of writing songs in either language. Therefore this compilation is confusing and disingenuous, if not outright slightly artistically dishonest, in portraying the Stellenbosch and/or Afrikaans rock scene.
Wouter van de Venter is a young Gautenger with pretensions towards being an Afrikaans rocker in a more mainstream rock mould than, say, Valiant Swart, with his psychedelic painted Stratocaster and mixture of lite metal (his Voel Vere album contains at least one Metallica rip-of/parody/homage albeit not as heavy), cod-reggae and folky ballads. According to a press release he intends rocking while he is young and will save the softer pop sounds for when he is more mature, as if this is some sort of game plan for career longevity; get the kids by posing as a rock’n’roller and when you and your audience grow, keep ‘em happy with more polished mainstream balladry. The Voel Vere album is not a bad product and has a number of quite tuneful songs though it doesn’t truly rock very hard – the production has smoothed out the edges too efficiently – and it is a bit overlong. Had Wouter, who writes all his own songs, stuck to the old-fashioned forty minute album limit, the listener would have been intrigued enough to ask for more. As it is, the latter half the album passes by in anonymous fashion. The best tunes are upfront and the interest is not sustained. I guess Wouter’s eventual slot is AOR rock but even in the present cultural climate he could still be seen as an alternative to mainstream Afrikaans music simply because he does not produce glossy pop like, for example, Coleske, two brothers who specialise in light, tuneful pop with plenty of harmonies, but who have chosen to sing in English to make their albums exportable. Apparently they are big in Europe (or certain parts thereof.)
Since the Coleskes are Afrikaans speakers, Dirk Uys would probably like to include them in his list of Afrikaans rock and pop artists and I think they started out singing in Afrikaans before aiming for the more lucrative world-wide market by adopting the universal language of pop. As Afrikaans musicians Coleske would fall squarely within the mainstream tradition of such as Herbie & Spence, also two brothers, who were quite popular in the Seventies, two working class siblings who dressed like country singers and affected a country influenced Afrikaans pop. Where Herbie & Spence were kind of down home, in dress and behaviour they remained true to their working class origins, Coleske quite clearly aims at international sophistication and a great deal of effort and money has gone into their styling and marketing, as befits an “international act.” They seem to have had only one major hit however and lately they’ve regrouped and played it safe, in a manner of speaking, by recording an album of songs made famous by Simon & Garfunkel, an act with whose sound Coleske probably identifies although the brothers do not have Paul Simon’s songwriting talent. They are firmly in the AOR mainstream and are most likely happy to be there if that mans a lucrative recording and performing career. None of this “artistic statement” nonsense if that means obscurity. It took Koos Kombuis a long time to reach the mainstream, or for that matter for his “alternative” audience to grow and to become the mainstream; Coleske were in the mainstream from the start and will never deviate from it. Koos might still be a kind o hip act. Coleske does not care about hip as long as they remain commercial.
Wouter van de Venter also does not want to be a cult figure if that means obscurity and lack of financial reward for his musical labours. In any event it is probably a sign of the maturity of Afrikaans rock as a significant genre that it will now accommodate AOR figures whereas it was previously populated virtually only by cult figures. As I’ve said above, Koos Kombuis’s audience grew up with him and they all became the mainstream. Van de Venter does not make the kind of music, an is not the kind of cultish figure, where an audience will grow with him. He might grab a young audience, if he can have some radio hits as well, and have the standard three to four year window of opportunity but then his core young audience will move on and the younger pop generation then coming onstream will not want to now about him. He could conceivably become an Anton Goosen like elder Afrikaans rock statesman but then he has not yet shown himself to be the same kind of master craftsman as songwriter and likely will never do so.
Goosen was also a mainstream figure from the start. After all, his first claim to fame was as the songwriter for Afrikaans songbird Sonja Herholdt. Even so he wanted to appeal to a young rock audience too, as is shown by the rockier route he followed. His longevity as career musician is based on his superior song-craft. One might shudder at the contrived nature of some of his songs but it is undeniable that he has a way with words and tune and this sets hi apart from a great number of his contemporaries. Goosen writes standards, songs that are independent of his performance of them. Wouter van de Venter has not yet mastered that art. His tunes are not that catchy and the strength of the recorded performance are what makes them work, when they work. Van de Venter, like Valiant swat, might think of themselves as artists rather than the meticulous craftsman Goosen is but it is generally the songs of the craftsman that become standards and stand the test of time.
Piet Botha is a latter day convert to the Afrikaans rock cause. For most of the Eighties and into the Nineties his main gig was as the songwriter and frontman of Jack Hammer, a southern rock styled band, but in 1997, with Jack Hammer dormant, Botha released the ‘n Suitcase Vol Winter album which was a collection of mostly country rock tinged Afrikaans songs touching on various aspects of the Afrikaner experience, from the second Anglo Boer war to the “border war” in Southern Angola which was the defining coming of age ritual of so many young white South African males. The album contains the popular “Goeienag Generaal” (about the “border war”) and even a song written and sung by Koos Kombuis. The debut was followed by Jakob Skopgraaf, a lesser known collection of similar hue. The last solo Afrikaans album to date is Die Mamba where Piet Botha has crafted a moody set of tunes with quite lush arrangements and strong melodies. The usual themes are present and a nice quirky touch is an Afrikaans rewrite of the venerable “House of the Rising Sun”, just about the first song most aspiring South African guitar players from the Sixties and Seventies learnt to play. Mamba is quite possibly Botha’s masterpiece. It was followed in 2004 by a live album where the band performs material from both the Jack Hammer songbook and the solo Afrikaans stuff. Though the album does not have much live atmosphere it is sonically stunning.
