Our band is incredible, but we didn’t play an encore last Friday. Here’s why

I may have mentioned that I play in a band. We are The Feel So Strongs, and we play a brand of Afro-fusion rock music. The style has been cruelly neglected since its heyday during the 1980s, when PJ Powers was at her peak, Johnny Clegg could Zulu-kick up to the ceiling and the Stimela train was still running on all cylinders.

Heck, even Hugh Masekela made rock music! Oddly enough, though, this brief flowering of musical non-racialism in the rock’n’roll paradigm was to fade out with the coming of democracy. Post-1994, there was something called the SA Rock Explosion, but that turned out to be a rush by a bunch of white people to sound as international as possible.

Since then, SA rock music has ploughed the stylistic groove of mainstream global rock’n’roll, as purveyed by other adherents in the USA, England and Australia. Just with far less success.

So recently, me and my musical mates decided to remedy this by making rock music that is heavily influenced by our surroundings. Nothing revolutionary about that, and we go at it with enormous gusto, if not equal expertise.

Yir, it’s fun though. We play versions of African traditionals, surf-punk interpretations of Jamaican dancehall hits, covers of songs by Zahara, optimistically executed bits of Xhosa here and there. Sure, we’re guilty of cultural disrespect, but rock’n’roll is one big cultural appropriation anyway.

We played a show last weekend. It was all about introducing our particular brand of African rock to a wider audience of beer drinkers than just ourselves.

Our time on stage arrived around 10pm on Friday, the few dozen punters at the Colony Arms politely interested, if not precisely excited to see us.

This was us trying something different, and we were sincerely keen to see how it would go. In a transforming South Africa, surely it’s time for music to transform too, we’ve been telling ourselves.

Unfortunately, the stage sound was shocking!

Anyone who’s ever performed will know that it’s quite important to hear yourself. Since most of the sound is projected out at the audience, your band relies on monitor speakers to relay your performance back to your own ears, so you can navigate the songs.

Tonight, there were no monitors. So we pretty much could not hear ourselves.

Sure, there were some snatches of music reflecting back off the walls of the pub at sporadic intervals, in between hoots and hollers, cheers, jeers and a conversation at the bar about the rugby, but not much.

This was no fault of the sound engineer, who performance recordings show was actually doing a sterling job. But there just were no monitors, so we could really hear ourselves. Least of all my modest attempt at vocals.

Most fundamentally, I could not tell if we were good or not. Were we burning down the house with our innovative copying of mid-Eighties rock music, or were we sucking the big one?

I had no idea.

In the absence of sonic proof, all we had to go on were the reactions of the crowd. They seemed happy enough. There were some polite rounds of applause, and some whoops. At one stage some girls came through from the seating area and danced a few gentle steps. Then they went back.

Loyal to the code, the support band stood around and looked earnestly interested in what we were doing. They too, cheered a bit. But was it politeness, or was it approval. I could not tell.

Gamely playing through our set, I did my best to sing in key, and with enough power to pierce the guitars and drums. But I wasn’t sure it was getting through.

Riven with uncertainty, I committed a cardinal sin of rock’n’roll: we finished our last song, and I didn’t ask about an encore.

“Do you want more?” I should have asked the crowd, but I wasn’t sure they were particularly  interested in another one. “Thanks for coming out,” I said. “And thanks to Office Drugs and Peter Blackbeard.”

And I walked off stage.

My bandmates were pretty miffed. “Is that it?” they wanted to know. “Aren’t we gonna play an encore?”

There would indeed be no encore. But weirdly enough, we were excellent. We had just completed one of the great sets of rough-n-ready Afro-garage rock, and we didn’t even know it.

I listened to the recordings later, and I was blown away to hear that we had pretty much played to our full potential. We’d given a great account of ourselves.

But I didn’t know that at the time. I wasn’t getting enough feedback. And that hit my confidence. I didn’t have the confidence to call for that bloody encore!

I will make it up to my bandmates, don’t worry. I’ll buy them a round at the next band meeting. And next time, we will play an extra song. To celebrate ourselves.

I’ll also make sure we play with monitors next time. Positive reinforcement is important. You need to know where you stand.

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