WIE IS BERNOLDUS NIEMAND?

(Shifty Records, 1986)

This record was a semi-legendary release way back in the mid-Eighties mostly because it was not all that readily available in the Cape Town record bars and even the Shifty Records table at the Greenmarket Square flea market never seemed to have a copy. Maybe it sold out too quickly to the cognoscenti who were wise to the hip legend of Jams Phillips, Corporal Punishment and the Cherry Faced Lurchers. As it is, I never laid hands on the LP and could listen to the whole album for the first time only once I bought the CD re-issue. Some selections from it, particularly “Reggae Vibes Is Cool,” were a staple of the compilation tapes played between sets at alternative gigs in Cape Town and “Snor City” made it to the 1989 Voëlvry compilation of so-called alternative Afrikaans music.

Seeing as how I lived in Cape Town and the Cherry Faced Lurchers were based in Johannesburg the James Phillips mystique meant nothing to me. He was a name that frequently cropped up in Vula magazine, a Cape Town based quarterly in the image of The Face magazine, as one of the most hip movers and shakers of the Johannesburg alternative rock scene and part of the Shifty Records crowd, the flag bearers for local music, Black and White, out of the “approved” mainstream. I for one would not have been surprised had his publicity referred to him as The Godfather Of The Alternative Scene.

My first experience of the James Phillips oeuvre and sound came with the purchase of the Corporal Punishment/Illegal Gathering tape The Voice Of Nooit at the aforementioned Shifty stall (on the strength of a Vula magazine advertisement) and I must say that I was tremendously disappointed. Neither of the two aggregations rocked all that much and the songwriting was pedestrian at best; although there was an attempt to write about local issues and not to slavishly imitate overseas punk or new wave trends, there was a severe paucity of tunes. In fact, only “Johnny’s Conscience” and an acoustic version of “Hou My Vas, Korporaal” are worthwhile. Phillips thought up some brilliant song titles but could not back up the promise with songs that had any meat to them.

A year or so later I bought the LP Live At Jameson’s by The Cherry Faced Lurchers, the vehicle Phillips was employing in his quest for rock’n’roll stardom in South Africa, particularly the Johannesburg watering hole where the tracks on the album were recorded. If the Weekly Mail & Guardian is to be believed, the Cherry Faced Lurchers played a legendary residency at Jameson’s. This might be but on the evidence of the album the Lurchers were a pretty piss poor live experience. The band didn’t rock and there was still a dire absence of tunes. Phillips appeared to have had a great rapport with his audience but then it is likely that they were too drunk to care whether the music was any good. If Phillips was the only game in town, what was there to compare with? Live at Jameson’s must rank as one of the most disappointing, weak live albums of all time.

Just to emphasise the unrelenting mediocrity of the live album, Wie Is Bernoldus Niemand? released just before the live album and recorded in the same year, is light years away in terms of songwriting and performance, as if Phillips didn’t really care what he sounded like with the Lurchers, only a vehicle for performing to drunken journalists, whereas Bernoldus Niemand was a serious project for which he saved his best songs. When Phillips wanted to be serious and to make serious comments on South Africa he was just boring but when he adopted a parodic “secret” persona and had a little fun with his music, he was inspired to write actual tunes.

Where the Lurchers was a guitar/bass/drums trio, the Bernoldus Niemand band had a larger line-up, including keyboards, of studio musicians to provide a fuller and more versatile backing. The Lurchers sounded like under-rehearsed amateurs; on Bernoldus Niemand the musicians, including Phillips, played like seasoned professionals to produce something close to a proper pop record. The lyrics are sharp and funny and, most importantly, Phillips discovered that melody, the tune that provides the pop hook that makes a song memorable, was a very meaningful part of the songwriting process. A songwriter who cannot write catchy, hummable, unforgettable melodies will never write a standard.

The unique selling proposition that truly helped make Bernoldus Niemand a landmark in South African rock was that Phillips chose to write mostly Afrikaans lyrics (only three songs on the album are in English) to tell his tale of a particular place and time in South African cultural and political history. Afrikaans had been officially “the language of the oppressor” since 1976 and had always been the language of the unhip and reactionary political and cultural hegemony that conspired to run the country for the benefit of an Afrikaner, and generally, White elite. By and large no self respecting non-Afrikaans speaking alternative artist would be caught dead working in or with the Afrikaans language and Phillips probably thought that it would make a good ultra-hip statement to parody his subject matter in such a pariah language.

In any event, there was a smattering of people in the English speaking alternative world who were starting to make use of Afrikaans in a manner calculated to wrest it away from the hegemony and to point out that it was not necessarily in or of itself oppressive; the stench that clung to it was not of the language’s own making but was almost forced on it by elitist Afrikaner agendas. It was then not uncommon for bands who otherwise wrote and performed only English songs to include at least one Afrikaans song in their repertoire – bands such as Khaki Monitor and The Kêrels for example – and Phillips took this process one step further.

