Bands that changed my life part 9 (in no particular order): After ‘varsity and after paying back the student years by way of the obligatory Dilbert cubes, we washed ashore in Knysna in April 1995, landing in a small wooden house in old Belvidere that was right near the lagoon. One night, out on the town at Tin Roof or The Pelican, Loshi found and brought home two delinquent souls he’d known from the Navy who traipsed in carrying a military-grade brand of singular madness along with their own history of great music.

 

This crew all traded tunes between each other and thus my musical boundaries expanded once again. Over the years I think I gave out Tom Waits, Pink Floyd, Live, Vusi Mahlasela, Amampondo and the Pumpkins, I got back in stuff like The Verve, Mazzy Star, Metallica, Candlebox, Foo Fighters, Countryman, Misty in Roots, Burning Spear and most recently the Pogues and the Black Keys. We still listened to the classics back then, but in those days we also threw in Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains. It was a wide sea we now drew from: at a given shindig we might play Audience, then Burning Down the House then Neil Young, the Peppers and REM, Pearl Jam, and some old Stones and maybe even an acid-jazz remix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Stripped to the Bone’ but at some point someone would always, always put on Zack de la Rocha and RATM.

 

That’s was how I found the Rage, and I’m very well pleased that we danced to ‘Bullet in the Head’ at my mate Ming’s wedding.

 

The two delinquents lived in a house near a forest of pine trees; it’s still there and I still live near it. The forest extends for miles, and in those miles, there are patches of indigenous trees to act as a reminder that this area had once had forest stretching right the way down to the edge of the cliffs that fall into the sea past the Crags. The house overlooks a range of mountains, in fact the edge of the property falls slowly away into a vast valley that sprawls before it: the coastal plain that belts the narrow strip between mountain and sea. The valley begins with forest and fynbos and then gives way to pastures, dams, farmsteads and houses and eventually the tiny dwellings that represent the nearest town. It’s fortified to the north and east by a narrow band of mountains that march out from behind the hill across the vista to as far as the eye can see – the point where the sea seems to meet those mountains in the very infinite distance.

 

That was how I got to Kransbos.

 

I moved there, and one night my mom phoned.

"How’s it going?" She asked.

 

I looked out the window onto the lawn. There was a gigantic bonfire out there, fully 3 metres high. There was an assortment of people around the conflagration, two of them doing fire breathing and the others moshing around the pit. ‘Killing in the Name’ was playing, and they were going mad, while the night came down to claim them, and they banged and moshed and threw out their arms to keep pace with the pounding crescendos driving their frenzied, sweating dance. It was a school night.

 

"Couldn’t be better, mom", I answered.