Boogie back in time

After Tusk,” says Benjy Mudie, “I said I never ever wanted to do another interview. I was just burned out.” But today the South African music industry veteran is doing an interview, this time to talk about Retro Fresh, a new series on his Fresh Music label.

Mudie joined record company WEA in 1976, “coming out,” as he says, “of working in record stores and playing in bands”. Ten years later WEA mutated into the independent Tusk; by then, Mudie was a key figure in the South African recording industry. He had led bands such as punk-rockers Asylum Kids to success in the late 1970s, and did it again with township-poppers such as MarcAlex and Mango Groove in the early 1990s. But when Tusk was sold to the giant Gallo in 1997, Mudie decided to go on his own, and formed Fresh Music, which has been behind the likes of Blk Sonshine and Sunways.

Retro Fresh is an archival project. It delves back into the history of mostly white South African rock and pop since the Seventies, putting key recordings of those years back on the shelves. Those were the days before CDs, and many a band came and went — some commercial, some less so, some clearly anti-apartheid, some equivocal. Most are probably unknown to the average record buyer in South Africa. Then, as now, most people were slaves to the rhythms of the great Anglo-American musical juggernaut.

But there were bands trying to put a distinctly South African spin on the global language of pop and rock, or attempting to blend Western and African sounds. If it often sounded very strange indeed, that was because those were strange times.

“Working in the music business then was weird,” says Mudie of the late Seventies and the Eighties. “The restrictions were frightening — records could be banned for one word. It was a scary time. Bands I was involved with, Baxtop, Falling Mirror, Corporal Punishment, Safari Suits, Wild Youth — their records got no airplay. Zero. I was arrested for having a copy of Free Nelson Mandela. WEA was watched by the security police because we had mixed parties. It was hectic.”

It was also heady. South African society was a pressure cooker, and young people found some room for rebellion in the music of the day, as they had in the Sixties. Sometimes it was political, sometimes they just wanted to get trashed. Or both. The music offered a revolution you could dance to, even if you weren’t entirely sure what the revolution was about.

The releases thus far on Retro Fresh are, inevitably, a mixed bag. They go back to the blues of Otis Waygood and the heavy metal of short-lived shock-rockers Suck, both with recordings from 1970 (Otis Waygood Blues Band and Time to Suck respectively). The former were nice Jewish boys from Rhodesia who found themselves playing what Rian Malan, in his liner notes, calls “the music of black American pain”. They borrowed from the blues repertoire and composed some of their own tunes.

The pattern would continue with other bands bending Western music to their own uses or merging it with African sounds. In the early 1980s Via Afrika pioneered a funky urban African crossover style, making for themselves a hybrid culture as Juluka had done in a more traditionalist way. Retro Fresh releases Via Afrika’s startling debut, which has aged remarkably well, and that of the more derivative éVoid, who got some of the style right after they added that “é” to their original name and, as one critic of the time put it, “warp-spasmed out into ethnicity”. Also on the catalogue are The Dynamics, one of those wonderful mixed-race bands of the mid-Eighties who brought sax-driven kwela into collision with ska, gigged a lot and recorded little. It’s something of a trip to hear them again.

In fact, you can revisit (or just sample) the Retro Fresh range on the Rocking Against the System compilation, which brings together on one CD the heterogeneous noises of Bright Blue, Tribe After Tribe, Dog Detachment, The Spectres, and more — even the not very lamented Petit Cheval.

“Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have about 25 CDs out,” says Mudie. Forthcoming releases include The Cherry-Faced Lurchers, Ellamental, The Helicopters and Tribe After Tribe. He is trawling the archives of companies such as Gallo, EMI and the independent Shifty, and tracing the original members of half-forgotten bands.

“With Suck,” says Mudie, “it took me nine months to find them on the Net. I put out searches every week for photos. A guy came to my house the other week and gave me a whole bunch of vinyl. He said, ‘I hear you’re doing this project, and I want you to have them.’ My house is becoming like a museum. I’m constantly getting e-mails on the website from people who send me photographs and rare tapes. This was the soundtrack to our lives.”

Mudie has “a list of about 150 albums that I want to do”. When he puts them out, he adds value: “Every album has bonus tracks in the form of unreleased tracks, demos, mixes, or m-peg videos or something. Every artist has been involved from scratch in putting the project together. For a lot of them, it’s the first time they have any creative control over what goes out.”

For Mudie, the project has given him back some of the excitement of those years. “I’ve reignited a lot of the passion I had when I was 21. Retro is partly about rediscovering my passion, but also it’s an attempt to make it available so people know where their roots are. When you see a band like Tweak today, you understand that their roots go back to the Asylum Kids.

“It’s a labour of love. I’m having so much fun doing it. The music that we made in the last 30 years is so amazing.”

See the full list of Retro Fresh releases at www.freshmusic.co.za