“You should know that the lies won’t hide your flaws / No sense in hiding all of yours.” More than just lyrics to Seether’s swinging hit ‘Fake It’, the words reflect a way of life for the band’s frontman. That’s startlingly clear when I come face to face with Shaun Morgan Welgemoed. What you see is what you get. There’s nothing fake about him.
He doesn’t even bother to hide his vulnerability: “The bigger it gets the more I realise I wasn’t cut out for the fame part of it.”
There’s far more to Ireland than the Guinness factory, leprechauns and sheep. Like the breathtaking coastline with its tranquil villages and jagged cliffs. The stunning natural beauty, and even the way the lush green grass glistens after the rain. It’s not called the Emerald Isle for nothing.
“Dance music isn’t at its peak at the moment,” Norman Cook says, rather wistfully, from his Brighton beachfront home on the south of England.
“Five years ago it was breaking rules and turning people on who didn’t like dance music – rock bands wanted to get involved, and people were excited.”
“Since then we’ve kind of lost our momentum a little bit. When big beat came around in the ’90s it gave dance music a kick up the arse, with groups like Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers,” adds the man better known as Fatboy Slim.
“It was the best time in my life – I was so carefree,” remembers Karen Zoid of busking on Melville’s streets as a teenager. It certainly beat her grade 10 weekend job as a Mr Delivery call centre phone operator, earning R3.20 an hour towards an amplifier (“Nobody ever knows what they want, they always change their mind!”).
Out on the pavements she could perform to an audience, playing Rolling Stones tunes to 50-somethings, Smashing Pumpkins hits to students, sad Tracy Chapman ballads to loners.
Poor James, he’s had a tough life. At the posh Harrow School he was called a rude word that rhymes with “Blunt”. After training at Sandhurst (the very same academy that would later welcome Princes Willy and Harry) he was sent to keep the peace in Kosovo – virtually single-handedly – as every press release is sure to remind us. And even when the singing soldier’s debut album ‘Back To Bedlam’ was bought by 11 million people (allowing him to buy a villa in Ibiza), he was derided and ridiculed by millions more.
There are two Bruce Springsteens. One, let’s call him Bombastic Bruce, went through 15 months and marathon 16-hour recording sessions to produce just eight overblown rock tracks. The other, Bare-Bones Bruce if you will, made some bitter, morose songs at home with just a guitar, harmonica and his old tape recorder before bunging them on an album as is.
Both Springsteens are hugely talented – ‘Born To Run’ and ‘Nebraska’ aren’t considered rock classics for nothing. But you only need two fingers to count the number of times they’ve actually met up to share a bottle of whisky. There was ‘The River’. And now there’s ‘Magic’.
Wannabe drummer. Englishman in Vereeniging. ’80s pop star. Marketing-communications company boss. And now, over 20 years after breaking onto the South African music scene with his band The Helicopters, Bernard Binns is back with his second solo album.
Recorded in England, where he now lives following a brief French sojourn, ‘Outside Looking In’ finds the musician in a reflective mood, his new songs recapturing the indie-pop sensibilities of his ’80s calling card ‘Mysteries and Jealousy’, while evoking the melancholy Englishness of Tears For Fears or The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie.
“I wish politicians would realise that they can change the world if they work together like musicians collaborating, the world would be very different place,” sighs the man who has teamed up with the likes of Dave Matthews, Josh Groban and now Soweto Gospel Choir.
Vusi Mahlasela should know — for the past 30 years, he has embraced political and social messages that celebrate the importance of reaching out to others. Themes of conciliation and forgiveness run through his songs like the proverbial river through the desert.
Twenty-three songs. Four alter-egos. One batty musician. But for all its multiple personalities, bizarre high-brow concepts, and sheer overkill, the new Tori Amos effort adds up to one of the singer-songwriter’s best.
Staying true to the concept album format she’s favoured recently — so far we’ve had cover songs performed by different female personae, a woman’s journey through America, and something about bees and hives — ‘American Doll Posse’ finds the wacky woman getting political through four characters each representing different traits of her character.
Refined. It’s a word you’d use to describe afternoon tea at the Mount Nelson, a performance by the London Philharmonic, or one of those overly groomed men on the cover of GQ. Despite the recent technological advances, it’s still not really a word you’d even use in the same sentence as “diesel engine”. And yet there’s no better way to sum up Honda’s newly arrived 2.2-litre i-CTDi mill doing duty in the CR-V.
Gently pushing memories of noisy tractors, smoky Golden Arrow buses and smelly generators out of your mind, the oil burner surreptitiously gets on with its job: powering the SUV in such a way that you almost glide along. A refined engine for a refined vehicle.
Nils van der Linden