Music – not hooting minibus taxis or the drone of vuvuzelas – provides SA’s real soundtrack. In a country with more music genres than official languages, there’s certainly a playlist just for you. From BLK JKS to Miriam Makeba and TKZee to Lira, South African Music Awards judge Nils van der Linden offers his picks.
They were the darlings of the ’80s, the pretty boys of pop who – alongside Duran Duran – topped the charts with hits like ‘True’ and Gold’. But the good times turned bad with an acrimonious split and, later, a bitter court battle over royalties.
However unlikely it seemed, the reunion – almost 20 years later – was inevitable.
Now in a Cape Town hotel suite fit for superstars on the comeback trail, bassist Martin Kemp and multi-instrumentalist Steve Norman tell us about their rocky past, their surprising return, and their bright future.
Everything you know is wrong. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t own a deerstalker hat. Or puff one of those calabash pipes. And never in four novels and 56 short stories does he actually say: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings, he’s a tortured neurotic reclusive coke-head martial artist. And, after almost 200 film appearances as a stuffy bore, that’s who finally shows up here.
Robert Downey Jr brings the quirks. Guy Ritchie supplies the grit. Together the star and director give the detective a much needed kick up the arse. Reimagining the super sleuth as reluctant superhero (a la Batman, Spider Man, Superman, and, yes, Ironman) their ‘Sherlock Holmes’ trades tweed for TNT.
Gary Lightbody still remembers the first songs he ever wrote.
“They sucked big style,” he grins.
“I was 15 maybe. There’s a little room down underneath the kitchen in our house, like a little dungeon. I would go down there and turn my amp up and my parents would be in the kitchen going: ‘God, what have we done? What child of Satan have we spawned?’
Don’t expect to see Trevor Noah at screenings of his new ‘The Daywalker’ live comedy film, currently on circuit. During our conversation, one of South Africa’s funniest men reveals why he doesn’t like watching his own performances, how he beats Loyiso Gola at the game ‘Fifa 10’, why hanging with the paparazzi is never fun, the joys of being heckled by a six-year-old, and getting obsessed with twitter.
Cranky septuagenarian widowers are supposed to play bowls on Wednesday afternoons, drive as slowly as they speak, and send handwritten letters to the local community newspaper complaining about the quality of the toilet paper in shopping mall restrooms.
They’re not expected to tie thousands of helium balloons to their house and float off to the untamed jungles of South America, encountering chocolate-loving oversized birds and talking dogs on arrival.
John Dillinger: legendary Depression-era outlaw, audacious bank robber, cavalier jailbreaker, hero of the common people, and — in Michael Mann’s ‘Public Enemies’ — speed dating pioneer.
“I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, and you,” he tells a hard-to-get Billie Frechette when she first catches his eye. “What else do you need to know?”
Not much, reckons Mann.
The Dave Matthews Band’s seventh studio outing, ‘Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King’, smoulders into life with an impassioned sax solo — only fitting, really, for an album dedicated to the man playing with such fire in his belly.
Yes, the memory of Leroi Moore, who died suddenly last year, looms large over the album named after him. Quite appropriately then it’s a focused, no-nonsense affair — like the man himself.
My first car was a 20-year-old Renault 5. Bought new by my parents in 1976, it came with all the decade’s quirks – apple green body colour, faux leather (i.e. plastic) seats, thatched effect for the ceiling, a luxury spec featuring cigarette lighter and one of those analogue dial radios.
But even after two decades, it was easy to see the car’s original appeal: with VW’s Beetle its only real rival, the 5 was tailor-made for young families.
In 2009 so is Sandero.
There’s an odd hint of familiarity as two figures – cloaks flapping the wind – stand on a rocky outcrop, the camera swooping over the waves towards them. Moments later, inside a cave, the wizened old man bellows a spell, his flowing white hair and matching beard silhouetted against a sea of flames. And when a mass of pale, skeletal figures with big eyes creep up from the water (is that you Gollum?), it’s clear that ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ has ‘Lord Of The Rings’-scale ambitions.
Nils van der Linden