Chris Roper
`They’re good enough to make it internationally”. Yeah, right. How many times have you heard that ill-fated mantra pronounced over local bands? And nothing ever happens, especially if you’re situated in that genre known disparagingly as whiteboy rock, but which includes a couple of women and the odd black person.
The reasons for the continued lack of success are many, including that odd belief that mimetic reproductions of current European or American bands have any chance against the originals themselves. We don’t have to bemoan missed chances and failed attempts right now, though. Trans Sky are going international, and the spatial movement articulated in their name has become actualised in a three album deal with Britain’s MELT 2000.
This prestigious record label has been one of the major sponsors of the Montreux jazz festivals, and included on their roster are Amampondo, Busi Mhlongu and Pops Mohammed. This is a welcome development in rock circles, as it shows that the current darlings of the local media are not necessarily the inevitable role models for the way we should define South African rock.
Brendan Jury, one half of Trans Sky (the other is the whimsically gifted Warrick Sony), agrees. “This country is so in love with guitar-based music. I hope we don’t get to be like the Pacific Rim markets, saturated with the equivalent of Michael learns to Rock, bands like Just Jinger. A group like Springbok Nude Girls is just so musically superior, it’s sad we have this complete love of guitar music only. Although raves get massive crowds, what rankles is you can’t connect the two camps. There’s lots of rock in Trans Sky, and also a lot of dance or house. But we’re a band, there’s nothing clinical about what we do.’
Trans Sky have just finished recording their debut international album in the Shifty Studios in Cape Town with highly- rated producers Greg Hunter (who co- composed) and Chris Wesson, who form two- thirds of Britain’s The Orb. Jury says they are among the best in the world, with Hunter’s fat CV including engineering credits on Crowded House’s last album, and recent remixes for Bowie and Tom Jones.
“Working with the Orb guys blew our minds in terms of methodology and what you can do with sound. It has such a huge emotional impact, being in working mode for 16 hours a day for a month. They brought it back to us how important it is to be a real musician, to be able to play instruments and at the same time have control of cyber- reality and computers. At times I was looking over Greg’s shoulder and I had no idea what he was doing.”
This album is due for worldwide release in December, and Trans Sky will be doing the final mixing on a farm in Surrey. There’s no album name as yet, but Hunter describes it as hypno-tantric, and Jury as Chemical Brothers meets Africa. “It’s got potentially big pop tunes, and lots of electric guitars. There are some really beautiful songs like Michelangelo Dreaming, which is a lush drum’n’bass ballad done in electro-pop style. It’s the way Madonna would like to sound.”
Trans Sky are also releasing a local album on August 5. It’s called Killing Time, was recorded over a two-year period and features many of the tracks that Trans Sky have been peddling live. Jury unashamedly touts it. “I must be honest, I find its production breathtaking. It’s dramatic and thoughtful, and ranges from beauty to rage. The title track is the first song I’ve ever sworn in, and it’s a protest song about existing in the corporate world with people who have no real aesthetic grasp.”
The corporate world is a regular environment for Trans Sky. In recent months the “flexible little music collective” has produced sound for a horror movie, a documentary on JM Coetzee, the Kentridge play Ubu and the Truth Commission – and a Sprite advert. They’ve also just finished sound for a CNN documentary about the Himba people in Namibia and the threat posed to their ancestral grave sites and nomadic way of life by the imminent building of a hydro-electric project.
“We also explored their music. Their vocal music is extraordinarily beautiful, sounding like a collision between Eastern melody and African music. We rehearsed on the banks of the Kunene River at night and got footage of tribesmen dancing to our music. They played with us, and we improvised around our songs and their music, establishing a relationship that informed our compositions.”
Such anthropological endeavour seems strangely inapposite for a pop star and general sex-symbol-about-town. Hey, who wants your fetish objects to think as well: that’s so unattractive. I ask Jury what it’s like to be forever labelled a pop star. “I’ve always felt like a pop star. I’ve desired it forever; since I was five years old. I’ve always lived as one, in the sense of imagining that that was my job. It’s a simple thing, people need and want pop stars. I love pop stars. I don’t know why it’s such a scandal, it’s like saying if you’re a writer, you shouldn’t be contemplative. If you’re on a stage singing big beat music, you’d be a liar if you weren’t doing it for yourself as well.”
This synthesis between thought and expression is rare in the rock world and is what marks Trans Sky as different to the more mundane rocksters that belch their way through interviews. If any rock export is going to succeed in the nasty outside world, it will be bands like Trans Sky, who can combine a sense of face with a sense of place.