In late 1977, at the age of 20, I returned to South Africa after spending a year in the UK, where I had been invigorated by exposure to the new punk phenomenon. In transit to Cape Town, I spent a few days in Johannesburg where I caught the Radio Rats playing at the Market Café, a venue run by Dave Marks inside the Market Theatre. Though not exactly punk, their music did have an energy and freshness that I wasn’t expecting to hear in South African music. I resolved to join the band, reckoning in youthful arrogance that they needed my input. I had been in a couple of unremarkable bands before this and fancied myself as a lead guitarist. Band leader Jonathan Handley kindly agreed to meet me a day or two later at the Koffiehuis at the Carlton Hotel, where he told me politely my services were not required.

Then followed a period of little ambition in Cape Town, assembling pizzas, dabbling in music, attempting to make guitars and going to the beach a lot. During this time the Radio Rats began making waves in the national media, having a hit with ZX Dan. In the Sunday Times I read that they were looking for a lead guitarist, prompting me again to get on the phone to Jonathan. His response was no different from before, saying that he had been misquoted in the article, but I was not easily put off. I grabbed my guitar and hitched to Johannesburg, spending the night of my 21st birthday freezing my butt off in the bicycle shed of a high school in Winburg. Because of my keenness Jonathan was obliged to give me an audition, which took place at the Rats’ practice room alongside the defunct Palladium Bioscope in downtown Springs. I got the job.

During my time with the Rats I got to know the East Rand and Jo’burg scene. The one band that stuck out was Corporal Punishment, featuring the 19 year-olds James Phillips and Carl Raubenheimer as songwriters. Their songs had the energy and lyric integrity of punk, though again the music itself couldn’t strictly be classified as such. They also had the early punk attribute of not being virtuoso instrumentalists, but that didn’t matter either. They were like a sister band to the Rats, so I got to know their music pretty well.

Maybe my memories are hyped by nostalgia, but for me, Corporal Punishment produced some of the most vital and deeply honest music ever made in South Africa. James Phillips was way above and beyond politics. In fact, the real measure of his genius was that he could write songs about totally ordinary things that made you want to laugh and cry at the same time, but it was when he turned his eye on our troubles that his strength as a songwriter really stood out. One of his lyrics got the band into trouble with a short-sighted segment of the white left who heard the work “kaffir” shriek out over some crappy PA system and didn’t stick around to check out the context. Brain Damage was actually a brilliant exercise in irony:

“He’s a supervisor, takes a lot of skill
To be in charge of 40 kaffirs, that’s responsible!
He doesn’t mind that he gets all the pay
Mr Arri Paulus says they’re just baboons anyway.”

Songs like Brain Damage were searing and haunting and even, so help me, danceable. I simply could not comprehend how a music so compelling could be so utterly ignored by the music industry at large. This is when I started having idle thoughts about getting a recording facility together. I say idle because this was long before the days of home recording. The release of the revolutionary Tascam Portastudio was still a year away at that point, and the capital needed to set up an orthodox studio was prohibitive.

I returned to Cape Town once the Radio Rats disbanded. The music scene there was very seasonal. You would start a band in spring and by autumn that was pretty much it. Of the bands that I was involved in, Happy Ships was the best known. In it were Warrick Sony, of Kalahari Surfers fame, and a few other friends. Unusually, even though its lifecycle wasn’t much different from other bands that I was involved with or witnessed, the band managed to regenerate itself every summer for 3 or 4 years. The music could best be described as experimental in a rock/pop sense. At the same time I began a career in the film industry, working with Dirk de Villiers’ C Films outfit in Cape Town. I ended up on a shoot in Johannesburg, realized how much I missed the energy of the city and decided to stay.

Gerry Khoza, Mike Lebisi, Punka Khoza and Ivan Kadey of National Wake