Shifty Records was born 30 years ago. Tymon Smith reminisced with its founder about his caravan of musical orphans
Lloyd Ross turns to me as we're about to go into his house and says: "I'm having trouble remembering things. I'm still trying to figure out if it's the good or bad things I can't remember, though."
This is not what a journalist wants to hear before sitting down for an interview. But over the course of the next hour, it emerges that Ross's memory is doing just fine. We're talking about Shifty Records, the label he started in a caravan in the 1980s, and which is due for recognition next month for its contribution to the alternative music scene during the darkest days of South Africa's history.
As a collector I've accumulated as many of the label's records as I've been able to over the years, but I knew Ross and his label's name long before I started buying vinyl. My father had lived in a commune in Parktown, where Ross also lived with label co-founder Ivan Kadey, a member of the multiracial punk band National Wake.
Shifty's catalogue was wildly eclectic, ranging from Afro-jazz to New Wave, spoken word and anti-establishment Afrikaans rock (Johannes Kerkorrel, Koos Kombuis and Bernoldus Niemand, aka James Phillips).
The story of Shifty begins on Ross's 21st birthday in 1978, when he hitchhiked from Cape Town to Johannesburg to play guitar with Springs rockers The Radio Rats. In the 10 months he spent in the band, Ross met Phillips and Carl Raubenheimer, who together with Mark Bennett performed as Corporal Punishment.
Ross had been exposed to the early days of the punk movement in the UK, and was inspired by Corporal Punishment. "It was the punk thing where you immediately feel the energy. It's your energy and they're saying what you want to say - except they're saying it in a way that you never really could, because you can't write songs like that."
After a stint in Cape Town working in a pizza parlour, Ross returned to Joburg and landed a job recording sound for film and television. While working on the set of Afrikaans prison drama Vyfster in 1982, he seized a gap and became a best-selling musician. "The person that had been commissioned to write the theme music f***ed it up and so they fired him.
So I said, 'OK, I'll try it out.' So I wrote that little ditty and they said, 'Fine.' It was my first real musical success, I suppose, and for a very long time it was my only musical success in terms of financial gain."
The Vyfster theme was recorded in a caravan fitted out with gear that Ross and Kadey had bought. The caravan would become the control booth for many of the early Shifty recordings, beginning in 1983 with an obscure Afro-jazz fusion band from Lesotho: Sankomota. Ross had heard the band in a Maseru hotel, while working on a documentary about mohair in the mountain kingdom.
Sankomota's eponymous debut was the first album recorded by Shifty, and remains a classic. It also expanded Ross's horizons. "The studio was built to document the new wave scene in Joburg, but it didn't take me long to hook onto the idea that it could be used for any kind of music that had originality and energy, and was saying something different about this place than the kind of music you were hearing on the radio."
In 1985 Ross made contact with Phillips again, and recorded his new band The Cherry Faced Lurchers over two nights at the legendary Jameson's club in downtown Joburg. The resulting album is a unique document of a vibrant moment in the local music scene, and Ross would go on to record all of Phillips' subsequent work, until his death from injuries sustained in a car accident in 1995.
The story of Shifty can be benchmarked by Phillips' career. Arguably the stand-out songwriter of the era, he was recently recognised by his inclusion in a stamp series celebrating the posthumous legacy of South African musicians.
As the late composer Shaun Naidoo said in an interview conducted for a documentary Ross and Robbie Thorpe directed about Phillips' life: "Most people, they fit their beliefs into the belief system that they are embracing, whereas James made the belief systems fit into his way of thinking."
Phillips' life and work will form a major part of next month's programme of events in celebration of 30 years of Shifty Records.
Ross is crowd-sourcing funding for a Heritage Day concert at the Bassline in Joburg featuring Shifty artists Kalahari Surfers, Tananas, The Genuines, Vusi Mahlasela, Louis Mhlanga, Lesego Rampolokeng, Jennifer Ferguson, Matthew van der Want, Chris Letcher and Urban Creep. He's also looking to remix a previously unreleased Cherry Faced Lurchers album, and raise funds for a doccie about Shifty. The label's full archive has been deposited at the South African History Archive.
Ross says the label never really made money, but they did have a few successes, including a gold album for "People's Poet" Mzwakhe Mbuli, which was sold as an unlabelled cassette (Mbuli was banned) in bicycle shops and other alternative vendors.
The memorable Voëlvry Tour in the late '80s made rebel stars out of Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel and gave Phillips the biggest audiences of his career through his Bernoldus Niemand persona.
"Part of the problem with a lot of the music that we recorded was that white, English kind of interest. There's been a tradition among white English-speakers that you don't really support local music, but Afrikaans people do support their own music. People go out and spend money because it's their culture. We white, English South Africans - we don't really have a f***ing culture."
Ross looks back at Shifty as "a multiracial orphanage".
"These were the guys that nobody else was going to record, but they were f***ing talented. They came from all over the place and from very different backgrounds - we basically covered all the bases here, and that wasn't because we were particularly going out and looking for that. It's just because they had nowhere else to go, and it was completely impossible not to record them because they were really good."
- To support Shifty September and get tickets to the concert at the Bassline in Johannesburg on September 24 go to www.thundafund.com/ShiftySeptember
- www.shifty.co.za