With no fewer than 14 Afrikaans music festivals this year, featuring everyone from Mandoza to Valiant Swart, music is once again the cultural weapon of choice, enjoying respect and acclaim from all who brand themselves proudly South African.
It is singer and songwriter Karen Zoid who most recently re-enforced the adage “Afrikaners is plesierig”, meaning Afrikaners are happy, good-natured people, thereby confirming that, not unlike the majority, Afrikaners are for the most part easy-going people with a passion for life. Taking that maxim further, Theodorus Louis Crous of Springbok Nude Girls fame and Francois Breytenbach Blom, best known for creating some of this country’s memorable metal tunes under the guise of VOD, have started a band oddly called Kobus!. In so doing they have become something of a cultural and musical phenomenon in recent months with the release of their eponymously titled debut album. “It’s great when you create something thinking you’re the only one who understands it and an auditorium filled with people rises to its feet and applauds,” Crous beams.
Having both departed from their respective bands in recent years, the two suburban-saturated sons started writing songs together as a means of passing the time and humouring one another — not, as one might assume, to become near-overnight musical heroes celebrating all that is good about the Afrikaans language.
That’s exactly what happened and Crous and Blom can’t believe their good fortune. “It’s actually incredible how quickly this Kobus! ‘thing’ took off and started selling,” Crous admits. “We had no idea. I mean we didn’t start this thing for that. It was a joke and was never meant to become as popular as it has. For us it was a case of, we really enjoyed Afrikaans music, but there wasn’t anything new out there that we really liked, so we wrote a bunch of songs to entertain ourselves. The next thing we knew we were getting calls from record labels wanting to sign us up, so we signed a deal,” he smiles audaciously.
With an audience growing rapidly through word of mouth, live performances and the occasional track on radio, Crous and Blom put their success down to originality. “It’s music that people haven’t heard before,” Crous explains. “I think [pausing to purchase a packet of sensible Ultra Mild cigarettes] the way in which we’ve constructed it [the music], with a bit of electronica coming through, there is certainly no other band out there that offers the kind of variety Kobus! do. That’s why people like it. I definitely know that Francois is the most entertaining frontman I have had the good fortune of sharing a stage with. Coupled with that, we have the coolest Afrikaans band in the universe, so no wonder people dig us,” he says, breaking into laughter.
Afrikaans is a wonderfully expressive language, offering speakers the opportunity to articulate their mantras more effectively and simply than in many of the remaining 10 official languages of this country. So what would have happened if Kobus! had translated their magic into the universally accepted and understood English? “It wouldn’t have worked,” Crous confirms. “That was part of the challenge for us. Although we didn’t set out to do the album in any particular way, we knew we wanted to offer people a new experience. We knew that people who knew us and our pasts would never have dreamed of us doing an album like this, but we thought, what better way than an Afrikaans album done by the lead singer of VOD and the guitarist from the Nude Girls? The fact that we pulled it off is as much a surprise to people buying our CD as it was to us when we played our first gig and got a positive response.”
The gap between the demise of both the players’ earlier bands and the release of this album was just long enough to allow Crous and Blom to set up their new band the right way. “It’s great that there is absolutely no influence, lyrically or song-wise, that migrated with us from our last bands. All that we brought with us was our charming dispositions and our roots,” he jests.
Democracy has drastically changed the cultural landscape of South Africa over the past eight years and in its wake has left a gaping hole just waiting to be filled by the likes of these two innovators. Afrikaners have been seen as a proud people and what a new dispensation has afforded them and South Africans of all denominations is the opportunity to be seen and heard in a new, non-judgemental and mutually respected way.
What Kobus! have achieved as a band, by not rewriting the history books of a people known best for authoring the rule book on separatism, are to be critically acclaimed as a band who write new, eclectic music in a language proudly their own. “I think what a lot of people in this country need to do right now is reject the old stereotype Afrikaner image and our music is helping rid the country of that mentality that’s been suffocating the Afrikaans market for ages. People still buy an Afrikaans cover version of last month’s biggest Euro-hit and that for me is not art. But thankfully with every one of our songs that is played on the radio, people’s perceptions of what we as Afrikaners are capable of changes, and so do their buying habits and how they see themselves.”
Kobus! have become the unsuspecting yet willing ambassadors of the Afrikaans renaissance in music. “We’re not afraid to try new things,” Crous nods in agreement. “We have created something neither of us and probably the vast majority of South Africans ever thought possible.”
With a follow-up album planned for early next year and a touring schedule that is the envy of many a musician, the future looks bright for these two Stellenbosch misfits in taking their vision from Potchefstroom to Paternoster and beyond, all in the name of good old-fashioned gees.
The album Kobus! is available on CD at selected music stores