Month: June 2015

On the 4th June 1976, the Sex Pistols played their first gig in the city of Manchester. There were only 42 people in the audience. The crowd who had become accustomed to the prog rock and bombast of 70s bands was absolutely mesmerised by the raw energy displayed by the Sex Pistols, who could hardly play their instruments. Tony Wilson… Read more →

A diverse collection of artists, as was the case for Johannes Kerkorrel and his peers, had their music either banned outright or denied airtime by the SABC during the apartheid era. The Beatles had all their records banned from being played by the SABC for eight years after John Lennon said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ.… Read more →

Ge-trans-for-meer was Johannes Kerkorrel’s third solo album. The album’s opening track was “Sê Sê”, in which Rabie exhorted the listener to “Say Say” a prayer for various downtrodden people, such as “the tramp without a bed” and “the school girl, ugly and fat”. In particular Rabie sang about the “AIDS sufferers that are dying” and “The gay broken by ideology,… Read more →

In May 1990 an Afrikaans music festival called “Houtstok” was planned to coincide with Republic Day celebrations on the 31st May. The festival would reunite many musicians from the Voëlvry tour (controversially, Johannes Kerkorrel did not play at Houtstok), but would also feature other artists such as Anton Goosen and Steve Hofmeyr. At that time South Africa was taking its… Read more →

Whilst it is clear that punk rock had an impact on a number of mainly English-speaking bands who then went on via the influence of James Phillips to inspire Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel, some have also drawn parallels between Generation X and the Voëlvry movement. Generation X was the term first coined by Douglas Coupland in 1991 to describe… Read more →

A number of the songs on the Gereformeerde Blues Band’s album Eet Kreef were banned from the radio stations that were controlled by the SABC. One of the banned songs was the ballad “Ou, Ou Lied Van Afrika”, the music of which was based on a South American folk song with Afrikaans lyrics written by Mariaan de Jong. Rabie’s wife… Read more →

Here is an Infographic about Johannes Kerkorrel Johannes Kerkorrel Infographic Read more →

Johannes Kerkorrel and the Gereformeerde Blues Band produced one album called Eet Kreef, which was released in 1989. Music critics heaped praise on the album and declared that it was one of the most important Afrikaans popular music albums ever made. In a bizarre twist however, a NGK Minister, Dominee Jannie Malan, declared that if the Voelvry album was played… Read more →