Easter: the time of chocolate bunnies, long weekends and chilly mornings on the Highveld. But the sun always shines in the Bushveld, and it’s also time for the yearly Oppikoppi Easter music blast, this time quaintly titled the Dust on My Meerkat festival.
The Easter get-together has a different character than the famous August rock extravaganza. It tends to be a smaller event, with fewer people and far less dust, and the music is often more on the jazzy, laid-back side of the fence.
This year’s line-up certainly seems to stick to this recipe, boasting names such as guitarists Albert Frost and Louis Mhlanga sharing a stage, Bafo Bafo (Syd Kitchen and Madala Kunene making magic together), the Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes’s folk-rock, jazz man Paul Hanmer and Tidal Waves.
There’s no need to fret over a lack of ear-blasting rock, though, because Prime Circle, Pestroy, The Narrow, The Parlotones, Soil 7T7 and the likes will be plugging in those guitars and turning up the volume.
Another aspect of the festival to look forward to is the usual inclusion of a couple of international acts. France’s Trio Amsallem, led by pianist Franck Amsallem, will be plying the crowds with their flavour of modern, contemporary jazz.
Hailing from Canada, singer-songwriter Tal Bachman (remember the huge pop hit She’s So High?) is the other guest star.
Bachman’s no run-of-the-mill jet-setting pop star. The son of Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive fame, he was raised in the Mormon church and even spent two years doing missionary work in South America. He’s a family man and has seven children.
It’s been five years since Bachman stormed the charts with She’s So High, but he now has a new album out, titled Staring Down the Sun. He spoke to the Mail & Guardian Online about his return to the music world.
“She’s So High was supposed to be a set-up track”, released to radio stations before the “really big songs” off his first album, Bachman says. However, it unexpectedly went to number one around the world.
“By the time it stopped getting played, the record company [Columbia] had sort of moved on to other things,” he says. “Radio stations would not play the second single, because they were still getting requests for She’s So High.”
The record company would not put out another record, and Bachman was “stuck for a few years”.
But who needs a record company? Not Bachman, it seems. For Staring Down the Sun, he did the songwriting, producing, played all the instruments and sang, all in his own studio in a barn, with the help of a cousin “who figured out the software” on the computers they had to use.
A Canadian label agreed to put out the album, and then it was picked up by a United States label, meaning Bachman at least doesn’t need to promote the album himself.
“I ended up getting really involved [with distribution and promotion] at the beginning with She’s So High,” he remembers. “It’s difficult to be in that position.”
In the meantime, Bachman made a drastic move to leave the Mormon church after a lifetime of involvement — “kinda like leaving Islam”, he says of the weighty decision he made after becoming disillusioned with the church.
Did this spiritual decision affect his music on the new album?
“I finished recording the new album at the time that I realised and discovered that the founder of the Mormon church did not tell the truth about his experiences, so that spiritual turmoil did not really reflect [on Staring Down the Sun],” he says, adding that his next album will be a different matter.
Staring Down the Sun is a mellow mix of upbeat pop-rock and plenty of much slower ballads, with the feisty tune Aeroplane as the first single.
“My favourite on the album is [the ballad] What You Won’t Reveal … it might be because it was easiest to write,” he says. “I wrote it at lunchtime. When my cousin came back from eating his sandwiches, we recorded the whole thing that afternoon. I came in at 5am to get gravelly vocals. It was all done between lunches.”
The title track is catchy and strong, even more so than Aeroplane.
“Staring Down the Sun was another one I wrote really quickly,” says Bachman. He put Aeroplane out to Canadian radio even before he had a record deal, though, and that is why Aeroplane was selected as the first single.
And what will he do at Oppikoppi?
“I’m coming by myself, so I like to just play by myself, acoustic, tell a few stories and crack a few jokes,” he says — which will, of course, go well with Oppikoppi’s easygoing Easter attitude.
Oppikoppi runs from March 25 to 28 near Northam. For information and directions, go to www.oppikoppi.co.za