Afrikaans rock has not been around long enough for us to see which acts were significant beyond their initial popularity or time. We do not know yet whether Koos Kombuis will always be hailed as a genius or whether his musical career will be yet another footnote to Afrikaans culture, much like his poetry or novels. He is at home with words and it seems that he can write at will but the very prolific nature of his talent makes hi seems like a dilettante who dabbles in everything and can n the surface produce beautiful, interesting results but is of little true substance when analysed carefully.
Depending on which way you approach it, the concept of Afrikaans rock is either a tautology or an oxymoron. Or so it was for a very long time.
At the end of 2001 Dirk Uys, the man behind Trippy Grape Records, the Wingerd Rock events, veteran of the alternative Afrikaner movement and music scene and long-time running buddy of Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel from the days when Hillbrow, Johannesburg, was still a haven for penniless White bohemians, put out a press release to publicise a new album called Vloek Van Die Kitaar, a compilation designed to be a definitive history of the alternative Afrikaans rock scene, from its far off genesis in the late Seventies up to date, and in this press release he fulminated against the record company that had put out two volumes of a compilation called Alternatief op Sy Beste also designed to cover much the same round as Uys’s version although, according to Uys, the motives of the compilers of that particular album are highly suspect, not only in that they were trying to decide what “alternative” was without having his own impeccable credentials (after all he was the man who put together the seminal Voëlvry album on Shifty records in 1989), but he also as much as accused the record company of using material for which the artists were not going to receive royalties. I suppose Uys has reason to think that he is the most qualified person in this country to decide who does or does not belong amongst the alternative Afrikaans crowd but his attitude is uncomfortably reminiscent of the typical cultural fascism practised b the guardians of Afrikaner culture under the old Nationalist regime, that Uys and only Uys is allowed to make these kinds of value judgements. One aspect where I would strongly disagree with Uys’s viewpoint and selection criteria is that he appears to think that “Afrikaans rock” should include all Afrikaans speaking musicians, or bands that are formed completely by Afrikaans speaking musicians even if they choose to sing in English whereas the Alternatief Op Sy Beste compilers at least stuck to artists who sing only in Afrikaans.
Petty music industry politicking apart, the more important point to make here is that at the end of 2001 there were three different compilations of so-called Afrikaans rock in the Musicas of the country. Also there was Boland Punk, a career retrospective of Valiant Swart and a compilation of the best of Piet Botha’s Afrikaans songs, called Die Hits. The existence of these releases, more than the plethora of new Afrikaans bands, is the evidence that Afrikaans rock has arrived in the mainstream of South African rock.
Afrikaans speaking rockers have long been part of the local scene as member of bands that sang in English because that is supposed to be the language of rock and because it automatically gives any local rock band a much larger potential audience, both local and in the vast overseas market. The now defunct Springbok Nude Girls, the spearhead of what was almost a Stellenbosch invasion, was arguably the prime hard rock act in South Africa over the seven years of their existence but chose to go the English language route so that an assault on the foreign market could be an option not limited by using a language spoken and understood by a very small percentage of rock fans world-wide.
If one accepts the proposition that English is the language of rock, any rock band that chooses to sing in any other language automatically chooses to limit its appeal to other speakers of that language and if that community is small then the band’s commercial viability must be directly affected. If one looks at the potential market for rock music n South Africa, then at its widest it cannot be much larger than the 6 million or so Whites. Of that number say about 4 million would be Afrikaans speaking. A significant number of the Afrikaans speaking group will fall into the demographic that attends gigs and buys rock albums but their interest is likely to focus on the broad range of product from foreign sources, notably the USA and the UK and this means that the available cash for local product will be so much less. An Afrikaans rock band might attract a sizeable cult following in South Africa but even so it is likely to number only in the thousands. There are any number of regional rock bands in, say, Texas, who can command larger audiences, and thereby maintain a decent career in music, than even the most popular Afrikaans rock band in South Africa where it is struggle fir English bands to make a living purely out of music. At least the English bands can potentially relocate to the UK and try to make it there because their lyrics will be instantly understandable to the audience but an Afrikaans group will be at the same disadvantage as a Dutch or German band who insists on singing only in their native language. Koos Kombuis has played in London, where there is a substantial South African expatriate community but it is debatable whether the audience would be large enough t support him on his own, much less a group of musician. The most reliable foreign option in recent years has been to play in Belgium where the Flemish part of the country would give Afrikaans musicians a more convivial home. Kerkorrel has played there a number of times but then he has now become a serious, cabaret style artist and receives support from local and Belgian cultural organisations that might not be forthcoming t a raucous rock band.
