A mad scientist dressed all in black is playing passionate, tastefully screaming guitar solos on a beautiful green Fernandes. His music pushes ever so slightly into abstraction without ever losing its relationship with the underlying chord progression: always threatening to burst through into atonalism but never quite doing so, which (coupled with some masterful feedback control) creates a really beautiful tension. Accompanying him is this sixties-throwback character pounding a large drum kit like a man possessed, and an ice-cool space chick with very short hair playing minimalist keyboard bass.

To see musicians in Jo'burg who obviously shared something of this sensibility was indeed a thrill.  

The guitarist's experience is that he is playing a red Fernandes. He is going to kill the drummer, who has completely lost the beat, has clearly had some kind of seizure and is under the illusion that he is the reincarnation of Keith Moon. All the guitarist had wanted was some decent backing for his songs, not complete Dada meltdown. It would be a miracle if they made it to the end of the set at this rate. 

The set finishes with a fantastic, soaring song called 'One River', which features a very long, Zappa-esque guitar solo (bring on the mild recreational drugs!). The band leaves the stage and goes to sit with their friends. I really want to express my appreciation. Dare I approach the hallowed table of the great? I sidle over, grinning and nodding awkwardly. "Hey man, do you like Zappa? Are you into Steve Vai?" I ask the mad scientist. And he says...  

"Ja"!  

The virtuoso had deigned speak with me. Truly, this was a coup. I don't remember much of the conversation, except that the guitarist, whose name was Meinhardt, told me that he worked at Campus Books opposite Wits University, where I was a student.

Meinhardt's experience was that someone had actually come to express appreciation of his music. This was a great day indeed. The poor naive Witsie must be recruited to the cause forthwith. Harpo Speaks needed groupies.  

Some days or weeks later, I ventured into Campus Books and skulked around the South African literature section hoping to catch Meinhardt´s attention. Over the months that followed, we had many conversations over the stacked, colourful volumes of Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Essop Patel, Professor Njabulo Ndebele, J.M. Coetzee and others in the Ravan Press stable -- with Meinhardt sucking furtively on roll-ups, his internal radar scanning the area constantly for signs of his boss. He would sometimes dart off mid-sentence to attend to a customer or, if his boss appeared, to attend to whatever it was he was supposed to have been doing instead of talking to me. I can´t remember what we talked about, probably some politics. Everybody talked politics in those days -- these were the darkest years before the dawn of Mandela´s release, the apartheid regime´s desperate last stand, the time of P.W. Botha´s State of Emergency, international sanctions, the rout of the South African army in Angola, the rise of the UDF and COSATU, strikes, mass detentions, police in riot gear, teargas, dogs, sjamboks on campus, Amandla, Ngwetu! Aluta Continua!

... But mostly we talked about music I guess.

Life for the average teenager was grim. For most of us -- car-less and too young to drive -- the clubs and music bars of Jo´burg might as well have been on Mars for all the good they did us. Speaking of Mars, I´ve met a fair number of East Rand folks who are really into science-fiction, space travel, flying saucers, that kind of thing. Perhaps suburban wastelands like Benoni, Germiston and Springs leave just too much space for the imagination to run riot (remember The Radio Rats and 'ZX Dan'?). Certainly, I spent most of my teen years dreaming of Star Wars, UFOs, sci-fi comix, Star Wars girls, bald UFO girls with unbelievable bodies like the one in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, sci-fi comics girls like Judge Hershey from 2000AD, with breasts bursting out of one-piece jump-suits, fantastic bedroom scenes involving said bald alien girl, various assorted girls from church and school and one very attractive teacher who used to wear a jump-suit-like garment to school. I, of course, was Luke Skywalker with a large pulsating lightsaber, the sole male in the scenario.  

Interests such as these first brought myself and co-Roach Clifford van Ommen together. Clifford is my brother David´s best friend and they have known each other since Grade school. I got to know him in my early teens through our shared passion for the sci-fi comic 2000AD. There was an associated title called StarLord, which encouraged readers to set up their own ´StarTrooper´ units subject to the supreme galactic command of Mr StarLord himself. Benoni never appreciated the fact, but for a period in the late seventies or early eighties, the town enjoyed the protection of its very own StarTrooper unit made up of David and Clifford, with myself as commander. One of several missions that I cooked up for us was to infiltrate and systematically undermine The Broederbond, a sinister secret Afrikaner organisation I had read about in the Sunday papers. I began corresponding with a group of StarTroopers in England, who duly appointed me ´Admiral of Africa´. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they say, and I ruled the Benoni unit with a fascistic fervour that eclipsed even Judge Dredd´s draconian antics (actually, I probably learned my behaviour from him in the first place). During one of our ´training exercises´ in the veld behind the Methodist church I inflicted some kind of physical abuse on Clifford, an act for which I am eternally ashamed (sorry Cliffie).  

