A Johannesburg record company is rereleasing the great alternative local albums of the 1980s — on CD. Shaun de Waal reports
THE courageous cottage industry that was Shifty Records in the 1980s produced almost all the seminal “alternative” music of the time — from Bernoldus Niemand to Jennifer Ferguson, Mzwakhe Mbuli to the Gereformeerde Blues Band. Now that music is making a reappearance in the 1990s, thanks to a Johannesburg record company called Tic … Tic … Bang!, which is releasing CDs to replace the scarred vinyl of those records’ original incarnations — and hopefully introduce them to a new audience.
The first rerelease is Koos Kombuis’ superb album, Niemandsland, now retitled Niemandsland and Beyond. The “beyond” refers to a couple of extra tracks that have been added to the CD version.
The LP first appeared in 1988, as did Koos Kombuis, who up until that moment had been known as Andre Letoit, one of the original “alternative Afrikaners”. The rather erratic poet and novelist had branched out into troubadour-style singing and guitar-playing, if one can call it that: Shifty had already released the cassette Ver van die Ou Kalahari, his often hilarious attack on Calvinist mores and stultifying cultural attitudes. What he lacked in musical virtuosity he made up for in his lyrics, often based on the classics of Afrikaans poetry, deconstructed and reconstructed for an angst- filled era.
Niemandsland was the product of a marriage made in heaven, bringing together Letoit’s verbal talents with the musical expertise of Bernoldus Niemand (who did the excellent arrangements, besides playing acoustic guitar and piano and helping out on backing vocals), plus Johannes Kerkorrel, Willem Moller and Ian Herman. The result is a great album, on which everything works together for maximum effect.
To take just the first song, Paranoia, as an example: Letoit-Kombuis’ blackly comic lyrics about family murder and suburban zombiehood are laid over a ticklishly attractive mbaqanga-inflected melody that makes you want to boogie even as you chuckle nastily about the madness of white South Africa. (It also contains the immortal line, “Ek is `n doos/van Belville-Oos.”) The extra tracks are not entirely successful, though. Baskitaar, which now closes the album, is from the same sessions, and while not quite as strong as the other material, fits in reasonably seamlessly. The other addition, Autobank Vastrap, is Letoit’s take-off of the novelty hit Da Da Da. While amusing, it is hardly of the standard of the rest of Niemandsland and it breaks the mood right in the middle of the record.
Still, Niemandsland is a brilliant album, one that triumphantly forges a local idiom from American popular music and, in the process, teaches Afrikaans to dance. The anger and contempt of the Emergency years may now have dissipated, but the songs remain classics that have outlived the time that spawned them.
The other Shifty release now on CD courtesy of Tic … Tic … Bang! is Jennifer Ferguson’s second album, Hand Around the Heart, which originally appeared in 1986. This album also contains extra tracks, the best of which is Bay of Bombay, one of the most haunting songs any South African ever wrote. Lifted from her first album, it appears in both live and studio versions. The latter, along with a new take on Suburban Hum, was recorded in 1994.
Ferguson may have attracted some disapproval at the time for the air of preciousness that hung over her often stagey performances, but this rerelease reminds us of her immense strengths as a songwriter. The faux- platteland accents of Letters to Dickie — a Boetie-on- the-border tragedy — could have seemed condescending but works brilliantly, making of itself a time-capsule narrative from a period thankfully over but worth recalling.
The unfettered emotional force of Ferguson’s work can cause chills to run up and down the spine, and her rolling Dollarish piano complements her voice — veering from ethereal to earthy in a phrase — perfectly. Further releases to come from Tic … Tic … Bang! include the Sankomota album that was one of Shifty’s earliest recordings and the absolutely essential Wie is Bernoldus Niemand? It may or may not get a new title, though I hope not: that has to be one of the most important semi-rhetorical questions asked in the dark years of apartheid’s last decade. And it remains partly unanswerable — Niemand, the sharp-eyed observer and seriously tongue- in-cheek poet of a very weird society, is no one and everyone.
SPORT