If playing in a rock band as career can be a decisive choice then choosing to play Afrikaans rock is an even more decisive choice for you are then really limiting your options and potential market and will have to work twice as hard to break out of those confines, unless you are happy to be a big fish in the small pond of Afrikaner youth culture.
Anton Goosen’s first four albums (Boy Van Die Suburbs, 2de Laan 58, Liedjieboer and Jors Troelie) were arguably the foundations for any kind of Afrikaans rock that followed even if it took twenty years for this genre to mature and to produce a more diverse body of work.
Not that Goosen was particularly a rocker. He came from a song writing tradition and a culture where tune and melody were highly regarded and where tastefulness in musical accompaniment was almost de rigeur with loud guitars and thumping drums seen as rude and crude intrusions. Goosen was the all round entertainer who wanted to appeal to the 6 to 60 Afrikaner demographic that any local Afrikaans musician had to reach if he or she had any ambition to make a decent living out of their music.
As such Goosen wrote quite traditional songs with “story telling” lyrics on various local subjects that would strike a chord in he collective heart of his audience. He first came to prominence as a song writer for Sonja Herholdt with such hits as “Jantjie,” “Tant Mossie Se Sakkie-Sakkie Boeredans” and others; mostly songs about that far-off, romantic Western Cape and the perceived wonders and unique attractions of its people and places. One must remember here that both Goosen and Herholdt were from the Transvaal (as it then was) and to them “the Cape” was at most a remote summer holiday resort and it was quite easy for Goosen to create he usual “fairytale” image for a place that was not all that familiar to his audience either and anyway “The Cape of Storms” had always been more romantic than the northern provinces.
Once he’d proved himself as a song writer with an assured commercial touch Goosen as given his own cording contract and almost from the off he had a major single hit with “Kruidjie-Roer-My-Nie,” an uncompromising “boeremusiek” track that rose to the top of the Springbok Radio Top Twenty and possibly also made it to the Radio 5 chart. It was not really a rock song although the backing was electric and in many ways it was cocking a snook at the local rock industry that was still looking towards foreign influences as the be-all and end-all o hipness. Goosen brought not only an Afrikaans song to the Top Twenty but utilised a type of music that was despised by the hip crowd and derided as the very sign of the backwardness f Afrikaner culture.
The Boy Van Die Suburbs album followed and with it Goosen set the pattern for the next three releases. The songs were a mixture of boeremusiek, pop, rock, country, folk and whatever other musical influences had informed Goosen’s musical education. He recorded his own versions of a couple of Sonja Herholdt hits composed by him, added rock riffs to couple of tracks (although still rocking rather stiffly) and generally tried t make every track sound different from any other as if variety was vital t sustain the listener’s interest or maybe he just wanted to show off hi skills in adapting or parodying various musical styles to produce an album that was not boring.
Goosen followed this pattern on the subsequent releases but at least managed to grow in assurance and sophistication of arrangements so that by the time of Liedjieboer and Jors Troelie he can be regarded as having achieved a proper rock sound. In fact, on Jors Troelie, Goosen was backed by a proper rock band and on he could record talking blues that quite rocked in an AOR kind of way. He even went all avant garde with the adaptation of Breyten Breytenbach poems (adumbrating the Mondmusiek and Om Te Breyten albums of 2001) and using the fretless bass to add exoticism, although he was not above recording yet another “Kruidjie-Roer-My-Nie” style number in what seemed to be a blatant attempt to score another popular hit with the core Afrikaner audience who might have started abandoning him when he left behind the low brow, middle-of-the-road folksy pop songs to become a rocker who wanted to appeal more definitely to the younger rock audience. Goosen became an Afrikaans rock trailblazer but alienated his core adult constituency without attracting a sufficiently large hip young audience to sustain his career.
By 1981 and the release of Jors Troelie Anton Goosen was at the type of career peak that comes just before the rather steep decline. He was successful, well-regarded, critically acclaimed, even found a slot in the “Musiek & Liriek” movement aspired towards a larger and more broadly appealing cultural role and produced a movie called (I believe) “’n Brief Vir Simone” and the Jors Troelie was kind of the soundtrack for the movie but the wheels came off before the movie was released, if it was ever finished, and suddenly Goosen’s career landed in the doldrums where t slumped in a very low key for the better part of the next twenty years. In the late Nineties he made something of a come back with a band called Kommissie van Ondersoek and lately (2001) he’s returned under his own banner with ‘n Vis Innie Bos, by all accounts a full return to vintage Goosen music and the album includes a collaboration with new Afrikaans rockers Beeskraal. Anton Goosen is, after all, in his own way the Father of Afrikaans Rock and it is only fitting that the new young upstarts should pay their respects.
It was not quite a case of handing on the baton but at more or less the same time as Goosen was fading into the background David Kramer suddenly made a spectacular splash on the music scene with his version of Afrikaans music with “Hak Hom Blokkies” and The Royal Hotel mini album of 1981, coinciding with a dramatic and tense Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand.
