Music

The Cherry Faced Lurchers' long lost album finally sees the light

The local band sank into obscurity after the death of their frontman in the nineties. Now the remaining Lurchers have completed their unfinished masterpiece, 'The Otherwhite Album'

24 October 2021 - 00:01
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James Phillips, front man of the Cherry Faced Lurchers.
James Phillips, front man of the Cherry Faced Lurchers.
Image: Shifty Records

In 1986, The Cherry Faced Lurchers went into the studio at Shifty Records to begin work on their second album.

A group of musicians known predominantly for their success as the resident “jol band” at the Jameson’s Bar in Commissioner Street in Johannesburg, had recorded a live album there the previous year.

Recording in the studio would be, as producer and Shifty founder Lloyd Ross recalls, “the beginning of a very long, drawn-out and sometimes torturous process”, hindered by the excessive drinking and dope smoking of The Lurchers’ lead singer, a tortured but brilliant, prophetic songwriter and talented guitar player named James Phillips.

Their first album, Live at Jameson’s, had been a collection of tongue-in-cheek observations — amusing everyday experiences of life in the schizophrenic environment that was Johannesburg: women with R45 perms, the eccentricities of a Portuguese takeaway cafe owner, doing “the lurch”, having a jol and trying for a few brief moments to dance the troubles of apartheid away.

The one song that had proved an exception was the haunting ballad Shot Down, a song Ross describes as “so full of yearning and so bleak because it evoked the completely disparate experiences of the people in the country. You could be white and completely unaware of the stuff that was going on in the country. In fact, a lot white people were. We had censorship and propaganda just like Germany.”

LISTEN | 'Shot Down' by The Cherry Faced Lurchers

The spark of conscience that was ignited by Shot Down had, by 1986 — the year of the declaration of a national state of Emergency and the increasingly brutal suppression of opposition to apartheid under finger-waving president PW Botha — become the driving force of Phillips’ songwriting and the songs that The Lurchers performed in their post-Live at Jameson’s period.

As former Lurcher Mark Bennett sees it, Phillips and his bandmates “had started to find it difficult to articulate what we were feeling”.

The songs that Phillips wrote to try and voice some of those feelings focused on the plight of political prisoners in detention, the “heavy ous” — security branch members — who held their fate in their hands and other glaring, depressingly absurd and tragic realities of life under apartheid.

James Phillips and The Cherry Faced Lurchers outside Jameson's in the Johannesburg CBD.
James Phillips and The Cherry Faced Lurchers outside Jameson's in the Johannesburg CBD.
Image: Shifty Records

The album, in typical Phillips pun-loving spirit, was to be called The Otherwhite Album — a reference to the madness of apartheid-era racial classification and, of course, The Beatles’ seminal double album.

By the time The Lurchers went into the studio they were, as Bennett says, “playing f***ing well. We were really well rehearsed and we were all playing well. In the studio the recording of the music itself went relatively easily — we were tight and we didn’t have to do too much. That’s what Lloyd captured.”

Phillips’ erratic behaviour and increasing unreliability unfortunately led to tensions between him and Ross, and though the recording process carried on in stops and starts for two years, ultimately the album was never finished. The closest it came was a cassette release in 1992 for a series of gigs with a much changed Lurchers line-up performing at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival.

With the tragic death of Phillips in 1995 at the age of 36 as the result of injuries sustained in a car accident outside Grahamstown, The Otherwhite Album seemed to have faded into legend as the great Phillips masterpiece that never was and probably never would be.

Lee Edwards, bassist for The Cherry Faced Lurchers.
Lee Edwards, bassist for The Cherry Faced Lurchers.
Image: Shifty Records

In 2016 Lurchers bassist Lee Edwards — who after Phillips’ death had stopped playing for two decades, feeling that “there wasn’t any point in playing any more because I wasn’t interested in playing stuff I didn’t believe in” and eventually left SA for the UK — asked Ross for the tracks. Together with his son Tyrone, Edwards began trying to mix them into a version of the lost album.

That attempt eventually ran out of steam and the hopes for The Otherwhite Album seemed to be once again lost until last year.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, Ross found himself with time on his hands and began to go back to the material, surprised to discover, just how good Phillips sounded. Ross collaborated with Edwards, Bennett, Lurchers drummers Richard Frost and Steve Howell and fellow musician Jannie van Tonder to finally bring the work to life.

Posters for The Cherry Faced Lurchers gigs held at Jameson’s live music venue in Commissioner Street in Johannesburg.
Posters for The Cherry Faced Lurchers gigs held at Jameson’s live music venue in Commissioner Street in Johannesburg.
Image: Shifty Records

It arrives in digital and vinyl formats in SA this month and Edwards hopes that once listeners hear it they’ll feel as he does — that the album is “one hell of a rock ’n roll album [that] does everything a rock ’n roll album should do. It’s full of social commentary, it’s angry, it’s got it all and it’s what it needs to be. I’m pleased it’s there.”

For Ross, “The actual composition of the songs and the arrangements, the way that James managed to manipulate mood is very contemporary and stands up to a good listen today. It’s also a recognition of what a great talent he was. James was the most talented person I ever worked with ... his soul was really, really there.”

Some of its songs may seem no more than snapshots of the dark and terrible period of history that was life under apartheid in the 1980s, but many of them continue to have relevance to places across the world today where individual freedom is threatened by brutal totalitarian regimes and dangerous, intolerant ideologies.

The Cherry Faced Lurchers featuring Lee Edwards, James Phillips and Richard Frost.
The Cherry Faced Lurchers featuring Lee Edwards, James Phillips and Richard Frost.
Image: Shifty Records

What was once a “should’ve been” collection of recordings now emerges as a finished product, as close, it is hoped, to what Phillips wanted it to be when he was alive. Ultimately it’s a reminder of the prodigious talents of the singer who, as his friend journalist Shaun de Waal once observed, was a man who “used his artistic abilities to say something about the time he lived in, to capture it and put it down in a way that allows us to know, in some way, what it felt like. To me that’s as much of a contribution as anyone is likely to make.”

Pre-orders of the vinyl edition of 'The Otherwhite Album' are available from permanentrecord.co.za and digital pre-orders are available from jamesphillips.bandcamp.com


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