I am thinking about my Afrikaans father and the vastrap hoedowns he used to stage in our garage in the sixties, after he and his friends had braaied and downed a few brandies. This time, it’s “ Kom Kuier in Die Hantam,” their very first CD, the one with the (subsequently fired) singer whose semi-yodelling demolition of a cheesy American country song called “Forever and Ever” has us in stitches. “Besides,” he says, “they sound completely wrong out here.” So we axe Jestofunk and play more Klipwerf. “The main difference between Klipwerf and these guys is style and attitude,” I say. This cool Italian shit is eons removed from the dust and stones of Bushmanland, but it’s also dance music, and the approach is identical to Klipwerf’s – start with a simple bass pulse, wed it to a suitable beat, add some earworms and repeat ad infinitum. He proceeds to play some acid jazz by Jestofunk. When I move to put in a third Klipwerf CD, I see Guy’s eyes rolling so I say okay, your choice. This music exists only to drive a certain kind of dancing, and if you aren’t dancing, it can be a bit much. There are no solos in a Klipwerf song, no fancy windgattery, no vocals. We put on another Klipwerf CD, and it sounds similar too – relentlessly cheerful and devoid of all pretensions to art or introspection. “ Wie se Kind” segues into “ Lientjie se Vastrap” and then “ Wals vir Hessie”. At first, you wonder why anyone would do such a thing, but after an hour or two, you get it: the vandal could not bear to face the awful truth about the unbearable distance he had yet to travel. Somewhere along the line, someone went mad on this road and defaced all the distance signs, causing them all to read “Kliprand 0km”. We know where we’re going, but when we’ll get there….God knows. Now we’re dopping wine to fight dehydration. Every half hour or so, we pass a windmill and a flock of dejected sheep, but otherwise, there’s nothing: no trees, no houses, no respite from the glare. We’re crossing what appears to be an ancient seabed, a level plain of blackened rocks and grey grass. Not to everyone’s taste, perhaps, but I tell you one thing: Klipwerf sounds great on a sinkplaat road in an arid and empty wasteland. There’s a fat sakkie-sakkie rhythm guitar in their somewhere, and atop it all, a Yahama synth picking out the melody. The drummer moers the offbeat with both hands, simultaneously whacking the snare and hi-hat. Someone pumps a simple bassline on the bottom end of an organ. It was originally a coloured song, but Klipwerf has pulled it slightly this side of the racial border and infused it with their patented vastrap groove. Specifically, we’re listening to “ Wie Se Kind is Jy”, a catchy ditty that seems to have originated in Garies, a dusty town about three hundred clicks behind us. Klipwerf is the band playing on the stereo in Guy’s bakkie. Klipwerf? Ring any bells? Probably not, but don’t worry, we’re all on a learning curve here. So here we are, roaring down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere in search of the most famous band you’ve never heard of. Rian Malan introduces Klipwerf, the multi-platinum-album band that keeps Boers happy at dancehalls in the Afrikaans heartland. They might have sold more records than any other South African music act, but they’re almost totally invisible in the world of big-city English people.
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