1984: Edge of Benoni, Dunswart Iron and Steel Works behind

Alas, the band that spawned such evergreen family favourites as "God and the Devil Got Married", "The Antichrist's Ball-Hairs" and "God is Coming to the East Rand" must remain forever nameless, in print at least. If the word ever gets out, and I am taken to task by (insert moral, religious, cultural interest group of your choice) the Parent's Music Resource Committee of America, the Jewish Defence League, the Vatican Police, I will say that the name was conceived by an orthodox Jew who kept the Sabbath and went to shul every Friday, and approved of by a nice Catholic boy. Because that would be the truth of the matter.

The nice Catholic boy was my friend Bob. We met at Hillel High, the only Jewish school on Johannesburg's East Rand, when he was 14 and I 15. Bob and I belonged to the small handful of goyim allowed admittance to the school. How he came to be there, I don't know. I went to Hillel because my Dad came into a good job and decided, rightly, that I would fare better in a private school than at the massive and fascistic Benoni High, which had proved to be a very difficult place for a sensitive boy like me.

At the start of every school day, the Jewish kids went off to the synagogue for morning prayers. This meant that the goyim, and a few Jewish kids whose parents had written notes exempting them from shul, could skulk around school for 45 minutes attending to other devotions of their choosing. Bob and I were particularly devoted to the large and bountiful breasts of the school librarian, Elena Ritz, and later to the sheer sexiness of her gentile successor, Traci Korff, who went on to grace the front cover of South African Cosmopolitan magazine (it's true!). And so we spent our mornings in the library leering and snickering at these poor girls, squeezing our zits, and talking about Heavy Metal.

Had I never left the North of England for South Africa, I would surely have become a punk; but since I grew up on the East Rand, I was destined to become a teenage heavy metal fan. The first song I ever remember liking was 'Blockbuster' by glam rockers The Sweet circa 1973, when I was 6 or 7 years old. It was the relative heaviness of the guitar sound that grabbed me. I cried to my parents the week the song was knocked off the Top of the Pops Number One slot by 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree'. My Mom told me not to be so silly because 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon' was "a very nice song". Thus traumatised, I embarked upon an 8-year quest to find that magic heavy sound again. This was no easy task in apartheid South Africa, which did not exactly lie on the major thoroughfares of Western pop culture. Church helped, though (yes, church!).

I was obliged to attend various levels of Sunday school and/or church from age 5 to about 15. The Northfields Methodist Church, Benoni, was the second-largest in South Africa; it offered Sunday schools, youth chapels and youth clubs at every level, many filled with guitar-strumming Christian hippie types who would lead sing-a-longs of 'Yes, Jesus Loves Me' and 'If You Love Him and You Know it Clap Your Hands', etc. The youth church was filled with beautiful untouchable girls and I would always stand up to sing these songs with a giant boner displayed for all the world to see in the brown nylon flared trousers my Mom used to make me wear on Sundays.

The first rock gig I ever saw was 'Apostle' in the church hall. The band consisted of two guys from church called Steve and Peter, and a R15 drum machine. If the truth be told, they rocked somewhat. But the real turning point was for me was a presentation on the evils of pop music by a young crusader with a ghetto blaster in the youth chapel. In a one-hour sermon, I was treated to reverse-play versions of songs by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and ELO(!). The exercise was supposed to reveal to the congregation the alleged evils of backward-masking, and the guy also exposed us to the straight-forward heaviness of supposed Satanists Black Sabbath and the like. This stuff sounded great! I had never heard anything like it before. It was heavy, heavy, heavy. My quest was at an end, and I can positively say that church made me more evil.

I conferred with Bob in the school library the following morning. Up until then, we had listened to Casey Casem's American Top 40 on Radio 702. We knew many of the songs on the charts and had, at least, discovered early Van Halen there, but now we had a new mission: HEAVY METAL. In the wake of Sabbath followed AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Ozzy, and my all-time faves, Motörhead. Bob took to the new project with gusto and was cheerfully crucifying frogs and making pacts with the Devil faster than you could say "People think I'm insane because I am frowning all the time." In fact, Bob did a number of arguably unsavoury things in high school. A list of some of his achievements is included here for your erudition.

