Snaith & van Coke - Burn, 04.04.07

Maybe under all this brunette, there lurks a blonde, but when I saw this gig advertised, I thought “Oooh, what an interesting combination, the frontman of Soulja with the frontman of Fokoffpolisiekar” and assumed they would be playing together. Luckily for me, a friend checked them out last week and gave me the heads up that no, in fact Snaith would be doing Soulja songs unplugged and van Coke would be doing (you guessed it) Fokoff songs unplugged. At least that meant I didn’t have to put my WTF face on when Warren Snaith took to the stage solo. A few more wrinkles avoided.


I don’t remember ever watching Soulja when they were still around. This could mean one of three things: a) I genuinely did not ever watch them; b) they were utterly horrid and I blocked all memory of the traumatic event, or c) they were so bland as to be rendered instantly forgettable. Since I definitely did hear about them, and they certainly had quite the reputations as wild and uncontrollable (I’m guessing this may be where Snaith and van Coke found some common ground), I’ll say that option c is pretty unlikely. I’m leaning towards option a, since while I did not really enjoy Warren Snaith’s set last night, it wasn’t skin-crawlingly bad either. Unplugged can be quite tricky when you’re not really fantastic. The problem is, when the crowd is not completely hooked, they tend to talk…and they tend to try and talk over you. This can be quite distracting when you’re trying to listen to the poor guy on stage, but I thought the club owners might object to me putting on my strict teacher voice, telling them to shut up, and delivering a swift round of forehead slaps. The pool tables in the immediate vicinity of the stage did not help, but we can hardly blame Warren for that, or for the lights tripping in the middle of his set. Anyway, he was mildly entertaining, with the obligatory songs about weed and coke (yawn), a lot of swearing in between songs which made me giggle since most of the patrons looked like they were enjoying the skool vakansie by die see, and a serious amount of angsty face scrunching which probably appealed to the emos. He wasn’t bad, he just wasn’t great either, and when Francois van Coke did join him for one song, I was really disappointed that it was Snaith who did most of the singing. Then again, the song was in English, so maybe that explains it.


But on to more important things. Francois van Coke took to the stage and suddenly the chatty cathies had nothing more to say. He opened with Hemel op die Platteland and immediately had the crowd in the palm of his hand. People were belting out the lyrics at the top of their voices and just loving every minute of it! I must admit, it was kind of weird to see Francois on stage, not thrashing around violently and swinging off the rig. He did manage to knock the lights over though, so all was not lost. I got the impression he also found it a bit of a departure from the norm as he was having a seriously hard time keeping still. The man just radiates energy and emotion, even sitting on a chair. And if I was crazy about Fokoff before (despite the fact that I’m so English and “Durban” I probably have saltwater in my veins), then when Francois proceeded to make a mockery of De La Rey, and spit on the floor at the thought of dear Bok, well, I think I may just have fallen a little in love with him, stovepipe jeans and all. Also, the fact that he calls us “Durban naaiers” at every gig and jovially translates into English from time to time just makes him cool in my books. There’s no arrogant posturing or ‘look at me I’m a sex god’ attitude – it’s all just rock n roll baby. Van Coke did not let technical difficulties or quite a few broken strings stop him from whisking us through an amazingly energetic set, including a new song of his own, and the crowd was absolutely with him all the way. It may not have been the crazy stomping frenzy of Fokoffpolisiekar, but it was nonetheless seriously kickass. So kickass in fact that I may have to go and watch them again tonight at Society!