The Jewish Kramer grew up in the very Afrikaans atmosphere of Worcester and in due course became a standard folk musician who at first aped overseas model but while spending time in Europe came to he realisation that he needed to write about South Africa if he were to be true to his muse. He released his debut Bakgat! In 1980 as a mixture of English and Afrikaans songs, some with sole acoustic guitar accompaniment, some backed by a rudimentary band. Almost from the first the record attracted unfavourable scrutiny from the political authorities and guardians of South African culture and some of the tracks were banned from air play on the SABC stations, for example “Botteltjie Blou” which was deemed to contain blasphemy although it was a very stringent and unsentimental social commentary. The more folksy “Biscuits En Biltong,” an equally wonderful though more light hearted song, did get some airing on the Western Cape regional radio station Radio Good Hope. In general, though, Kramer was still seen as really a South African English folk artist and as such would not have been able to make the career break-out he managed a year later.
“Blokkies Joubert” was actually an English song that resonated in Afrikaner hearts and became a massive hit and the chores of “The Royal Hotel” title track of the subsequent album became a national catch-phrase and suddenly Kramer became the darling of the same Afrikaner audience who had earlier embraced Sonja Herholdt and Anton Goosen. Not only that but Kramer utterly surpassed both of them in commercial success by becoming an icon, the persona “David Kramer” as a distinct show biz entity separate from the private individual.
Also, though Kramer recorded with backing musicians he was not much of a rocker either preferring to remain within the parameters of folk based pop with strong emphasis on entertaining lyrics and memorable tunes that could be radio friendly but were definitely tailored to entertain the middle-of-the-road Afrikaner audience who attended his shows in droves and bought his records and Kramer the performer became a kind of Afrikaner mascot clown, a nice friendly Englishman who had a feel for the kind of song and subject matter that would engage with Afrikaner sensibilities.
The breakthrough was made mostly with humour, though there was also a sprinkling of subtle, socially conscious songs t show that he remained true o his folk-activist rots, and it was only in the late Eighties and from the time that he reverted to English as the main language of his lyrics in album such as Delicious Monster that Kramer addressed the social and political issues he had refrained from touching on in his Afrikaans music. This was deliberate step away from the clownish David Kramer image pandering to Afrikaner tastes and as a result his records sold in fewer numbers and eventually that core Afrikaner audience turned its back on him. In turn Kramer turned his back on the japery and focused on writing and producing the hit “District Six – The Musical” which was more successful than his previous recording career and he has since concentrated on the stage with varying degrees of commercial success. In this way David Kramer truly fond a mass South African mainstream audience whereas Anton Goosen remains within the Afrikaner community, although with more selective appeal, despite efforts to broaden his appeal to include an English language audience.
Even so, Kramer’s ascendancy was complete and in a way he was the first White popular entertainer to achieve true mass popularity in South Africa, becoming a brand name along the way. His trademark costume of loose shirt, wide tie, big jacket , baggy trousers and red “velskoene” became iconic to the extent that he endorsed and marketed the David Kramer brand “rooi velskoene” and in the process was attacked by A peeved Anton Goosen who claimed that he’d been wearing “rooi velskoene” long before David Kramer but obviously had not thought of the marketing opportunities until Kramer started making money from it. Kramer, as “himself,” also became the face, and spokesperson, for the Volkswagen microbus radio and TV advertisements, a first in the South African entertainment industry.
In essence both Goosen and Kramer were pop entertainers in the old storyteller, singer/songwriter tradition and although the music contained elements of rock it was mostly little ore than a flirtation. Both wanted careers in the popular entertainment field in that precluded full-blown rock.
Throughout the Eighties there were plenty of Afrikaans speaking musicians in local rock bands but the lingua franca of rock is English and this was the language they chose to write and sing in. It took yet another English speaker by the name of James Phillips to release an album with mostly Afrikaans rock songs although even this record was in he Anton Goosen tradition of adopting a different musical style for each song. Unlike Goosen, Phillips was not aiming to gain an audience amongst the Afrikaner mass, and he did not. Phillips no doubt counted a number of so-called alternative Afrikaners among his fans but they were not a large enough, or influential enough, grouping to ensure substantial commercial success.
There was a brief fad for bands that otherwise wrote in English to include one or two Afrikaans songs in their repertoire in a kind of anti-hip contrary hip way. These bands were, amongst others, Khaki Monitor, The Kêrels, Teenage Botha & The Blacks, Duck 4 Cover, Artvark (who boasted of having written the first Afrikaans “rap” song) and the Genuines.
Probably the first Afrikaans rocker to nail his colours to the mast was Valiant Swart who started gigging in the Western Cape in 1988. Not only was he a rocker but he took the almost revolutionary step in those days of alternative rock that took great pains not to be good old-fashioned rock’n’roll, to play loud, raucous, tuneful country rock, sounding unlike almost anybody else on the Cape scene at the time. Thirteen years later he is still going, having released a number of albums and most recently a career retrospective, and he is an influence on many local rockers, especially the Stellenbosch bands, and an ubiquitous presence on their recordings sometimes as player, most often as producer.