Picture the setting: a boy from a happy-clappy Methodist church, his wayward Catholic friend (with all the potential for guilt and perversion that that implies), both with a passion for heavy metal, and all in the context of a Jewish school. Something just had to happen.

In his penultimate school year, Bob left Hillel to attend Damelin College in downtown Jo'burg. Damelin was something of a rarity in South African education in that was a college for high school students that offered the all the freedoms of a university campus: freedom from school uniforms and hair regulations, freedom to smoke at school, freedom to roam off campus between lessons, freedom to go to Bar Bonanza at lunchtime and join in choruses of 'War Pigs' ("Generals gathered in their masses...," etc.)

It was on one such excursion that Bob met kleptomaniac heavy metal super fan Howard Schenker. For those of you who have seen Zappa's movie 200 Motels, Schenker rather resembled Mark Volman (a.k.a. The Flourescent Leech) of the 'Flo' & Eddie' Mothers of Invention: large and lardy, long black greasy hair, glasses. It is probably no exaggeration to say that he was South Africa's number one HM fan. His album collection ran into several hundred titles - all of them pure metal. Given that these events took place circa 1983-84, there cannot have been many metal albums in the world - barring a few Czech and Soviet items - that he did not own. Bob reckoned that Schenker funded this enterprise by siphoning (a lot) of money off his father's business and, wherever possible, through straightforward theft. For some reason, I always got nervous when Schenker came to my house.

The plan was for Schenker to form the nucleus of a metal band with Bob on vocals, myself on bass and Schenker on guitar. Schenker had no musical ability whatsoever and could not play an instrument, but we figured that he was best suited to the task due to his vast knowledge of HM. He was later relegated to bass duties, however, after I said that his fingers were too fat for the guitar fretboard. In the event, all our negotiations, top-level board meetings, drunken arguments, etc. about who was going to do what in the band proved to be academic, because this promising line-up never even got to rehearse together.

Schenker did go on to greater and better things for a while. He managed to convince a Radio 5 deejay that he was the cousin of German guitar ace Michael Schenker. The deejay invited him on to his show to talk about HM, and Schenker and the deejay later appeared on TV as co-presenters of a special HM edition of Pop Shop - probably South Africa's first-ever TV show about heavy metal. And that's the truth.

I left school at the end of '83 and landed a job as a junior sales rep with Chesebrough-Pond's, the company that makes Vaseline. And that's the truth. In 1984, kid drummer Phil Cresswell came to the band through divine intervention: he was the brother of a girl I knew from church. Phil had his own drum kit, a garage to practise in and a sweet and indulgent Mom who smiled at Bob and me a lot and commented favourably on our appearance. Bob had a microphone that had been bequeathed to Schenker by the congregation of the Springs Synagogue when they weren't looking. I had a R100 boere guitar and a 5-watt battery amp that provided a modicum of distortion if you turned the dial all the way round to 31/4. We were ready to rock.

We let rip in Phil's garage, me with my repertoire of 4 chords, Phil unleashing his entire arsenal of one lolloping beat, Bob serving up roaring and vomit noises. We had no songs and we were crap, but we thought we were great. Over 3 or 4 garage sessions, we improvised a bunch of sort-of songs. Bob, when drunk, spewed out reams of mock-metal lyrics, many of them of a quasi-religious or devotional nature, e.g. God and Satan have a battle and then make up and get married (the new sequel to Paradise Lost?), young crusaders embark on a quest to find the pubes of the Antichrist, etc. We also had an almost-proper song with identifiable verses, called 'There in the Grave', and our outro, of which we were especially proud. This consisted of lots of crashing cymbals, atonal guitar screeching and giant puke noises, courtesy of Bob.

