Movies and a song: Neither roaring nor weeping

Bright Blue replayed their immortal anthem in Joburg last weekend. Tymon Smith lent them an ear ...

'Who are these guys?" asks the woman sitting next to me, as a motley trio of middle-aged white men take to the stage. But before I can answer, the haunting opening chords of Weeping start to chime, and she says: "Oh wait, I know this song!"

We're at the Nelson Mandela Theatre in Joburg, for Anthems of Democracy, a musical revue starring Sipho "Hotstix" Mabuse, The Soweto Gospel Choir, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Joan Armatrading and others.

In Bright Blue's dressing room afterwards, drummer and founding member Peter Cohen says my neighbour's reaction to the band is very common. "As soon as we start Weeping it's like, 'Oh, it's those guys'."

Almost three decades after it was first recorded in Johannesburg, the band's seminal hit has been covered by everyone from Josh Groban to Vusi Mahlasela, and even in an Afrikaans incarnation, Weening, by Coenie de Villiers.

The band are often described as a "sporadic" unit - they've never broken up, but tend to come together to perform and record only when invited to special events. Weeping is often their ticket to these gigs. "We never know when we're going to see one another next. We don't say goodbye knowing when the next time is going to be."

Weeping was written by founding band member Dan Heymann, but he's not here for this performance: on stage are Cohen, his older brother and co-founder Ian, and Tom Fox, who's flown in from New Zealand to perform vocal and guitar duties.

Although they've released three albums over the course of their three-decade history, it's for their anti-apartheid anthem that they're remembered, which might be a bit of a yoke around the neck for some groups - as Doo Bee Doo must sometimes feel for Peter's other band, Freshlyground.

But Ian isn't bothered. "It's better to have one beautiful song that everyone remembers than to not have any beautiful songs, and just songs that nobody remembers. So it's not as bad a thing as you would imagine."

But the Bright Blue songbook strays beyond politics. "We write a lot of love songs, a lot of songs about what happened yesterday and what happened on Thursday and blah blah, but things do have to be said and when they do they come back into our music. "We didn't know what Weeping would become - it was the B-side of a single. Nobody sets out to write an anthem, and we're more surprised than anybody else. But we've gotten used to it."

The show's strange mix of nostalgia (which Ian refers to disdainfully as the N-word) and regret puts politics front and centre. For Peter: "I wish we could have normalised a bit after 1994, and that poor people weren't so poor and so uneducated and that society had levelled out a bit, but it doesn't seem to have at all. It was very obvious in the '80s who was right and who was wrong but it's not obvious anymore. I don't even know exactly where I'm going to put my cross in these elections - but in 1994 I had no doubt where I was going to put it."

Although they've recorded new tracks over the years, Bright Blue have not as yet released anything since their Best So Far compilation in 2001. But the rapport is strong. As Fox puts it: "A certain thing that happens when we are playing together that doesn't change, a core sort of synergy."

Influenced heavily by African music, the band's sound has remained true to its origins - a mix of local rhythms and rock elements - because as Ian jokes: "We can't help ourselves. The more different we try and sound, the more we sound like ourselves.

"And who knows? Maybe when we're 80 we'll get to Madison Square Gardens like Buena Vista Social Club." LS