kagablog

We meet South Africa’s avant-garde radical Kalahari Surfers ahead of the upcoming African Soul Rebels UK tour with Oumou Sangare and Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou.

“I’m an African and I’m a soul rebel. It’s logical that I should be playing on the tour.” Warrick Sony speaks simply and softly but his voice masks an angrier, more complex character. This maverick South African pioneer has always been sensitive to the aural and political currents that surrounded him, absorbing the best and challenging the worst. The musical education of the Kalahari Surfers founder evolved in the context of Apartheid; late 1970s and early 1980s South Africa, where the law was imposed by a racist, fervently Christian and staunchly anti-communist political elite.

“My stuff is very eclectic”, he says, referring to his music, in his musing, lilting South African accent. His sentences seem to float. Just when I think they are landing and prepare to ask another question, he takes off with further thoughts. “I grew up with the idea of the guitar” he says. Another pause. “Rock music was the norm. But then I grew up in Durban, which had the largest Indian community in the world outside India. I was very influenced by Indian music and culture. I had lessons at the Hindu school. I learnt the tabla, rhythmic music, Sunni music. And I was influenced by the way Zulus play and the Shanga from Mozambique…”

Sony talks of his time in the brass section of an army band, playing the B-flat horn, the euphonium, and where he also taught himself the drums. He was eventually released from compulsory military service, something he loathed so much he went on a thirty day hunger strike in protest, drinking only water. “Then punk happened. It was ’77” he adds abruptly. “My dad came back from London with a slew of punk records; The Pistols, The Clash, The Boomtown Rats and reggae…Reggae was a big turning point. Practising bass at the time I was trying to be like Stanley Clarke and then I realised I could do it the African way, that the less you play, the more powerful you are.”

His first album Own Affairs was released in 1984 thanks to Chris Cutler’s Recommended Records, a radical London label. “Their punk and African elements were a huge influence. But also I drew a lot from them on the political side. These guys were serious communists, Trotskyists even…” Together they produced Sony’s second album Living in the Heart of the Beast in 1985, to critical acclaim.

The Kalahari Surfers aspired to bring the radical stance of punk against an ultra-Conservative political regime. Using early Frank Zappa albums as a guiding template, Sony began cutting up tape and re-formulating politicians’ audio clips, presenting ironic and sometimes scathing social comments to the country’s youth. “Whoever owned the media owned the mind” says Sony. So he began his own one man media backlash. What was the impact? “A splash and a ripple” he says. “In South Africa at the time, not many people were being very outspoken. I set a legal precedent in that one of my albums was banned.” He refers to his fourth album Bigger Than Jesus, produced in 1989. The title was a nod to Lennon’s controversial 1966 statement. The Beatles singer was assassinated in 1980. In 1989 Salman Rushdie, under Islamic fatwa for The Satanic Verses, was speaking in Cape Town when a bomb threat cleared the venue hall. “I was struck by censorship, struck that you could die for your art” says Sony.

Although presented as a collective, Kalahari Surfers is actually Sony’s long-term personal alias, providing some protection against persecution by the South African authorities. But Warrick Sony has sought more than mere political provocation over the years, engaging with numerous other artists in live and recording collaborations, including Soweto performance poet Lesego Rampolokeng, whose contributions have provided Sony with the kind of lyrical substance he’s so keenly desired and who appears with him on the upcoming tour.

Indeed together their work reaffirms Sony’s initial claim, that truly, the Kalahari Surfers are genuine African Soul Rebels.

African Soul Rebels 2010 UK tour

Featuring: Oumou Sangare, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou and Kalahari Surfers with Lesego Rampolokeng

18 February // Poole Lighthouse lighthousepoole.co.uk
19 February // Brighton Dome Concert Hall brightondome.org
20 February // London Barbican barbican.org.uk
21 February // Northampton Royal & Derngate royalandderngate.co.uk
22 February // Bristol Colston Hall colstonhall.org
24 February // Basingstoke The Anvil anvilarts.org.uk
25 February // Warwick Arts Centre warwickartscentre.co.uk
26 February // Liverpool Philharmonic Hall liverpoolphil.com
27 February // Edinburgh Usher Hall usherhall.co.uk
28 February // Manchester Bridgewater Hall bridgewater-hall.co.uk
2 March // Leicester De Montfort Hall demontforthall.co.uk
3 March // The Sage Gateshead thesagegateshead.org

this interview first appeared on mondomix