Valiant Swart was in some ways preceded by Koos Kombuis, the third of the influential Afrikaans singer/songwriters of the Eighties. Koos started his career as all-round alternative Afrikaner icon as the writer Andre Le Roux du Toit who on the one hand wrote funny little short stories for populist mainstream magazine Huisgenoot and on the other hand more serious poetry and literary prose. As Andre le Toit he published a couple of volumes of poetry and two Afrikaans (and one English) novels and was one of the first serious writers to employ the wholesale use of colloquial Afrikaans with its many imported English words, to write as he spoke, that is in a strange way a return to the slogan of the original and first Afrikaans language movement of the late Nineteenth century. Even so, Andre le Toit would have been nothing more than a minor footnote in the history of Afrikaans literature had he not sent Shifty Records a demo tape of himself singing his own compositions and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. Shifty released the demo as the 1987 tape only release, Daar Ver Van Die Ou Kalahari (now available on CD.) The facility with language but lightweight touch that made Le Toit a minor poet was admirably suited to the semi-autobiographical lyrics, and he wrote some intriguing tunes, sang them in an endearingly sweet, amateurish voice and played rudimentary guitar, all the elements that combined to make him the legend he became. Unfortunately it was also a row that quickly became monotonous and he has not really progressed much beyond that demo tape although he eventually recorded with a full band and has had a great deal of commercial success, not bad for someone who came from a truly alternative angle to the then prevailing Afrikaans pop market.
It was on his next Shifty Records release, Niemandsland & Beyond, a proper vinyl LP, that Le Toit changed his nom de stage to Koos Kombuis, according to him it was a sly reference to the old insult to Afrikaans as a “kombuistaal”) and recorded with a rock band including inter alia James Phillips who also backed Koos Kombuis when he toured the country to promote the new release. Koos did not completely abandon sole acoustic performance though and still performs solo on numerous occasions. He has released several CD albums of new material (though he has continuously recycled some of his best loved tunes) and there are currently even two “best of” compilations on competing labels, as well as the live album Blou Kombuis where Kombuis is backed by Albert Frost, a collaboration with Valiant Swart called ‘n Jaar In Die Son and his most recent studio effort, Equilibrium. The music varies from the solo, folky stuff to quite hard edged rock and along the way he has also recorded some English songs. These might be an attempt to reach out to an English rock audience who otherwise might not “get” what he was going on about but unfortunately he does not have the same facility with English as he has with Afrikaans and the lyrics, and performances, are always more stilted and awkward than the Afrikaans songs where he is clearly more at ease. Along the way he has recorded a number of “classics,” among them “Lisa se Klavier” and “Onder In My Whiskeyglas”
The big news in Afrikaans rock at the close of the Eighties and on the cusp of major political changes in South Africa was the Voëlvry Tour of 1989 with Die Gereformeerde Blues Band (GBB), Koos Kombuis en Khaki Monitor. The main mover and shaker behind GBB was one Ralph Rabie who used the stage name Johannes Kerkorrel and who worked as a journalist in Johannesburg where he met Andre le Toit (before he metamorphosed into Koos Kombuis) and the two of them collaborated in a stage show called “Piekniek By Dingaan” one of the first, if not the first, big statements of the then burgeoning alternative Afrikaner movement. It set out to slaughter a bunch of holy cows and entertained a vast number of people along the way, even enticing the hip English speaking crowd and garnering a heap of critical praise. Some of the songs performed by the ensemble eventually found their way onto Koos Kombuis and GBB recordings.
Kerkorrel decided that a smaller band would be a better vehicle to put across his musical vision and formed the GBB as a “real” rock’n’roll band, with Willem Moller, now also an important producer and session player, on guitar, Gary Herselman, previously guitarist of The Kêrels, on bass and Jannie van Tonder, trombonist in various projects, on drums. A veritable Who’s Who of Afrikaans rock musicians.
GBB was (obviously) not a blues band and not quite a true rock band either; it would be more accurate to refer to it as cabaret rock or rock cabaret. Kerkorrel’s musical aspirations were to a somewhat higher cultural plane than mere common or garden rock and he simply devised GBB as a framework and vehicle to put across his musical ideas that actually could easily have fitted into the Musiek & Liriek frame of reference. The rock elements came from the odd Chuck Berry riff and Moller’s blues drenched rock guitar, and titles like “Rock’n’roll Ossewa,” but on the other hand there were leftovers from “Piekniek By Dingaan” such as “Ons Ry ‘n BMW” and “Hillbrow” that bordered on cabaret schmaltz, the latter with weepy, pseudo-Parisian accordion and all.
The Voëlvry tour was preceded by the eponymous Shifty Release, a compilation of Afrikaans songs by acts on the label in an attempt to show that there was in truth a serious alternative Afrikaans rock movement. The whole concept was little more than a flawed hype of the type one would have expected of the large, reactionary record companies anxious to make a buck from a trend and not from a perceived enlighten small independent label. GBB was represented by two tracks and James Phillips’s Bernoldus Niemand track “Snor City” got a place and these slots were deserved because at least the two records represented by these three rocks were predominantly Afrikaans albums, but The Kêrels and Khaki Monitor also each got a track and this is something of a misrepresentation since these are the lone Afrikaans songs recorded by the bands at that time and neither of them can by any stretch of the imagination have been called Afrikaans rock bands except insofar as thy might have had Afrikaans speaking members. The Genuines, a Cape Town based jazz funk rock band was represented by an example of their “ghoema” songs and once again this track was an exception to the basic output of the band. Even less than he other two bands mentioned The Genuines was in no was part of an alternative or otherwise Afrikaans music movement, whether rock or mainstream. With the Voëlvry album Shifty Records tried to present a snapshot of a burgeoning movement but it was a fake, a trumped up and inflated and dishonest picture.