Anyway, if one were to accurately portray the milieu on which Phillips was focusing then bilingualism was almost mandatory since the working people on the Reef came from both language groups and the patois of the White working class was a mixture of English and Afrikaans. The use of Afrikaans could not have been a ploy to ensure radio play on the SABC’s Afrikaans Service (as it then was), which otherwise was almost a prerogative of any Afrikaans music, because not even the most wildly and unrealistically optimistic person in the Phillips and Shifty Records camp could have believed that a record with the content of Bernoldus Niemand would find favour with the SABC programmers for whom musical or artistic quality were hardly ever the overriding factors in okaying any pop music for broadcasting. The SABC operated a well-known system of “banning” LP cuts, or indeed whole albums, that were regarded to be unsuitable for a variety of reasons, mostly because the offending music was deemed to give offence to one or more sections of the population whether on political or religious or cultural grounds. I doubt that any track off Bernoldus Niemand ever got any SABC air play before 1994 – maybe there could have be an odd Chris Prior sneak play or a Barney Simon guerrilla play, but not much more than that. This lack of airplay was at once the commercial death of a record and its saving grace as an alternative legend. The legend of James Phillips or Bernoldus Niemand would not have been the same had the record been a commercial hit with a catchy pop track like “Die Boksburg Bommer” receiving the saturation air play and hit status on the Radio Top Twenty it deserved.

Wie Is Bernoldus Niemand? was released as a two sided vinyl LP and was programmed as such. The sequence has been adhered to for the CD release and although the framing is no longer the same due to the CD’s continuous play without the need to turn over the platter to provide a natural break, one can still discuss the album as a record of two halves, particularly because I see a unity of concept in ending Side One with the mock-funk of “Snor City” and Side Two with the pseudo-Reggae of “Reggae Vibes Is Cool.” The rest of the songs are essentially country based, more or less the favourite music of the White working class on the Reef, but to my mind the aforementioned two songs represent a sardonic reference to the hipness then prevalent which rejected such twee, old-fashioned music as country and adopted Black music as the new Big Thing although not exactly for the right reasons.

The album’s opening track is a country’n’western remake of “Hou My Vas, Korporaal” that ends in some silly vocal japes, an overlaid sound collage of the “typical” interaction between an instructor corporal and a “troep” replete with marijuana references (“Bring vir my daai boom. Ek wil dit rook.”) and then plays out on a mock heavy metal coda which actually gives one an idea of how yet another version of the song could have been recorded in a truly rock style and it is almost a pity that we do not hear that version too.

Phillips (and cohorts) obviously liked the potential of goonish audio humour on tape as is already evident from a couple of skits on the Voice Of Nooit tape and on “East Rand Blues,” the opening track of the LP’s second side, there is more sound collage as the background to the spoken word narrative of a lonely “joller” in search of good times, first in the Riebeeck Hotel in Springs and then in a similar establishment in Nigel. This tale is a parable of the grass being greener on the other side until you get there and the narrator realises that in both towns “daar is drasties te min bokkies en geen kwessie van die zol” and this is probably the paradigm of white male working class ennui in the Reef area of South Africa in the early Eighties. “East Rand Blues” is not truly a blues in the classic Mississippi Delta sense but is rather simply a countrified lament for the absence of life’s simpler pleasures.

In a sense this album is a concept album, a comment on the life of the white working class male on the East Rand in the South Africa of apartheid and National Service. Straight after school Bernoldus reported for duty for his initial period of National Service and on completion of that not quite wonderful year in his life, he became the proud owner of a Ford Escort XR3, the dream car of a certain class of white male way back in the Eighties. It is no doubt this particular car that is the “gasoline scented boudoir” of the second track on the album, ”Welcome To My Car,” where Bernoldus waxes all sensual and mysterious, with a suitably scuzzy jazzy musical backdrop, when he invites his “cherry” to admire the velvet interior trim of his loverman limousine.

The “stukkie” of his choice is “Marie Ferrari,” the title character of track three and her aspirations are reflected in her surname; no mere Ford Escort for her and her disdain for Bernoldus is more than likely the inspiration for “East Rand Blues,” “My Broken Heart” and “Visse,” the three songs that round out the tragi-comic tale of Bernoldus’s failure to achieve true romance.

