kagablog

SA’s most beloveded trio of Trixters, our merriest triangle of pranksters are back (is it a trix?)!! Confoundingly having disappeared in a tall Pow of neon smoke around 2003, at the height of their cheekiness, already lassooing in European legions to add to their slavering Seffrican contingent, Boo! left us scratching our noggins, twirling our ears, left with the vague scent of spaceships and wayward musical notes. Poor, sad, slippery musical notes, bright and abandoned amidst still-twirling hoola-hoops on the broken disco floor. “Princess?… Ampie.?” a lost fan mumbles..
But whatever it was that had dropped them onto our shores, in a squirmfest of dresses and C-grade Special FX, and upside/down crooning hiccups, and orange synths and alien love songs, had beamed them back up again.

Genesis: “Then we phoned Ampie because he wasn’t fat..”

I remember well the firstest time I sensationed the skirted three. It was during my first, free-wheeling experience of Cape Town, think it was at some now-defunct fest like Houtstok. Wandering around in what had turned into a festival of dust-storms I was drawn through a sudden parting in the dust air. Strange, bubbly sounds were thumping from up ahead. I saw a twirling frock; fat, slinky bass drummed my ears. And lo the dust-war settled to reveal what seemed to be a psychotically chirpy, transgender ladyperson, with a crazy-blonde-locked dude pacing disconcertedly around to the left of him/her, and a proudly frocked drummer. Casually unveiling they were, gleefully unleashing, the most magnificently Different concoctions of music. Venusian, stuttering ballads met disco-Primus bass and the delicious kitsch of Omo’s trumpets and synthetic delights.

When I interviewed rainbow-voiced Chameleon some years ago, following his understated, ridiculously beaut sonic rendering of Ingrid Jonker’s poetry, ‘Ek Herhaal Jou’, his anecdote on the origins of the extra-dimensional Boo! is an appropriate collision of the banal, and divine intervention..
Chris: “I was flipping burgers at McDonalds, when Leon (Princess Leonie) came in as a customer. He heard me sing in the kitchen and said he could make me famous. Then we phoned Ampie (Omo) because he wasn’t fat, and one thing Leon was always adamant about was that the band mustn’t be fat.” Just like that, unassumingly, yet somehow brashly, South Africa’s music scene was turned upside in, if only for a merry gasp of time.

Dotty polkas: Triumph and return.

Make no mistake, one gets to experience many flashes of brilliance in any music scene, many unexpected starts and booms, but Boo! were a phenomenon. And that was, I venture, somehow their point - a sudden, confusaloid, BURST. Extra met Terrestrial and melancholy kissed merriment; bass slapped trumpet and spells seduced logic. Boo! was an enigma. And now Boo! be an enigma again! An enigma wrapped in a polkadot exploding through a tune..

Nov 2009. Following tinkly rumours of the return of dem Boo!dists, I bump into the kaleidoscopic Chameleon, in the apt quantum of the InterWebplace.

Me: “What cosmic ripple led to the re-Boo!ing?”
Chris: “With Boo! there is something we can say that can’t be said in any other way, and, obviously, it also means that there’s something to be heard from Boo! that can’t be heard in any other way. We’ve had something to say ever since Boo! stopped saying something, and having not had it said has caused much of the sort of anguish one gets from leaving things unsaid. If, similarly, the desire to hear that which can only be said by Boo!ing is equally intense, it should be a happy outcome for all concerned. If not a cosmic ripple, perhaps it is merely a cognitive ripple.”

The new Boo! bounces its return at next year’s Ramfest. Grab your kokies, tear your rokkies, shine up the sky!
Chris asserts: “A reunion implies we get together tonight and then go our separate ways again. It’s not a reunion. Boo! is just getting back to playing.”

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[first published in Muse magazine]