(Richard
Haslop)
Respected music guru, raconteur supreme and
multi-talented musician, Richard Haslop, will be giving two presentations and is
part of a post-movie screening discussion at the 26th Hilton Arts Festival 2018
on September 15.
“Attendance at the presentations, where I
will talk about the music and play examples to illustrate, is free. And despite
the festival programme photo I will be playing CDs only and not a musical
instrument! Thereafter I’ll be at the film, The
Fun’s Not Over, and taking part in a Q&A session with director Michael
Cross afterwards,” he explains.
His two formal presentations are at 10h00: A Naartjie In Our Sosatie - Originally
formed to give unsigned rock bands in the general neighbourhood of punk and new
wave a relatively cheap place to record, and named after the mobility that its
caravan studio provided rather than the furtive nature of the music business,
Shifty Records soon gave a voice to independent, politically orientated South
Africans in an era when such voices were absent not only from the airwaves but
from most record shops. 35 years after its first album release, we pay tribute,
through a selection of tracks both memorable and obscure, to a label whose
output represented an essential slice of South African cultural territory that
might otherwise have been completely ignored.
At noon, he will present: Thousands Are Sailing - Have you heard
about the Scottish boomerang? It doesn’t come back … it just lies there and
sings about coming back. And how beautifully it sings! From songs of 18th
century Australian transportation to the sounds of the Calais Jungle, some of
the world’s most heartfelt music has come out of immigration, emigration and
exile, and this flow seems unlikely to be stemmed any time soon. We choose an
hour or so’s worth of prime examples from the hundreds of possibilities.
Finally, at 14h00 there is a screening of
the film, The Fun’s Not Over: The James Phillips Story. Merging from
Springs, an apparently unprepossessing East Rand mining town that had nevertheless
spawned the only briefly-famous yet enduringly-loved Radio Rats, James Phillips
became about as close to a cult figure as South African rock music has
produced. Having announced himself through the darkly political punk influences
of Corporal Punishment, and then the near-mythical Voice Of Nooit cassette by the short-lived Illegal Gathering, this
English-speaking preacher’s son, by then not altogether comfortably disguised
as Bernoldus Niemand, persuaded a previously somewhat sheepish Afrikaans
musical underground into the public eye as he kickstarted the important Voëlvry
movement. As leader of the Cherry Faced Lurchers, he wrote and recorded Shot Down, considered by several
commentators to be among South Africa’s greatest ever rock songs, and was responsible
for a number of wonderful live rock ’n’ roll memories at a time when good South
African news was hard to find. Seemingly the unlikeliest of academics, he
undertook formal musical studies, turning in his Wie Is Bernoldus Niemand? album as a university thesis, and his
considerable musical growth was soon revealed in the composition and
arrangements for his last album, Sunny
Skies, while the posthumously released demos, Soul Ou, the title an impressively accurate description of Phillips
himself, demonstrated the increased depth and insight of his song-writing.
“Yet, for all the respect and admiration he
engendered among his peers, Phillips, who died in 1995 from injuries sustained
in a motor accident, was never more than a marginal figure in the greater
scheme of South African musical things. In this beautifully pitched
documentary, full of humour yet deeply moving at the same time, Durban film
maker Michael Cross (Rockstardom: The
Journey of a Small Town Songwriter; Jiving And Dying: The Radio Rats Story) covers
all this and a great deal more as he gets right under Phillips’s skin,
transcending what might easily have become a cosy cultishness of reminiscence
and rumour in order to tell an important South African story,” he says.
The 26th annual Hilton Arts Festival will
take place in the beautiful grounds of the Hilton College from September 14 to
16, 2018. The full programme is on www.hiltonfestival.co.za. Online bookings
are open and programmes are available from various outlets in KZN. Refer to
website for list of outlets.
The festival would not be possible without
the generous support of Hilton College, Grindrod Bank, Black Coffee Design, DWR
Distribution, Extreme Events, Bidvest Car Rental, KZN Dept of Arts &
Culture, Redlands Hotel, Assitej South Africa, Loud Crowd, Sappi, BASA, RMB and
Corona.
For more information visit
http://www.hiltonfestival.co.za/ or like the Facebook page, Hilton Arts
Festival. Follow us on Twitter @HiltonFest and Instagram. All enquiries on 033
383 0126 / 7 or tickets@hiltoncollege.com