Cape Town appears to be the new crucible of white South African rock. Here we take a look at three top Capetonian bands
Janet Smith
The point is that none of them would fit in a beige hotel room where the gold paint is peeling off the fake rococo vases. The mini-bar would be cleaned out by the first love song of evening, as the hooker wigs are tangled and the paint oozes onto the fingers. The Honeymoon Suites belong rather in the backyard of a working-class neighbourhood, barefoot with beer, steel 1970s garden furniture making chequered red pattern weals on their thighs.
“Free your ass and your mind will follow,” says lead vocalist Kevin Parisenne. He’s the frontman of the band, the sort of boy who radiates so much stealthy cool that no mother would let her offspring date him. She’d do it herself.
There are seven of them, and only one girl. When we arrive, she’s sitting, toes pointing inward, on a small, uncomfortable bench. You’d think she was the virgin at the party.
“Hi. I’m Julie.”
Whatever. Where’s that sexy thing in an Afro?
Julie Uranium, a composer-vocalist who also plays percussion and synthesiser, says she can’t wait to wear a purple sequined boob-tube and liquid crystal sandals when the Eighties come back to trample the Seventies daisies. “We already take the tackiest out of all the best periods,” she says, sweet as a sandflower. Lure the flies. Make them sticky. Open and swallow. “We’re focused on the now and the present, so I’ve already thought about my outfit for the next rebirth.”
They do most of the talking, Kevin and Julie. It’s easy to form the impression that, compared to one of the most decadent alleged studs in South African music, she’s kind of paisley, but it’s probably not true. She’s an architect, a jazz graduate, a welder and designer, and her conversation skips at an eclectic pace. Clearly, this is the time of her life, and she’s going to have it dressed as the umbrella rental girl at a beach resort if she can’t have it in a shimmering kimono.
Their music veers wildly in style from goodtime rock to lounge-lizard schmaltz. It is so self-confident and sure of getting laid that it barely tries to make an impression. It’s stream of consciousness. Have another milk stout.
The Cape Town band, the darlings of those allergic to ginger, found an intimate stage at last year’s Karoo Kunstefees, secluded in an old casino behind a butchery or a haberdashery or a hardware store or whatever it was.
The kissing sign, The Honeymoon Suites, was almost too tempting for boys who met girls with lips that made Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers look like blommetjies. But, yes really, it is all about sex.
In her most skintight encounter with public affection, Julie Uranium rolled naked with the six boys in the band on a magazine shoot. Yet it doesn’t matter whether they’re wearing body hair or bridal satin. They run their tongues over exhibitionism like it’s a spine or a shoulder-blade or a nipple. Come in, take a look around, listen to them play.
Budi Cava (bass, guitar, vocals, composer) says “it’s not a hell of whole lot more difficult to play anything once you’ve mastered Three Blind Mice. Writing songs is stress relief, it’s so hard to control. It’s like there’s a backlog.” He thinks he must have been deprived as a child.
Julie Uranium is giggling. She says their name was bequeathed to them by Roger Young, Cape film-maker. Then they forgot to invite him to their launch party. It’s a crying shame.
Kevin says The Honeymoon Suites feel a responsibility, if not to their mentors, to the general public: “They must come to us, and dig us for fucking who we are.”
Douglas Armstrong, or is it Drugless Armstrong, calls on the healing power of live music over pre-recorded. Sometimes, he says, he’s terrified someone will spill a drink on the record player. “We walk the line of seriously fucking up,” he says. “Dangerous.”
You could rub up against the fake pink fur on their drumkit and get frighteningly turned on by the fluffiness, blinded by the lame and confused by the satanic drug thing that seems to be happening all over Kevin’s body in black whirligigs of tattoos. It helps to remember that their musical DNA is wound up with the Backdoor Initiative – one of the country’s essential good-time culture collectives – when you feel like getting sober.
They’re so serious about what they’re doing that they’ve gone mad with the idea of taking over the world.
There are stories about how they all met. Someone wore a smurfskin jacket. There was a blacksmiths’ convention. A health shop. A pair of gold boots. A skateboarder. Better still, listen to the music and make it all up for yourself. It feels like a tart sticking her tongue into your ear after three tequilas and a slice of pineapple pizza. You don’t want to do it. It’s late. There’s going to be traffic in the morning and a hangover. Suddenly it starts to tickle a little too good, and soon you’re moving in for more.
Kevin says their songs are too positive to be anything like anybody else’s. He calls them relevant prophesies. Eddie Boyd, so proud of his virtual horn, smooches with the idea of Hebrew rock’n’roll avant-garde jazz. It’s like the sound of 27 garage bands, he says, with 18 one-hit wonders between them – and then some. Who knows what it all means.
So now The Honeymoon Suites are on a national tour and they’ve released their Greatest Hits EP. If you’re feeling low, you can rip off the complementary strip of synthetic blonde hair and stick it to your forehead with syrup and look at yourself in the mirror and remember how beautiful you were before you had your last birthday.