Alex Sudheim
SIX years ago Nadine Raal was crooning for her supper in smoky jazz clubs on Durban’s Point Road, serenading inebriated audiences with Blue Moon and Old Man River. “But,” sing Pavement, masters of slanted and subverted country music, “you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent.”
Presumably Raal doesn’t have too many problems paying the rent these days; her band, Famous Curtain Trick, have a recording contract with a major label (EMI) and have just released their eponymous debut album, accompanied by a lush, sexy video with “made- for-MTV” written all over it.
The music is assured and mature, like a long sultry drawl on the lips of a sunburned dust farmer. With their moody slide guitars, swaggering drums and Raal’s seductive voice, Famous Curtain Trick’s songs are the soundtrack to a Hollywood road movie, evoking empty desert highways, ghost towns, burning fields of sugar cane.
They share with Canada’s Cowboy Junkies an understanding of heartache and regret, of leaving your lover and hitting the road or waking up to find your lover has left you and hit the road.
They explore life’s sweet misery blues, capturing the grand atmospherics of America’s Deep South and transposing them on to a South African lanscape. Instead of seas of windblown wheat in Tennessee, it’s fields of sugarcane blowing in Natal’s humid breeze; instead of a roadside diner in Alabama, it’s a rundown farm in the Karoo.
Live, the band are powerful and tight, rawer and more intense than the slick production on the album suggests. Raal was born to slink about on stage like a panther, and the other band members clearly share her passion. Their lyrical C&W sound becomes infused with guitarist Michael Whitehead’s Pixies-like sensibility for skewed melodies: Slow Car Chase is a swirling mass of controlled chaos, the wall of overdriven, distorted guitar reminiscent of REM’s sublime Country Feedback. Warren Peddie provides highly original drum rhythms, accompanied by thick, ropy bass from Garth Johnstone, also a prime contender for smouldering sex god status.
Aside from the music, a major factor contributing to the band’s success has been the commitment of EMI South Africa, who have orchestrated an impressive campaign to sell the band to the public. The label spared no expense in the production of the album, which was mastered at London’s Abbey Road Studios by Chris Blair, also responsible for the records of Blur, Oasis and Radiohead. The album is being distributed to CNA and Game, ensuring widespread attention. All this adds up to a product that is indistinguishable from overseas albums in terms of slickness, sound quality, artwork and publicity.
The growing understanding within record companies that original South African bands can achieve mainstream success bodes well for all those talented and overlooked rock stars out there, but, as Raal says, “it’s ultimately up to what you do for yourself.”
Famous Curtain Trick will play on second stage at the 5fm birthday concert on October 26