The South African music festival circuit is a cluttered mesh of gatherings; it seems all you have to do is put a sound system in the middle of a field and the punters will come. The latest to join the annual festival circuit is the inaugural White Mountain Folk Festival, held last week in the Central Drakensberg. Yet it seems South Africa is desperately short of bona fide folk musicians, because the line-up mostly boasted generic pop rock, the kind of music that made me stop listening to radio. Then again, it all boils down to how you define folk.
Judging by the state of this year’s roster, folk means any music played by white people on acoustic guitars, unless you count the Zulu dancers that opened up Sunday’s proceedings, while people scrambled for breakfast, coffee or a regmaker. There were the few exceptions; Richard Haslop delivered a superb set of blues numbers, ably assisted by Jim Neversink, and Durban Folk Club founder Fiona Tozer provided some folk credibility with two performances over the weekend. Others worth mentioning were a raucous Saturday night closing set by Jim Neversink and an early afternoon set by Laurie Levine.
Otherwise Durban artists, who all tend to sound exactly the same, dominated the line-up. The talented Nibs van der Spuy, along with his cohorts Farryl Purkiss and Guy Buttery, turned three individual sets on Saturday afternoon into a mammoth jam session, which left members of the audience slightly bewildered; maybe they should have split the sets over two nights.
This new festival, run by Pedro Carlo, the organiser of the Splashy Fen festival near Underberg, is positioned in a beautiful valley next to a small dam. Which is quite convenient, because the lack of a quality line-up that was worthy of the title “folk festival” meant there was plenty of time for walks. The White Mountain Folk Festival has obviously been created to cater for the older music fan, who no longer feels comfortable at the youthful rock festival that Splashy Fen has become. This is evident by the family friendly chalet option for those who can no longer battle out the cold in a tent.
Hopefully, next year the festival will offer up a diverse line-up that is representative of the rich cultures that make up South Africa, so that once again we don’t end up with a bunch of white people on the mountain.