Kalahari Surfers
Warrick Sony, a.k.a. Kalahari Surfers, has been South African alternative music’s most consistently provocative troublemaker for over 30 years - and, as the new Kalahari Surfers album One Party State shows, he has not mellowed with age. In this week’s show: a Surfers retrospective, and an exclusive interview with the man himself.
Kalahari Surfers emerged from the South African punk underground of the early 80s, to release some of the most explicitly confrontational anti-apartheid records of the era. Musically, the Surfers sound is a mix of dub, post-punk and avant-garde experimentalism. Politically, Kalahari Surfers is an object lesson in how to cause as much trouble as possible.
Among Warrick Sony’s more unusual claims to fame is that, in 1989, he became the first person to successfully sue the apartheid regime for inappropriate censorship of music. It’s hardly surprising that the regime banned Bigger Than Jesus, Kalahari Surfers’ brilliantly vicious 1989 cocktail of agitprop, blasphemy and political satire. What is surprising is that Warrick Sony found a way to drag the state censors through the courts, ending in a humiliating public climbdown by the authorities and an official ruling that the state had no legal grounds for banning the Kalahari Surfers’ music.
You can hear more about this, and about many other episodes in the Kalahari Surfers story, on Friday Ripple > 25.06.2010. Here are some highlights:
Warrick Sony on his early musical influences:
“My evolution was from rock, then into Indian stuff, then to the fusion-jazz side... And then I was drafted into the army, and this guy from Cape Town brought Natty Dread the Bob Marley album, and Max Romeo’s War in a Babylon. And I bought in Durban on a weekend pass, Burning Spear’s dub album Garvey’s Ghost. And then I started playing drums. I was the only dude who could play reggae drums then – no-one understood it! That was 1977.”
On trying to avoid compulsory military service:
“By that stage I was a Hindu. I’d joined an ashram. Drafted into the army, tried to get out – I fasted for 30 days, just drinking distilled water. The army failed to notice that I looked like something out of a concentration camp, and I was just sent off to the normal thing. But as a Hindu... I was put into a military band, where I played the trombone and baritone horn.”
On the “Bigger than Jesus” court case:
“We still had a legal system that the apartheid government tried to make seem like it was a normal legal system. And you could appeal. So the banning of my album, I appealed. No-one had ever done it before, it set a precedent...
“The track that they objected to most strenuously was Gutted with the Glory. It was a poem I’m put together using William Burroughs’ technique of cutting up newspaper pieces. I cut up the Lord’s Prayer with this raid into Maseru [that Jackie Quinn who used to live with us was killed in. So it sort of went ‘Our Father, who perished when soldiers who blasted art homes, burst inside firing heaven-hallowed horrors, Ashes be thy name...’
“It gave you the feeling of the religious state descending, and war. And that was my defence. It was not anti-Christian or anti-religious, it was anti-war. So the album was unbanned. I think it was the first time that anyone had listened to it so carefully! I had these nine people, representatives of the Afrikaans Church and a panel of the Censorship Board. They had to sit there and study it, it was great! [laughs] But it was, I think, important that those things were done then... No matter how small it is or how few you sell, the seeds are there: this is possible.”
On the fall of apartheid:
“Apartheid came down, I believe, mainly by the work of the foreign media. People outside of the country seeing what was going on, the horrific things that the state had been up to... It was like the Vietnam War, the undoing of the American state [in] the first media war.”
On post-apartheid cultural influences:
“The rise of bling, and the rise of what I believe comes from American hip hop - a sense of misogyny. There’s been an incredible upsurge in violence against women, that has marched through our last 20 years, and more now than ever before. I don’t know why there’s been a growth, but I really think that somewhere along the line it’s this kind of hip hop thing, the negative sides of hip hop...
“Hip hop’s [also] been used – certainly in Cape Town – amazingly. Teba [Rastafarian rapper and sometime Surfers collaborator] is part of these groups of people, and Prophets of da City [seminal Cape Flats crew], with these incredible initiatives to get kids out of drugs and gangsterism, and into music and dancing.
But then, that whole dark side – it’s stupidity, America and misogyny - yeah, that stuff has, I reckon, a bad influence on the youth. This mindless lack of - there isn’t a moral centre any more. And I believe in a moral centre.”
On South Africa’s controversial current President Jacob Zuma:
“It’s like having Snoop Dogg as your President.”
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There’s lots more in the show, along with all these songs:
Kalahari Surfers feat. Lesego Rampolokeng – Child Soldier (Microdot)
Kalahari Surfers feat. Mzi – Gangsta (African Dope)
Lesego Rampolokeng & Kalahari Surfers - End Beginnings 4:13
Kalahari Surfers -Trouble On The Way 1:43
Kalahari Surfers - The Last Kick/One Verwoerd In The Grave 4:49
Max Romeo - One Step Forward (Trojan)
Kalahari Surfers - Township Beat 5:20
[Excerpt from] Soul Brothers - Ujaheni Oma 1:49
[Excerpt from] Henry Cow - Living in the Heart of the Beast 4:36
Kalahari Surfers - Surfer 2:15
Kalahari Surfers - Don't Dance (Live) 5:05
Pere Ubu - Birdies 1:50
Kalahari Surfers - Teargas 2:09
This Heat - Paper Hats 5:32
Kalahari Surfers - Reasonable Men 4:07
National Wake - Bolina (Kalahari Surfers remix) 7:20
Happy Ships - Egg and Bacon Plantation 3:20
Kalahari Surfers - Gutted with the Glory 2:11
Kalahari Surfers - Bigger Than Jesus 4:18
Lesego Rampolokeng & Kalahari Surfers - Sebokeng Siefe 4:31
Kalahari Surfers - Running Out Of Time 3:37
Kalahari Surfers & Greg Hunter- Gita 5:29
Kalahari Surfers - A New Kind Of Leader (Microdot)
Kalahari Surfers - Minority Report (Featuring Lesego Rampolokeng) (Microdot)
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You can expect a follow-up to this show later in the year – Warrick had more to say than could be easily fitted into one show! In the meantime, if you want to find out more about Warrick Sony, the prolific troublemaker is also a prolific writer - and you can find lots of articles both by him and about him on Kagablog. Also worth reading online is Warrick’s thoughts on sonic mysticism, and his recollections of his time in bizarre early-80s avant-garde group Happy Ships.
