Kalahari Surfers
The Kalahari Surfers are a "fictional group" which have served as a long-standing stage name for Warrick Sony's music. He is the only permanent member of the band, and brings in other musicians as and when needed. He adopted the name partly to protect himself from the authorities. The Surfers' music was the first radical white anti-apartheid pop in South Africa, and began with a 1982 home-recorded cassette titled "Gross National Products". Sony distributed it himself; the South African Sunday Times described it as a "daring home-mixed collection of subliminal jive rhythms, sad-sweet jazz sounds, tabla burps, church bells, bird shrieks, political speeches and... other... found sounds", and chose it as one of their three "Terrific Tapes of 1983". The second release was a double single package, "Burning Tractors Keep Us Warm", released by Pure Freude Records. German group Can were involved with this label.
Warrick Sony worked as a freelance sound engineer in the South African film industry, and used this to acquire many of the sound samples he later used in his music. Shifty Records tried to release the 1984 album Own Affairs, but could not find a vinyl plant which would press it. Chris Cutler's London-based Recommended Records pressed the album, the start of a long-standing alliance. Own Affairs was hailed as breathtaking, innovative and humorous by the Weekly Mail. The Sunday Times called it "a music born from the spilled seed of our national sickness and nurtured to nightmarehood in the moral drought of daily life/politics". Cutler helped set up tours, and in 1985 a second album, Living in the Heart of the Beast, was released. Jon Savage wrote in the New Statesman that it was a "success", praised its "viciously critical (and historically intelligent) lyrics", and compared it with early Zappa. The NME called it "brave". The third album, Sleep Armed (1987), has been called "the best snapshot we have of South Africa at the time, right down to the jacket photo of rich surfers on Umhlanga Roxx, a posh White beach in Durban".
In 1986, with a live band comprising Mick Hobbs on bass, Alig (from Family Fodder) on keyboards, Tim Hodgkinson (keyboards, sax and slide guitar), and Chris Cutler on drums, Sony performed in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, the Festival des Politischen Liedes in East Berlin, and London. In 1989 they were the first South African band invited to play in the Soviet Union, where they played Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga.
In 1989 the South African authorities banned the fourth album Bigger Than Jesus, due to concerns about the song "Gutted With The Glory"'s use of the Lord's Prayer, which they deemed "abhorrent and hurtful". A shopper, Mevrou Mulder of Cape Town, was so offended by seeing the record on sale that she organised a petition to the Directorate of Publications. She complained: "The name alone is enough to make any Christian furious, not to mention the words. We as reborn Christians object to the publication of this record and also the distribution of it." Sony successfully appealed, and the record was unbanned on condition that the name was changed to Beachbomb. Personality magazine said the album "alternates between sheer poetic brilliance and intellectual nonsense." The first three albums remained banned in South Africa.
Sony worked as a journalist in covering the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in February 1990, at first for CBS and ABC then later for British television. He has used some of the recordings he made as a journalist in his musical work. He worked with Donald Woods on a documentary at this time. Sony worked with Lloyd Ross at Shifty Records from 1992, mostly concentrating on developing and promoting foreign African music in South Africa. He introduced the use of 16-track recording and became a partner in the company when Ivan Kadey emigrated.
In 1997 Sony left Johannesburg, where he had lived since 1983, after being shot in a hijacking. In 1998 he said he had been against the cultural boycott of South Africa in the apartheid era, as it had prevented important ideas from coming to the country.
Since the turn of the millennium Sony has released six more Kalahari Surfers albums. Akasic Record (2001) is "a highly sophisticated foray into African-flavoured dubfunk"; Muti Media (2003) features a sculpture by Brett Murray on the cover, and Zukile Malahlana from Marekta appears on the album. Conspiracy of Silence (2005) and Panga Management (2007) followed. One Party State (2010) was released on Microdot and debuted at the African Soul Rebels Tour in the UK alongside Oumou Sangaré & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou. It features Sowetan poet Lesego Rampolokeng on four tracks. The Mail & Guardian called it "a politically drenched album... track for track the most solid South African release of 2010". The Kalahari Surfers performed at the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival in early 2012, and released a live album of the performance. Agitprop was released later in 2012, on Sjambok Music; it was first played at the Unyazi Festival in Durban in September. Agitprop explores Sony's fears about South Africa in the 2010s becoming a one party state under the African National Congress, and includes a song about chemical warfare scientist Wouter Basson. South African Rolling Stone compared it to the KLF, Sly and Robbie and Pink Floyd, and described its "slow evolution of nuance" towards the "desolately upbeat" "Hostile Takeover". Sony says the album was mostly written on the train while commuting to work; he calls the genre "Voktronic, ... a blend of folktronic, and volkspiele with a dose of electronic experimental dubstoep and experimental rolled up into one fat two blade stereo hit."
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