That injury behind us, we later went on to play music together. I had taught myself to play basic acoustic guitar at age eleven, so when I wasn´t being Luke Skywalker, I was fantasising about being a pop star surrounded by various assorted girls from church and school, bald-headed alien girl, teacher in jump-suit, etc. Clifford, meanwhile, had been taking the business of playing guitar rather more seriously, and received lessons from a serious Benoni muso called Steve Baker.  

Cliff and I began jamming together when I was maybe 18 or 19 -- we started very slowly and very occasionally, with Clifford playing Van Halen-style riffs and me picking out basslines on a boere electric guitar I had purchased for R100 with my first paycheque after leaving school. A couple of years on, we had amassed the following: one cover of a Motörhead cover of a Byrds tune, one half-cocked version of Black Sabbath´s 'Paranoid' and a twelve-bar blues called Got my Bottle, which I had partly ripped off from Eric Clapton's 'I Can´t Hold Out'.  

One day in Campus Books, Meinhardt asked me if we wanted to be his support band. The gig was a few nights at the Oxford Hotel. Naturally, I was thrilled at the prospect, but also at pains to point out the few small obstacles that appeared to stand in our way: (1) I did not own a bass; (2) we did not have a drummer; (3) we had no singer; (4) we had no songs.  

We arranged to get together one Saturday and test the musical waters. Clifford and I drove over from Benoni and we began jamming in a lock-up garage in Yeoville, with M tapping out the beat on Eric´s humungous drum kit. Something musical happened, I can´t remember what, but I´m sure it fell far short of magical. Meinhardt gave us some pointers and taught me his system for figuring out the major scales and their relative minors across the entire 12 frets of the fretboard. I took away from that day the only music tuition I had ever received and also Meinhardt´s Beatle Bass (a Hohner copy of a Hofner), which he very kindly loaned to me. And that was all I needed to get started.  

I mapped out some of my favourite-sounding scales (mainly Em, Am, A pentatonic and E pentatonic) on fretboard charts and made up verse/chorus basslines for songs, each of which was based on a single chart. My basslines, married to Cliff´s riffs, laid the foundations for some basic songs. Lyrics have never been my strong point, but I had some rather talented friends who, for a plate of chips in the Wits canteen, could be persuaded to scrawl a few rhyming couplets on a paper napkin. My old school friend Saul Sacks, then a dentistry student, penned one of the most memorable lyrics, which later became our 'anthem' Bokjoll. Could this be the Jo'burg version of The Clash's 'London Calling'? 

Spin your mags

Where these methods failed, I could usually get by with cobbled-together bits of other people´s poetry and lyrics. An early song called Hollow Man, for example, comprised ideas from T.S. Eliot´s famous poem and some lines of a Motörhead song! Another great source of inspiration was schizophrenic poet Wopko Jensma who, last I heard, was languishing in a Salvation Army hostel in Jo'burg. His poem "In Memoriam Ben Zwane" inspired another early song, Train's a-Comin':  

ma people, god got ya covered

Then came the challenge of actually singing this stuff. I discovered that I could belt out the numbers in a kind of David Byrne meets Rocky Horror baritone foghorn, and play the bass on automatic pilot, as long as I learned the basslines really, really well beforehand. We now had five or six songs, a guitar and bass, and vocals. Drums came in the form of Alec Leicher, a fine bass player and true gent whom Clifford and I knew from Wits. Alec gamely offered to play drums for us, despite having only a smattering of knowledge of percussion. It all came together (sort of) at rehearsals in Alec's garage in Alberton, South Johannesburg. Having started out with next to nothing just two months earlier, we were now ready, in a nervous and wobbly kind of a way, to play the Oxford. The one remaining task was to find a name.

