Words And Music

Stubbornly, I still pay actual money to “own” music. I don’t have a Spotify account, I don’t pay for Apple Music, Tidal or Deezer. I don’t stream music. I own it, inasmuch as anyone can really be said to ‘own’ anything these days. When I “buy” digitally downloadable music, it arrives instantaneously in what used to be called the iTunes app (now just “Music”) on what used to be my iPod (now “my…

I purchased my vinyl copy of Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust from a small music store hidden under an escalator in Cape Town’s Golden Acre shopping centre. It was 1987 and the album was a pricey import because Midnight Oil refused to sell their music in apartheid South Africa. They also refused, like most international bands in the late 1980s, to perform in South Africa. The only bits South…

I’ve spent the last week or so writing a song. First, I had a germ of a melody at 6:30 one weekday morning. I used a guitar, a bass, a drum machine and a computer to flesh out a rudimentary sketch of where the song might go. Still pyjama’d, I made an mp3 of the sketch and flew it into iTunes so that it would show up on my iPhone. That way, I could drive around all day listening to it,…

If the only ZZ Top album you ever owned was 1977’s “Ten Legendary Texas Tales” Best Of, you’d be forgiven for thinking ZZ Top was just Tush or La Grange: good-time southern boogie with long guitar solos.  True, ZZ Top is American guitar-bass-drums blues-rock. True, they’re really great at keeping a really great tradition alive. But there’s something else going on with this band, and it’s a…

Forget the synthetic sleigh bells and the inaccurate lyrics. Forget Phil Collins’ sleeveless brown jumper. Forget, if you can, the un-wokeness of it all. Forget even Bob Geldof’s avowed hatred of his own creation: Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? is a slice of 1980s pop genius.  By 2023, you have said “merry Christmas!” to members of your family 39 times since Do They Know It’s…

You can argue this till the Nguni cattle come home, but two things are inevitable: 1. the cattle will eventually come home, and 2. Siya Kolisi is right: if you’re not a South African, you have no real idea what the Springboks’ 2023 World Cup victory means for South Africa. It’s just a game, right? I think that’s the unspoken Fourth Wall with sport: don’t analyse it too hard, or you’ll discover…

Rampant artificial intelligence? Robot sex? Art made by machines? Information Age mental-health issues? Global boiling? Whatever your favourite paranoid vision of the future may once have been, you were right: they’ve all come true. Welcome. It’s been three decades since I was a teenager, and I find it fascinating to watch the prognostications of the 1980s manifesting themselves in real time only…

Slowly but inevitably, modern high-profile Christian ministries seem to collapse in upon themselves. Secular society has watched it happen so often over the decades of the twentieth century that the public degeneration of religious entities is almost grimly anticipated these days. I watched Hillsong’s recent fall with horror and, unfortunately, a degree of cynicism. I never expected, however, I’d…

I love Wham! I have always loved Wham! You should love Wham! too. Hear me out. Nobody in their right mind would dismiss George Michael as a pop songwriter. The man knew his way around a song, and between 1982 and 1985 delivered up some of the best British pop since Paul McCartney. Even in the cynical days of post-pandemic apocalypse we currently trudge through, Wake Me Up Before You…

I confess: I was a teenage metal-head. Not really: in the end, my musical interests broadened and I moved on. But for a while there, I was the proud owner of albums by Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Van Halen and Skid Row. Remember Warrant? Slaughter? Cinderella? I had them all. I tried to draw the line at Poison, although I definitely learned the riff to Unskinny Bop. For young me, it was…

45 STREETS AWAY: A 9/11 MEMOIR

1. In 2001, Tree63, the band I was in, was touring the USA. Tree63 was in its first flush of success in America, and these were heady days. We had consecutive #1 radio singles, a major industry award for our debut US album, and a support slot on a prestigious national tour. Our manager at the time was aggressively courting mainstream record labels in New York City, and everything seemed on the…

GUITAR-FACE & THE POVERTY OF MODERN POPULAR MUSIC

My eighteen-year-old son has just discovered the joys of rock ‘n’ roll. For himself. He’s always liked a few songs here and there by AC/DC or Van Halen, but his true musical love through his teenage years has been hip-hop. I can’t explain it. I’m a guitar-playing rock fan, my house has been filled with guitar-based music since he was born, and yet when the time came he fell hard for Drake, Lil…

DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE APOCALYPSE

If I were an aspirant common-or-garden power-crazed tyrant, the events in South Africa over the last week would be a test run for something bigger and better, and I would have spent the time taking notes.  South Africa has just been looted (physically, for a change) within a few inches of its life, but, like all catastrophes in this country’s tragic history, we will somehow snatch survival from…

MADE IN DURBAN: JOHN LENNON’S SOUTH AFRICAN GUITAR

I’ve known for a long time that John Lennon’s first guitar was a cheap mail-order thing manufactured in a South African factory, but my interest in this legend was renewed recently when I finally got around to reading volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s magisterial Beatles history Tune In. Chapter Ten is entitled “Guaranteed Not To Split”, a mystical phrase that Paul McCartney has always loved using in…

My father, Mike Ellis, was a Member of Parliament in South Africa from the dark State of Emergency days of 1987 until his retirement in 2012. He and I talk all the time about father and son things, but I’ve noticed over the last few years I tend to not ask him questions about the current state of the country’s politics. It upsets him, and I’m not sure I want to know. Most people are…

FAREWELL MUSICA: THE END OF MUSIC RETAILING IN SOUTH AFRICA

One of the first things I did when South Africa’s lockdown restrictions were initially eased last year was visit the mall. Retail therapy is real. Some people shop for bath salts or golf balls, I shop for books and music. Like many, I hadn’t quite grasped the full implications of ‘global pandemic’. After only a few months of the whole world putting itself on pause, South Africa’s shop shelves…