Chris Roper
When Arno Carstens, the dynamically imperious lead singer of The Springbok Nude Girls, leans into his microphone and tells his adoring fans, “Let’s make this the year we say `Fuck South African music – and enjoy it!'” you know you’re witnessing a sea- change in local music as well as an erotic double entendre.
It’s not just that the Nude Girls, without doubt the most cohesively intelligent South African band since Bright Blue, have a habit of setting trends in local music. And it’s not just that you experience this surge of empathy, and you think “Yes! I’m sick of thinking parochially, I wanna be part of the world!” It’s also that the very structure of the evening makes you wonder if the “so- called” (and we in the Western Cape know exactly how that “so-called” functions to exclude, denigrate and belittle) South African music explosion wasn’t just a metaphor looking for an excuse to turn into a damp squib.
It’s the start of the Nude Girls’ Omnisofa tour, a month of gigging around the country to promote new material. Sharing the bill at the River Club at the tour’s opening gig are Supernature and Lithium, two bands that synecdochically sum up the history and condition of the SAME. We might as well make “South African Music Explosion” an acronym, to signal its simplistic, often unthinking deployment by journalists and industry types. Lithium, at the time a grunge band in the Seattle mould, were the first of the SAME bands to get a major record deal, but not much seemed to materialise from it. You couldn’t avoid harbouring the suspicion that some marketing type at EMI was trying to jump on the American grunge bandwagon in a misguided attempt to make some vicarious cash.
To Lithium’s credit, they’ve transcended this beleaguered beginning. Their Omnisofa set showcases material from their new (self- financed, -released and -distributed) CD, Zennon Supertrooper, as well as several older, more familiar tunes. If the new songs are anything to go by, then the Lithium “sound” is clearly undergoing a process of change. Concentrating less on formulaic song structure leaves the new material pared down, more dense, textured, even more intelligent.
The question beckons: how long will it take for an audience primed on more conventional pop forms (of the SAME) to start hearing this? Supernature are the new Next Big Thing of the music scene. They’ve received offers of recording deals from everyone (even, on that night, a German label), though most have never actually seen them play. Their single Devil has shot to number one on the 5FM charts, largely as a result of constantly being played by Barney Simon. All this on the strength of only six performances and a handful of songs. Oh, as well as some fulsome praise from Cass of Skunk Anansie, who saw them playing at a gig in Somerset West.
All this is not to suggest that Supernature aren’t a highly talented band worthy of accolades. At the River Club, they played to their biggest audience yet. While many in the crowd were clearly only there for the Nude Girls and Lithium, by the end of their short set there were as many who were infected by Supernature’s emotive blend of guitar, drums and bass.
Their appeal lies in the fact that they do not sound like any other South African band out there at the moment. But the feeding frenzy attendant on any sign of unusual talent is too reminiscent of the search for marketable punks in England in the late Seventies. There is no appreciation of the individuality of bands and their sound, and this is perhaps what Carstens is hinting at with his call to fuck South African music.
The Nude Girls are a band that refuse to pander to anyone but themselves. Their new stuff is met by a quiet response from the fans, but it’s not a negative response. They’re willing to stick around and learn to appreciate the new, less poppy songs, because they have faith in the talent of their heroes.
When the Nude Girls do segue into more popular songs like Genie, the entire crowd erupts with dancing relief. It’s a relief tempered by the knowledge that they are being challenged, and it’s the same challenge that the Nude Girls throw down to the music industry. Exploding is all very well, but the really interesting thing happens when you try and piece the fragments together to build something new.