Cliff and I had been chewing over band names for a while, a process almost as central to the life of a new band as actually playing the music. Anyone who has ever tried to get a band together will probably know what I'm talking about. The routine goes something like this: crack open some beers and light up a fag; have a pseudo-intellectual discussion about what your music really, really means; think up a portentous, self-conscious name that captures this meaning, or so you believe (e.g. we hit upon Antic Hay, after Aldous Huxley's novel); agree that this will be your band's name, although inwardly you remain unconvinced; drink a few more beers; suggest ridiculous, improbable names such as "The Bedpan Band", "Sneff and the Grunts", "Algernon Skrewer and the Germs from Space", etc. Decide that you are going to become a comedy punk band. At the next rehearsal, say: "Jeez guys, what are we going to call ourselves?" Agree to get together for drinks after rehearsal to choose a name.  

The name that felt right eventually popped out quite spontaneously on Clifford's driveway as we were walking back to my car after a rehearsal. "Mystery Roach" was the title of an obscure song from Zappa's 200 Motels album (the finest prize I ever plucked from the bargain bin at Hillbrow Records).  We liked it because a "mystery roach" was what we thought we sounded like, or wanted to sound like -- fast, scuttling, cartoon-like, subversive. Meinhardt's Beatle bass, with its short-scale neck and next-to-zero sustain, lent itself to a just such a playing style, and Clifford was already a master of super-fast post-metal phrasing. The Roach concept at the outset was just a sound, a vibe that we wanted to have, and was not intended to convey any kind of special meaning. Of course, the drug connotations of 'roach' did not escape us, and a friend explained that there is a similar-sounding word in Hebrew which means breath, spirit, or wind -- all of which was good. It also occurred to me that the cockroach is the despised cousin of the beetle, so the name had some resonance with rock history, too.  

And so came The Oxford Hotel. One thing I remember about the stage there was that it was literally covered with cables. For some reason, wiring the whole set-up -- which included some rack-mounted units and one of those terrible ´eighties electronic drum kits -- into the mixing desk was a "technical nightmare". At least, that's how Meinhardt felt about it on soundcheck night. But the gigs happened, Harpo Speaks did their thing, as did Kevin Botha's band (I forget their name) and we made our debut. Friends came and danced, some looked a little uncomfortable. One guy who was a total stranger danced a lot, so he must have genuinely digged our music! (OK, so he was pissed out of his mind.) One girl said that we reminded her of The Cramps. I'm sure we were pretty dire, but it was a beginning.

Over the next months, we developed the Mystery Roach concept further. Whereas previously our name had merely represented a particular kind of feel, now it defined our intentions. I think we were trying to imagine ourselves into a whole new sub-genre, which took something from Zappa to express the surreal quality of our suburban lives, something from heavy metal to express all the ways in which we had been Americanised, something from the blues, and a lot from the Jo'burg alternative music scene at that time. We wrote new songs of greater sophistication. These included the instrumental Roach's Waltz and another Saul Sacks klassik, Plaashond se Vastrap, which began:

Die taal, die sterf

Eric was seconded from Harpo speaks and became our drummer for gigs at the now-legendary Jameson's in support of The Kêrels (the sound engineer, Thabang, liked us); and on New Year's Eve at The Junction, supporting Larry Amos. Shortly thereafter, the army caught up with Eric and hauled him in for 'national service'. By now, I had finished university, which meant that I, too, was no longer exempted from conscription into the apartheid army.

The regime came down hard on conscientious objectors in the ´eighties. The alternative to a two-year stint spent policing one's fellow countrymen or fighting undeclared wars against communism in Angola or Mozambique was six-years in prison. During my time at university, the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), of which I was nominally a member, was banned. I was quite prepared to go to jail rather than serve in an army set up to defend apartheid. Prison was not a very likely option, however, as I held a British passport and would have been stupid not to use it to get out of the country. The Junction gig was 31 December 1987. My call up was for August ´88. I had seven months. After university, my Dad put in a word for me at the plastics factory where he was a manager, and I went to work stacking boxes. The job enabled me to save R100 per week. A plane ticket to London cost over R2,000, plus I would need money to survive when (if) I arrived in Britain.  

The highlight of the Jo'burg musical year (as far as I was concerned) was Wits University's Free People's Concert -- a free, all-day live music event for a people who would be free. The music was a multi-ethnic mix of African pop, alternative rock, township jive, even punk -- all of it original and home-grown. I got friendly with one of the organisers who had seen us at Jameson's and liked us, and we got the gig.  

