Slowly we cruise along Hillbrow’s main drag, Pretoria Street. When we stop for a drink, Paul Riekert, founder of industrial rockers Battery9, tells me about his military service in 1987. How he witnessed a necklacing and smelled burnt human flesh. “I couldn’t interfere, because they would kill us. That gives you a perspective on things.”
Next I have to grasp the concept of vastbyt, the physical and psychological torment that each new recruit had to endure. It must have been something like this. The fresh recruit is pushed out of his bed at 4am. His rucksack is filled with heavy stuff. He gets two tins of food. Next he is searched, just to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Then he’s ready to walk. Three days, without sleep. Those who give in are punished. Says Riekert: “They would ask you questions like ‘what was that farm’s name over there, about 20km back?’ ‘Uh, dunno, Sir.’ ‘Well, I think you should go and have a look.’ They tried to break you down.”
It was during his stint in the army that Riekert came across the Jo’burg noise band, Koos. He had read about them in a newspaper. A journalist compared Koos to Nick Cave’s Birthday Party. “Dissonant madness,” he wrote.
Riekert points at a small building in a side street. “That used to be the Black Sun. It still looks the same, although now it’s a youth hostel. Or maybe rooms for prostitutes. There I saw Koos for the first time.” He smiles. “Fok man, what a gig.”
While Riekert recounts that night in the late Eighties, my mind paints the accompanying pictures. A small space, crammed with people, most of them dressed in black. They stare at the musicians on stage who, in the words of Riekert, look “elegantly wasted”. Koos act kind of indifferent, concentrating on their huge racket. The crowd love it. Inside there’s camaraderie, outside there’s hostility. Or as Einstürzende Neubauten sang: Draussen ist feindlich.
Later, when we’re sitting in Riekert’s garden in the suburb of Albertville, I’m eager to hear more. What made Koos so special for him?
The sun goes down. Northcliff’s Aasvoëlkop slowly turns into a black lump. Riekert opens a beer and lights a joint. “They expressed something else, something darker. Listening to them was creepy. Suddenly you felt like the perpetrator. You were the scary one. You were the mad guy blowing your brains out. They had that nihilist, paranoid twist. I had never heard it like that before, in my language. They used Afrikaans as a weapon. They expressed it so well, the ugliness of those times. It especially appealed to me because I was wasting two years of my life for a government I didn’t believe in. Fuck that, fuck everything.”
The next time Riekert saw them, at Wits, Koos singer Marcel van Heerden wore a toga. “And he was giving them shit, all those politically correct pipe-smoking fucks,” laughs Riekert. “Oh, how I enjoyed it. After them no one could take the gig higher.”
To see Koos in a mainly English speaking institution felt like a victory for Riekert, who was studying language and comparative literature. “At Wits, Afrikaans was like farting. When you spoke it on campus people looked at you as if you were the fucking devil. How I enjoyed that. I made a point of speaking loud Afrikaans when I saw a bunch of kugels around. Their idea of an Afrikaner was that guy with the wig who reads the news [Riaan Cruywagen], or Eugene Terre’Blanche. It was nice to crack that stereotype. I had the goth look after a year of growing my hair.”
The concerts of Koos were an affirmation of his complex identity as a “different Afrikaner”. Like Bowie sang on Five Years: “You’re not alone!”
Koos, formed in 1986, were an intensely personal reaction to the chaos to which South Africa had succumbed. Various states of emergency, burning townships, political assassinations, bomb attacks, prisoners who “fell” from the windows or “slipped on a piece of soap” — it was apartheid at its most paranoiac and gruesome.
At least black activists could vent their anger by throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at the cops. But young, progressive Afrikaners were at a loss. Their neighbourhoods and houses weren’t raided by the police. And unless they were involved in clandestine activities, the security forces left them alone. It was a painful paradox. Because of your skin-colour you were automatically part of a repressive regime — with studies and a job guaranteed.v
Koos were a metaphor for the deep revulsion for that system.
Koos had the perfect “we don’t care attitude”. Not about their audience, not about musical rules, not about racial laws. Willy, the drummer, was a Soweto boy. He loved rock, which made him an outcast in his own community. He fitted in perfectly with Koos. Koos as a free state.
Musically the band was way ahead of its time. Those were the days when heavy metal was regarded as proto-rebel music. Koos didn’t do screaming guitar solos. In fact, guitarist Neil Goedhals abhorred solos. Koos attacked the audience with a mix of poetry, theatre and noise. Undanceable rhythms rumbled under industrial soundscapes, accompanied by the occasional twanging guitar or cheesy organ. Van Heerden sang, spat, whispered the lyrics. Sometimes he stuffed his mouth with pebbles to distort his voice.
Not only did Koos manage to dodge rock’n’roll clichés, the band also stayed clear of fashionable, politically correct dogmas. Not a single party or politician could be trusted. Politics stopped at anarchism, erotica and transgression. Says Van Heerden: “It was also about wanting to tell black people and the country that some of us were expressing ourselves against apartheid as well. We did that from the perspective of the young man who gets into prison or is forced to kill people.”
1989 could have been the year of the breakthrough. Usually playing at political or cultural manifestations, Koos for once took part in a mass event. The Voëlvry tour was a series of concerts featuring musicians who had surfaced in the slipstream of punk, the alternatiewe [alternative] Afrikaners. They sang in Afrikaans and played lyrically defiant but musically conventional rock’n’roll. They had adopted punky noms de guerre like Bernoldus Niemand, Johannes Kerkorrel and Koos Kombuis. The Voëlvry tour was chaotic, reminiscent of early Rolling Stones concerts. The security forces were out in full force. Tyres were cut. Musicians got drunk, stoned and fell in love. The Afrikaner youth went berserk, feeling liberated. “Ons is die mense teen wie julle ouers julle gewaarsku het [We are the people who your parents warned you about],” screamed Kerkorrel in Bethlehem.
Koos quickly jumped the ship, sticking to its hardcore doctrine of no compromise. Especially Goedhals. “He was too involved in his art work, and he didn’t want anything to do with that bandwagon thing. He didn’t like the other music,” says Van Heerden.
As the alternatiewe Afrikaners released one album after the other on the independent Shifty label, Koos only managed a cassette. A black thing in a black box that just said KOOS, wrapped in a brown paper bag. Conceptual art, a typical Goedhals prank. The Black Tape of Koos versus The White Album of the Beatles. The brown paper bag symbolised the forbidden, a sneer at the United States, where the hobos have to hide their booze in a brown paper bag because it’s forbidden to drink in public.
In 1990 Koos disbanded. The Wall had come down, apartheid was about to implode. There was no more need for a political noise band. That same year, Van Heerden’s best friend, Neil Goedhals committed suicide by jumping off a building in Yeoville.
Club Risiko can be ordered through Boekehuis, Auckland Park, Johannesburg and can be bought online at http://winkel.bruna.nl/Auteurs_op_Alfabet/V/Vries,044_F,046_de/9038874588.htm