Author: dpelser

After the Gathering After the bands Corporal Punishment and Illegal Gathering broke up, James Phillips went on to form the Cherry Faced Lurchers. Phillips had decided to leave Rhodes University to complete his degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. In Johannesburg, he reconnected with Lee Edwards who he had met while living in Grahamstown. In the interim, Mike de… Read more →

Akademie vir Dramakuns Gerard Scholtz was a lecturer at the Akademie vir Dramakuns when he first noticed a young man, dressed in an army uniform, who would sometimes play piano in one of the school’s rehearsal rooms. When Scholtz needed a singer to play the piano for guests at a function at the Paarl City Hall, he remembered the student… Read more →

Johnny is nie dood nie, a movie set during the Voëlvry era and directed by Christiaan Olwagen recently won a number of awards at the annual Silwerskerm Festival. Read about it here. This new movie got me thinking about the influence that Ralph Rabie and the other Voëlvry musicians have had on contemporary Afrikaans musicians. KKNK 2003 After Ralph Rabie’s… Read more →

THIS POST IS IN HONOUR OF JAMES PHILLIPS (22 JANUARY 1959 – 31 JULY 1995) Corporal Punishment After the band Corporal Punishment broke up in 1980, Carl Raubenheimer moved to Cape Town and James Phillips enrolled at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Read about Corporal Punishment here. There were many reasons for the break up of Corporal Punishment. Phillips said that… Read more →

Koos was a very influential band whose music was truly ‘alternative’ although the band hated that label. A previous post about Koos has appeared on this blog you can read it here Thanks to Donald Ferguson, who took many photographs of the Voëlvry and other bands, some new photos of Koos have emerged. This post adds to the previous one… Read more →

A new documentary about the Radio Rats was screened at the 2016 Durban film festival. This got me thinking about the impact that Radio Rats had on the musicians and bands who were part of the Voëlvry tour. In 1978, the Radio Rats, who had signed a contract with Jo’burg Records, booked a day in a studio to record a… Read more →

In the 1980s South Africa seemed to be poised on a knife edge. Unrest erupted in black townships and PW Botha’s government was forced to broaden the activities of the South African Defence Force (SADF) to include maintaining order in the townships as well as to protecting the country’s borders. Thousands of young, white men were conscripted into the army… Read more →

Ingrid Jonker was only 31 years old when she committed suicide by walking into the cold Atlantic Ocean on the 19th July 1965. Remarkably, 29 years later Nelson Mandela would read from her poem ‘The child’ at the sitting of the first South African democratic parliament. Born in Douglas in 1933, Jonker started writing poetry at the age of six… Read more →

Whilst a number of very influential bands, including the Radio Rats and Corporal Punishment would emerge from Springs, Durban in the late 1970s was undoubtedly the epicentre of the South African punk rock movement. Leading the charge was the band Wild Youth. Wild Youth evolved from the band Fourth Reich, which was formed by Michael Flek after he had visited… Read more →

The lack of female musicians on the Voëlvry tour was pointed out by Jennifer Ferguson, who infamously said “The Voëlvry tour is all about big cock rock”. Apart from the supremely talented Tonia Selley who provided backing vocals, there were no other female performers on the tour. In personal correspondence, journalist Christi van der Westhuizen has said that whilst the… Read more →