The 1989 “Voëlvry” Tour became something of an alternative Afrikaans crusade aided by the intransigence an stupidity of Afrikaner authorities and the resultant media attention. The tour schedule included concerts on a number of university and college campuses around the country and would serve as a typical promotional tour by GBB to generate interest in its Shifty Records album Eet Kreef. The support acts were Khaki Monitor and a solo Koos Kombuis. Almost immediately the authorities who ran the very conservative Afrikaans universities and colleges banned the concerts from taking place on campus grounds. The media interest was so intense that the tour received the kind of publicity that money cannot buy. The Voëlvry Tour played two gigs in the Cape Town area. The first one was scheduled for Stellenbosch University campus but was banned and was then switched to the Drie Geuwels Hotel just outside Stellenbosch. The second gig was at the Three Arts Theatre in Diep River, Cape Town. Both concerts were well attended and probably he biggest rock events in Cape own that year.
At Drie Geuwels Koos Kombuis played along to a beat box and thereby transformed his somewhat staid, boring guitar accompaniment that had become a liability. At Three Arts he had no beat box and performed a low key, dull, perfunctory set. At both gigs he received a hero’s welcome.
GBB played a slickly programmed set where rock numbers were interspersed with the more cabaret-like tunes in a seamless whole. It was certainly powerful and effective. It was only after seeing the two concerts that one realised that one was watching a tightly rehearsed, scripted show rather than a standard rock gig. Kerkorrel repeated his “ad libs” from performance to performance. Once one came t grips wit this reality, the truth dawned that GBB was not a rock experience at all but simply a theatrical show using elements of rock music to dress up mainstream high culture to appeal to a young audience who would otherwise run a mile from the concept of Afrikaans Cabaret. GBB returned to the Three Arts the following year with the same set, or show and to a smaller audience and they really sounded like a band that was going through the motions for the sake of the money. No further GBB album was released and it was disbanded shortly after to allow Kerkorrel to pursue a solo career in cabaret and the high culture arena, completely abandoning rock music and opting instead for the more broadly defined popular music. Moller owns his own recording studio and is a well-respected producer and session player, Van Tonder kept on playing with all and sundry and is at present a highly regarded Cape Town based jazz musician, and Herselman reconvened The Kêrels in 1994 for a pretty mediocre album (again with only one Afrikaans track on it.)
An interesting contrast is the Houtstok double album of 1990, an Anton Goosen Production, which features acts that appeared at “the first predominantly Afrikaans rock festival” (non-Afrikaans acts on the album are Jennifer Ferguson, No Friends Of Harry and Jack Hammer, Piet Botha’s country rock band before he recorded Afrikaans songs as a solo career move) held in Pretoria that year, no doubt as a fall out of the popular success of the two GBB tours. Goosen’s new aggregation Kommissie van Ondersoek is prominently featured as well as Koos Kombuis (along with Koos and Randy Rambo the only hold-over from the Voëlvry tour), with some mainstream Afrikaans vocalists and the legendary Joos Tonteldoos & The Dwarstrekkers. James Phillips and/or Bernoldus Niemand were absent. Houtstok was repeated maybe once more and was then subsumed in the general rock festival thing in South Africa although Wingerdstok in the Cape came closest to replicating it, although Wingerdstok was about local, Cape town or Stellenbosch based bands, and not purely Afrikaans music. That Houtstok was first and foremost a celebration of the vaunted emergence of Afrikaans rock outside of the mainstream of Afrikaans music is underscored by the feted performance of the re-united remnants of the Briels, a long forgotten but cult Afrikaans country ‘n’western vocal group I the tradition of the American Cater Family, that specialised in heavily sentimental narratives of the tragic lives of the White working class. Their song on the album (“Trein Na Pretoria”) had been spoofed by Anton Goosen (or was it Casper de Vries in the mid-Eighties?) during his performances in Stellenbosch under the Musiek & Liriek umbrella and even Andre le Toit had written parodies on the theme. The Briels were a cult that would have been cringeworthy, and was cringeworthy to a generation of Afrikaans speakers, as examples of the lowest depths to which popular culture can sink, especially working class culture, but as always there will be a hip group who will adopt the previously unacceptable as also hip, i.e. the Briels ran so much counter to standard mainstream Afrikaans culture, the high culture of the Afrikaner establishment, that the so-called new Afrikaners adopted the Briels almost as mascots and the parodies were affectionate rather than approbation. This is not to say that the new Afrikaners would actually have accepted the Briels, or their kind, into their own special lager. It was only the outsider tag that linked the Briels wit Koos Kombuis, not any common understanding. This is underscored by the fact that Kombuis is now part of mainstream Afrikaans culture whereas the Briels never became part of it, not even in their heyday as recording and performing artists.