“Die Boksburg Bommer” is the closest to a standard pop track on the album, an exuberant celebration of the local hero, Gerrie Coetzee who was once briefly Heavy Weight Boxing Champion of the World in the Bob Arum stable. He came from Boksburg and qualified himself as a dental technician before he turned professional and as such must be an archetypal success story for a white working class South African male and a shining example to many young boys. Alas, Gerrie lost the heavy weight crown in his first title defence. Anyhow, the song is a delight, with a really fabulous hook and is radio friendly in the extreme. On the face of it, the song celebrates the Boksburg Bommer but it is obviously heavily ironic and the powers-that-be at the SABC might have been clever enough to pick up on the irony and would not have been prepared to give national radio exposure to a song that mocked a national source of inspiration and pride.

The last song on Side One of the LP is “Snor City,” a dig at the typical male in Pretoria, then the administrative capital of Apartheid era South Africa with a Civil Service over-supplied with men who considered a bit of fluff on the upper lip to be the ultimate sign of manhood, and the presence or absence of a moustache was likely to be one of the factors that decided whether one was cool and hip or not; Bernoldus did not have a moustache. The music is Eighties white funk lite and the lyrics mostly spoofs the topic. “Snor City” and “Hou My Vas, Korporaal” are the two most direct social and political comments on the album, the first on the political system, the latter a scathing commentary in humorous form against the Afrikaner hegemony that was running the country and I guess that was the reason for he inclusion of “Snor City” on the Voëlvry album which was as much a celebration of the new “alternative” Afrikaner as an attack on the old, reactionary one.

Side Two opens with “East Rand Blues” which is followed by the morning-after acoustic, country lamentation of “My Broken Heart" wherein Bernoldus bemoans the fact that Marie Ferrari dropped him although he is still prepared to love her “for eternally.” Bernoldus might be down but he won’t be out for long and soon he is singing “Visse”, yet another country song with good pop hooks where he takes advice from his mother and resolves to face the future with renewed energy and optimism when he realises that there are many fish in the sea.

This song is followed by “Tribute To Jody” and my guess is that this is a reference to Jody Wayne, one of the local kings of tear jerking country songs who had a big hit with “Patches” and Bernoldus really lays it on thick. Apparently the defining music of the white working class of the Reef area was not jazz or rock or blues or any kind of hip music but plain and simple country music especially the grossly sentimental variety with words, music and passions that were so simple, direct and obvious that it took an audience no time at all to take the song to its collective, slightly drunk maudlin’ heart and to sing along to the choruses while swaying with your “cherry” or your boyfriend close by your side.

The final rack is “Reggae Vibes Is Cool” and represents the music and hip aspirations of the alternative generation who no longer thought country was anything but an anachronism. Of course, all reggae is Rasta reggae and must be sung in an approximation of the Jamaican accent and dialect. One of the funnier aspects of he song is the reversal of the usual Jamaican and Rastafarian longing for African roots. Bernoldus sings for his longing for Jamaica – where reggae music is the soundtrack and ganja smoke the aroma. The meeting ground for the white working class male and the rootsy Rastaman is their common liking for he weed and maybe Bernoldus truly also feel more spiritual when he gets totally trashed on good, strong Durban poison. And it will help him forget his woes, his life under an oppressive system and his chick troubles.

Wie Is Bernoldus Niemand? was a milestone in South African music, both on the general alternative scene and as the first proper Afrikaans rock album outside the mainstream. It told the tale of an Everyman white guy – with a surname such as Niemand he had to be the ultimate anonymous cog in the machine who somehow thought he was cool because he wore mirror aviator shades – in a cultural/social milieu that had been ignored by mainstream musicians, told it wittily, humorously and tunefully and showed that Afrikaans could express thoughts and notions other than those sanctioned by the cultural gatekeepers of the Afrikaner institutions and language movements. The typical Afrikaans musician of the day either aspired to ultra-sophisticated higher culture or depicted the Afrikaner as still essentially rural or small town and not terribly sophisticated in a worldly sense but still full of the values of the soil. In this view Afrikaners were either farmers or solid middle class citizens. The Afrikaner working class was ignored or seen as something of an historical curiosity, not as the still vital and substantial part of the South African social fabric that they were.

If one looks at it as just another part in the jigsaw puzzle of James Phillips’ recording career then, to my mind, Wie Is Bernoldus Niemand? is the jewel in the otherwise rather tatty crown. In this one package Phillips managed to combine witty lyrics, solid tunes and able musicianship to produce an almost old-fashioned all-round pop platter of two sides and it seems that he needed the impetus of a fictional character and situation to be able to do this whereas he could not manage it when he was writing his more earnest songs, such as the ones on Live At Jameson’s or the later Sunny Skies. The former is musically shoddy in virtually all respects, the latter is a well-played product that wants to make momentous comments about the South Africa of 1994 but that has no memorable tunes and is ultimately the kind of tedious record where the selling point is the artist’s well-meaning intentions and not an actual pleasurable listening experience. With Bernoldus Niemand James Phillips found a lightness of touch and a sustained creativity that he never equalled again.