Alexander Sudheim
EVEN though the city council won’t let them put their posters on the walls anymore and the record companies don’t sign them, Durban bands continue to thrive in numbers and in quality. For a city with pitifully few live music venues and audiences that would fill a small rowing boat, the alternative music scene plays a significant role in the town’s cultural life.
The absence of obvious commercial motives for musicians underscores the music’s original spirit – bands form for the simple reason that they’re driven to be heard – whether it be in a stadium or a beer-soaked hovel doesn’t matter.
Enter Pedro Carlo, promotions manager of Teal, Polygram’s local record label. Just about every Durban band’s demo ends up on his desk at some stage, and many turn out to be quite impressive. But recording contracts aren’t thrown about like confetti, especially not in this country, so everyone was going home empty-handed. Carlo felt that all this talent and potential was going to waste by not being recorded, so he mooted the idea of a compilation album of unsigned Durban bands to Polygram.
The result is the recently released C-Weed, a remarkable collection of original independent rock music. A massive 58 entries for the album were received from local bands, an amount eventually whittled down to around 18 bands who recorded one song each at Neil Snyman’s Durban Beach Studios. Squeal’s David Birch was called in as the album’s producer, and the sonic quality of the CD is testament to his talent behind the desk.
Despite the presence of several rather dodgy numbers, the album manages to display a profound array of musical styles, reflecting the depth and maturity of local rock music. Highlights are post-grunge pioneers Breathe, Soundgarden-inspired Tongaat band Anarchy, ironic be-boppers Khaki Tango, the mellifluous Caffeine Substitiute and other as-yet-unknown purveyors of original rock music.
Though C-Weed is not uniformly brilliant, it does rank as a triumph that a “small town” like Durban is capable of producing enough alternative music of real calibre to fill the 70 minutes of CD-space.