The other noteworthy aspect of the Houtstok album is the first track, Anton Goosen’s “Wit Kaffers Van Afrika” which represents another spin on the then fashionable New Afrikaner repositioning of themselves as “the first freedom fighters in Africa,” being a reference to the war between the Boer republics and the British Empire and the subsequent Afrikaner fight for political supremacy in their own country. That this struggle culminated in the suppression of the majority of occupants of that same country was never mentioned, for obvious reasons. In any event, New Afrikaners wanted to distance themselves from the old Afrikaner Christian-Nationalist, segregationist policies and worldview and wanted to present themselves as Africans as much as any Black freedom fighters – in fact there as a brief fad for replacing Afrikaner with the supposedly neutral and more inclusive Afrikaan – so that they could embrace hipness and be regarded as hip, as politically correct as any ANC supporting English-speaking White radical “alternative” conscientious objector or feminist. The irony is that these sentiments were expressed by remnants of the old order – Goosen was as much an example of the old Afrikaner, bohemian edition, as any member of the Afrikaner Establishment – who were keen to reposition themselves as a more acceptable face of Afrikanerdom, and were fond of repeating the mantra that Afrikaners should not surrender any of their gains simply because they were made to feel guilty, especially now that liberation was at hand, and the true new generation of Afrikaans-speaking youth had already disassociated themselves from this particular cul de sac and were more intent on redefining themselves as sophisticated, coincidentally Afrikaans-speaking hip citizens of the world and as such were beyond trying to defend the indefensible or to change the facade of an Establishment to which they did not yet belong and from which they were also alienated.
Koos Kombuis went from strength to strength as a recording artist, even releasing a couple of albums on the Stellenbosch based Trippy Grape label run by Dirk Uys. Along the way Kombuis wrote a number of songs in English but to my mind these are not as successful as his Afrikaans songs because Kombuis has an ear for Afrikaans vernacular and the rhythms of he language that he does not have for English. To day he is married, has a child, has published a autobiography, charges large amounts for concerts (ha even played overseas) and is contemplating taking up serious writing again. All in all he has moved from the fringes to the mainstream.
Valiant Swart was the only Afrikaans rocker to emerge from the shadow of GBB and to maintain a presence on the local music scene through the Nineties. He released a number of albums and became a ubiquitous presence as producer, session player and general booster on the Stellenbosch scene. The music varied in quality but was generally interesting and he gains plus-points for sticking to a Country rock sound that was somewhat at odds with the “indie” or “modern rock” ethos of the post-Nirvana Nineties. He was blues and country based without debasing either, had an ear for a hook and obviously valued a tune above simple power chords. His influence can be heard in the music of Akkedis, obvious acolytes, on their debut album, but also on the likes of Billygoat, yet another bunch of Stellenbosch country rockers who sang mostly in English but included two Afrikaans songs on their debut album, one of which was written by Valiant Swart. It is not uncommon to find him name-checked on releases from Cape Town or Stellenbosch based bands.
Stellenbosch was a growth area for rock bands in the mid-Nineties after a long drought. It all started with the Springbok Nude Girls and as a result of their success the trickle down theory dictated, like Liverpool in 1963 or San Francisco in 1967, that there was a sudden interest in the commercial possibilities of bands from Stellenbosch. This resulted in the founding of the Trippy Grape and Afrimusik labels albums from The Led, Billygoat, Drain, White Trash, Garden Variety and others. All of these bands contained Afrikaans speaking musicians and as such are likely to fall in Dirk Uys’s categorisation of Afrikaans rock, although in most cases the songs were in English and at best there would be a couple of 1Afrikaans songs on each album. As far as I know the Springbok Nude Girls recorded only one Afrikaans song (“Pappa, Ek Wil ‘n Popster Word”) that was included on the Wingerd Rock 1 compilation on Trippy Grape but never made it to any full length SNG release on the Epic label, their official home. Billygoat had two Afrikaans tracks on their debut (and so far only) album, one of which was a secret track, and both were collaborations with Valiant Swart. White Trash had a few more Afrikaans tracks and as such their debut (and thus far only) album is more or less bilingual. Wingerd Rock 1 has a mixture of Afrikaans and English tracks and from this compilation one would guess that White Trash only has English songs and that Brolloks en Bittergal is simply an Afrikaans band and that SNG and Koos Kombuis make a habit of writing songs in either language. Therefore this compilation is confusing and disingenuous, if not outright slightly artistically dishonest, in portraying the Stellenbosch and/or Afrikaans rock scene.
Wouter van de Venter is a young Gautenger with pretensions towards being an Afrikaans rocker in a more mainstream rock mould than, say, Valiant Swart, with his psychedelic painted Stratocaster and mixture of lite metal (his Voel Vere album contains at least one Metallica rip-of/parody/homage albeit not as heavy), cod-reggae and folky ballads. According to a press release he intends rocking while he is young and will save the softer pop sounds for when he is more mature, as if this is some sort of game plan for career longevity; get the kids by posing as a rock’n’roller and when you and your audience grow, keep ‘em happy with more polished mainstream balladry. The Voel Vere album is not a bad product and has a number of quite tuneful songs though it doesn’t truly rock very hard – the production has smoothed out the edges too efficiently – and it is a bit overlong. Had Wouter, who writes all his own songs, stuck to the old-fashioned forty minute album limit, the listener would have been intrigued enough to ask for more. As it is, the latter half the album passes by in anonymous fashion. The best tunes are upfront and the interest is not sustained. I guess Wouter’s eventual slot is AOR rock but even in the present cultural climate he could still be seen as an alternative to mainstream Afrikaans music simply because he does not produce glossy pop like, for example, Coleske, two brothers who specialise in light, tuneful pop with plenty of harmonies, but who have chosen to sing in English to make their albums exportable. Apparently they are big in Europe (or certain parts thereof.)