Meanwhile, in the opposite hemisphere, the German group Trio scored big with the irresistible 'Da Da Da'. Bob and I dug Trio's album and we were also interested in them because they had the same line-up as us: guitar, drums, vocals and no bass. If our German counterparts were going to have a hit in English, then we had no choice but to answer in German. I wrote a 4-chord ditty called 'Ich Bin. Du Bist' and took it down to Phil's garage one night. I still have one of those old rehearsal tapes and so, reader, I am able to offer you the following transcript of the discussion we had about this little number.

Pete: Whore! Whore! In the middle of every space there's a whore! Lemme jus' do a bit o flute playing... [Context unclear]

Bob: Let's do that 'Ich Bin, Du Bist'.

P: Just for you, Bob has never sung fucking 'Ich Bin, Du Bist' before. It's a very difficult song.

B: I wanna sing it in English.

P: No. sing it in German, if you don't mind.

B: I can't fucking read your writing.

P: [starts playing]

B: What the fuck is that?

P: Uh, I got the wrong chords.

B: Yeah, Fucker... FUCKERRRRR! "Ich bin eine geschossen wurst, du bist das grau haus, ja!"

The time had come for the band to unleash itself on the world. Well, on Benoni, at least. Or perhaps just on my brother David's classmates, which is what we went and did. David organised a party at home for his Standard 8 (age 15 approx.) classmates at Wordsworth High. The Band That Must Not Speak Its Name was to provide the live entertainment, while our parents gamely agreed to go out for a few hours and leave the house to the kids.

At 34, I would still say that this was one of the wilder parties I have ever been to. Much drinking of alcohol, sniffing of solvents, interference with other people's private parts, breaking of concrete sinks, theft of property and general puking up all over the place was had by all. In the midst of all this, us, making our racket. Bob, true to form, was pissed out of his mind. He could barely stand, and definitely couldn't remember any lyrics, so he propped himself up against a wall with his forehead, placed his songbook open at his feet and shouted the words into the microphone. Most kids at the party paid us scant attention, being otherwise occupied in the bushes or around the back of the house, but we didn't mind because we were playing our first gig. It also turned out to be our last gig because Phil's family transplanted themselves to Cape Town a few months later.

After the show, Bob fell in lust with a girl who threw up in my bedroom. (He later told me he was attracted to her because she threw up in my bedroom.) Under the influence of his tender ministrations, she agreed to see him again. I had just started dating Annette, an Afrikaans nurse from Kempton Park, so the race was on to see who could lose their virginity first - Bob or me. I tried, in my fumbling and inexperienced way, to work my way around to home base with Annette as quickly as I could, but Bob beat me to the ultimate prize by 24 hours. The bastard. So determined was he to win that he got the girl out of her house during a thunderstorm and did the deed in a nearby veld in the rain. I will never live it down.

After Phil moved to Cape Town, Bob and I went on to write and record some acoustic tunes, notably 'Roche 5mg', 'The Moon at Noon' and 'No Fun to be a Nun'. Compared to the cod punk/metal we had done before, I suppose that this stuff was half-way decent and at least marked the beginnings of proper songwriting. 'Roche 5mg' was a song about Valium while the other two continued the irreverent religious themes of our earlier material. 'No Fun to be a Nun', probably our best-known song, went something like this:

The last piece of music we ever did was a collaboration with another friend from Hillel, Kevin. The song was a sinister epic called 'God is Coming to the East Rand,' words courtesy of Kevin, who probably lifted the idea from the play Woza Albert. Chanting in the accents of the South African Police, we sang:

By this time, we were a little more mature, perhaps 19 or 20. It had been a long slow dawning, but at least we were beginning to reflect the realities of our world in our music. Better, I think, than fuelling our own insane mythologies, which is what we had done previously. As for the music itself, I can look back and say that I have a lot of affection for what we did. We knew nothing and because we knew nothing, we were free to create whatever came into our heads. I am going to make a preposterous claim now and say that J & the JBs (for that was our acronym) is the nearest thing I have ever heard to Trout Mask-era Beefheart. Wild and atonal with off-centre rhythms and gut-busting vocals, we were the aural equivalent of black and red biro drawings made by a child in the throes of an epileptic fit.