Once again, we found ourselves without a drummer. But the angels led us to teen prodigy Wayne Houghton, a salesman in the shop where I had bought my first boere guitar. Cliff and I strolled in there one Saturday to pick up some new bass strings, we got talking and decided to meet for a jam. Wayne was the perfect Roach drummer: a little bit jazzy, a little bit comical, accomplished, and smart (maybe it's a Benoni thing). The jam sessions we had in his parent's laundry room became the stuff of private legend.  

A warm-up gig for the Free People's was in order, and I managed to blag us a couple of support slots at The King of Clubs. On the second night, the sound engineer hated us, set the desk for an appalling mix and abandoned the room; my brother overheard the manager referring to me as "an arsehole" and almost hit him. I remember wandering around the plastics factory in a depression for days afterwards, half-inclined to call off the Free People's gig.

Maybe the King of Clubs experience steeled us, for were well-rehearsed and sure of ourselves when the big day arrived in February 1988. We took the Free People's stage in the late morning under a big African sky with clouds like cream. A mere seven or so months had passed since those first rehearsals in Alec's garage. I think that we came a long way in that short time. The set came off like a dream; I would like to believe that none us played a bum note.

The Free People's was to have been our last gig, for I had found a means to get out of the country sooner than anticipated. A guy at Wits was selling the last leg of a round-the-world ticket for R1,000 or so. The destination was London, the departure date fixed for April. Though I had been born in England, no matter how hard I tried, I could imagine the place I was bound for only as a blank white field like still snow on a TV screen -- a White Void.  

About a week before my departure, I received an unexpected call from Thabang at Jameson's. One of the bands booked for that evening had cancelled, could we help him out? Wayne, Clifford and I loaded our gear into the car and headed down the R22 together one last time. We hadn't played together for some weeks, and so rehearsed silently at the side of the stage, with Cliff and I playing unplugged and Wayne tapping out the beats on a tin can. The gig went down fine, and I remember Herman, the proprietor, watching us from the door. As we made to leave at the end of the evening, he thrust a wad of money at us. We had just played our first paying gig at Jameson's.  

A week or so later, I was on a plane flying into the White Void. I became an adult somewhere over the Atlantic in the middle of the night, sitting next to a nice old lady who ordered kosher meals. The fields of England were green like fluorescent snot, the sky cloying grey and damp all around me, nothing like the big sky of Africa. Breyten Breytenbach wrote that an exile lives abroad as the moon lives in a lake, and I found this to be true. I would return four years later to reconvene Roach for the first Rustler's Valley festival, but that is another story.  

Eleven years on, I would say that we were a rather green band with some excellent original ideas. We had yet to develop the technical expertise needed to realise our vision, but I believe that would have come with time. To the extent that we had a vision, perhaps it went something like this: We are the contradiction crawling out from beneath your gleaming new fridge-freezer (hire purchase from Dion's Superstore, Boksburg), scuttling across the kitchen tiles where the maid stands and stares sullenly into the sink; we are the cartoon nightmare of plastic white suburbia, the surreal tension of emergency-era South Africa. Lest this all sound too grandiose, I should add that we were also just a bunch of kids looking for a good time.  

my name is zanouki

I was 22 when I left South Africa. My personal good times, like those of many South Africans, were taken away by the political realities of the day. We lived in an abnormal society which, on the one hand, made us want to express its contradictions creatively and on the other, cut short our self-expression. But we would not have happened had we not lived in South Africa at that particular time in history; we would not have happened if James Philips had not inspired me; we would not have happened had Meinhardt not given us a helping hand, so thanks Meinhardt, this is for you.

London, 25 October 1999

CLIFF'S COMMENTS

We were paid (unasked for) at the last concert at Jameson's by the manager as we were leaving. Payment: some complementary tickets to a jazz concert at Shareworld. I think we went with Wayne and Vinca (very unclear about this). The only time we were actually paid was for the New Year's concert where Larry Amos played. I can't recall the name of the place but we were paid R100-00. We gave Eric R40 since he was soon to leave for the army.

Clifford (23 October 2000)

MEINHARDT'S MADNESS Meinhardt's vast website includes a page called 'Music Photos', where u can see pix of Harpo Speaks, more pix of Cliff, Eric and Wayne, and of course, Meinhardt himself in various guises. Well worth checking out: http://www.oocities.org/tokyo/temple/2884

JAMES PHILIPS/CHERRY FACED LURCHERS The great man is dead, but his name and music burn brightly still. Read about his life and the musical legacy he left to South Africa in these SA newspaper obits: James Philips e-shrine 1 | e-shrine 2