Would this year’s Bandslam follow the triumphs of last year? MALU VAN LEEUWEN was at the River Club concert
APOLOGISTS for the so-called South African Music Explosion are probably going to hate me for this, but it’s so corny it’s worthy of a Leon Shuster gag – except the man has more taste than to stage a bomb scare at a Soundzone Bandslam. “SA Music Explosion Explodes!”
I could see the headline as a friend forcibly escorted me from Cape Town’s River Club building by the scruff of my fake fur collar. Slightly more glamorous was Just Jinger’s exit as they stopped mid- performance to instruct the audience to vacate the premises in a calm, orderly manner.
Once the mild panic subsided, all that remained was the cruel irony: after weeks of speculation about the launch of the new Bandslam – would it match up to last year’s rockfest? – Gauteng’s Just Jinger had managed to ignite an otherwise bemused crowd into showing some loud, appreciative enthusiasm for local music.
They were headlining and they were the only band that notoriously hard-to-please Capetonians had not been exposed to live. It was a calculated risk on the part of Soundzone, Bandslam’s organisers, to feature unknowns whose only claim to fame was a single receiving airplay.
Nobody knows who the nutter was who phoned in with the threat or why, but he or she is unofficially assumed to have come from the group who threw golf balls against cars, presumably disgruntled after a scuffle with security guards.
Whatever the case, it’s unnecessary bad publicity – the kind that South African music can definitely do without – and I hope they remember this the next time they decide to dent a few cars and play the fool with the public’s lives.
As for the speculation, it was always going to be a hard act to follow 1996’s national roadshow featuring names like Squeal, Lithium, Sugardrive, Nine and the Springbok Nude Girls. It was an established cast and, although vulnerable to the kind of criticism that trades on the white male rock clich (was coloured band Nine a token act?), it was a deserved success.
Judging from the response of the 1 200- strong crowd last Saturday night, success can’t always be measured by how much the front rows scream and go mal. Rather, it’s how much people talk about the event afterwards, how impatiently they anticipate the confirmed line-up for the national tour later in the year.
There’s a lot to talk about. Guided by their belief that current music trends and tastes are towards lighter, more diverse acts with a feel for entertaining, Soundzone chose Sons of Trout from Cape Town (oddly, with belly-dancers in tow), Famous Curtain Trick from Durban, Dorp from Stellenbosch and Just Jinger.
Sons of Trout are relatively new and their vibrant Waterboys-cum-Streaks-inflected electric folk-pop is distinctly Obs in flavour. They’re good to the point where it’s tempting to call them the new, less intense Urban Creep.Unfortunately, that early Creeps sound has since dated and paled in popularity. Yet theirs is a sound that’s been around in one way or another for as long as I can remember. On the other hand, how it will translate into national appeal is anybody’s guess.
The next band up, Famous Curtain Trick, is something of a conundrum and they’ve been castigated to Bellville and back for importing bluesy country and western that would be more at home in Kentucky than Kaapstad. Meanwhile, the same critics forget that the South African rock sound owes more to Seattle grunge than it does to any “homegrown” genre.
The music, however, is not FCT’s problem: the real problem is their performance, or lack of it.
Nadine Raal is a born lead singer with a voice that’s simultaneously honey and gravel. If only she’d get her band to lose the miserabilism and interact more with her and the audience. For instance, when Raal leaves her guitar on Cheap Perfume to prowl the stage, the connection is instant and spontaneous; with her guitar slung back on again, it as if they’re all going through the motions.
When it comes to performance, Dorp have got it waxed. At the risk of repeating myself – and further pissing off the apologists – Dorp are South Africa’s answer to The Spin Doctors. (Phew, said it.) But let me explain: they’re wacky, way-out, jazzy, rocky, funky – and all this came packaged in a safari suit that bounced around the stage in an unstoppable mini-orgy of energy. When the safari suit whipped out his cellphone to have a conversation with the saxophonist, the crowd all but demanded autographs right there and then.
While it’s nothing like using the telephone as a weapon as per Bono’s Zooropa conversations with God/ Alessandra Mussolini/fill in the missing name, it’s an entertainment spectacle – and undoubtedly what Soundzone is looking for. Bingo.
Finally: Just Jinger. After an impressively noisy start they dipped into the radio single (the love ballad that aches “I’m going to stand/ stand in your way …”), at which point I wondered out loud to a friend whether Bryan Adams was in the house, and if so, is this what I’d given up an academic career for. No, came the smart reply, this is what a truncated academic career trained me for. The bastard’s right, of course: no thesis could explain how Just Jinger pulled off it off and seduced Capetonians.
Now the speculation is on who will be in the final Bandslam line-up and while this one fared well it is going to need that je ne sais quoi – like the throbbing gutsiness of Battery Nine’s body music – to really send it to Mars.
— Malu van Leeuwen is the music editor of Student Life magazine