Since the Coleskes are Afrikaans speakers, Dirk Uys would probably like to include them in his list of Afrikaans rock and pop artists and I think they started out singing in Afrikaans before aiming for the more lucrative world-wide market by adopting the universal language of pop. As Afrikaans musicians Coleske would fall squarely within the mainstream tradition of such as Herbie & Spence, also two brothers, who were quite popular in the Seventies, two working class siblings who dressed like country singers and affected a country influenced Afrikaans pop. Where Herbie & Spence were kind of down home, in dress and behaviour they remained true to their working class origins, Coleske quite clearly aims at international sophistication and a great deal of effort and money has gone into their styling and marketing, as befits an “international act.” They seem to have had only one major hit however and lately they’ve regrouped and played it safe, in a manner of speaking, by recording an album of songs made famous by Simon & Garfunkel, an act with whose sound Coleske probably identifies although the brothers do not have Paul Simon’s songwriting talent. They are firmly in the AOR mainstream and are most likely happy to be there if that mans a lucrative recording and performing career. None of this “artistic statement” nonsense if that means obscurity. It took Koos Kombuis a long time to reach the mainstream, or for that matter for his “alternative” audience to grow and to become the mainstream; Coleske were in the mainstream from the start and will never deviate from it. Koos might still be a kind o hip act. Coleske does not care about hip as long as they remain commercial.
Wouter van de Venter also does not want to be a cult figure if that means obscurity and lack of financial reward for his musical labours. In any event it is probably a sign of the maturity of Afrikaans rock as a significant genre that it will now accommodate AOR figures whereas it was previously populated virtually only by cult figures. As I’ve said above, Koos Kombuis’s audience grew up with him and they all became the mainstream. Van de Venter does not make the kind of music, an is not the kind of cultish figure, where an audience will grow with him. He might grab a young audience, if he can have some radio hits as well, and have the standard three to four year window of opportunity but then his core young audience will move on and the younger pop generation then coming onstream will not want to now about him. He could conceivably become an Anton Goosen like elder Afrikaans rock statesman but then he has not yet shown himself to be the same kind of master craftsman as songwriter and likely will never do so.
Goosen was also a mainstream figure from the start. After all, his first claim to fame was as the songwriter for Afrikaans songbird Sonja Herholdt. Even so he wanted to appeal to a young rock audience too, as is shown by the rockier route he followed. His longevity as career musician is based on his superior song-craft. One might shudder at the contrived nature of some of his songs but it is undeniable that he has a way with words and tune and this sets hi apart from a great number of his contemporaries. Goosen writes standards, songs that are independent of his performance of them. Wouter van de Venter has not yet mastered that art. His tunes are not that catchy and the strength of the recorded performance are what makes them work, when they work. Van de Venter, like Valiant swat, might think of themselves as artists rather than the meticulous craftsman Goosen is but it is generally the songs of the craftsman that become standards and stand the test of time.
Piet Botha is a latter day convert to the Afrikaans rock cause. For most of the Eighties and into the Nineties his main gig was as the songwriter and frontman of Jack Hammer, a southern rock styled band, but in 1997, with Jack Hammer dormant, Botha released the ‘n Suitcase Vol Winter album which was a collection of mostly country rock tinged Afrikaans songs touching on various aspects of the Afrikaner experience, from the second Anglo Boer war to the “border war” in Southern Angola which was the defining coming of age ritual of so many young white South African males. The album contains the popular “Goeienag Generaal” (about the “border war”) and even a song written and sung by Koos Kombuis. The debut was followed by Jakob Skopgraaf, a lesser known collection of similar hue. The last solo Afrikaans album to date is Die Mamba where Piet Botha has crafted a moody set of tunes with quite lush arrangements and strong melodies. The usual themes are present and a nice quirky touch is an Afrikaans rewrite of the venerable “House of the Rising Sun”, just about the first song most aspiring South African guitar players from the Sixties and Seventies learnt to play. Mamba is quite possibly Botha’s masterpiece. It was followed in 2004 by a live album where the band performs material from both the Jack Hammer songbook and the solo Afrikaans stuff. Though the album does not have much live atmosphere it is sonically stunning.
Afrikaans rock has not been around long enough for us to see which acts were significant beyond their initial popularity or time. We do not know yet whether Koos Kombuis will always be hailed as a genius or whether his musical career will be yet another footnote to Afrikaans culture, much like his poetry or novels. He is at home with words and it seems that he can write at will but the very prolific nature of his talent makes hi seems like a dilettante who dabbles in everything and can n the surface produce beautiful, interesting results but is of little true substance when analysed carefully.
posted by Neels van Rooyen @ 12:36 AM
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