From the hands of author of “I AM BIFF”, which is probably the best Graeme Smith Tribute I have ever read – We bring you: The Prince of the Hanging Gardens ~ By Justin Nurse.
Hanging Gardens of Beatenberg Album Launch Review
I never had a doubt that you would come through
I always adored you
I always ignored you
Just to make you try harder
To you do what you do
I had to be awful
Just to keep you from danger
These are the words coming out of my five-year-old daughter’s mouth as we are driving to school in Constantia.
“What are you singing, Willow?”
“It’s my new favourite song Dada. Mama made it for me, it’s on my CD.”
I scrounge around in the glove compartment, taking orders from my kid all the while, till I find the CD and play the song. Sure enough, it’s just like she sung it and at the speed of 4G this falsetto chorus has got me by the balls.
And after all that I’ve said
I want you to know me
I want you to throw me
In the river
So the clouds that follow my head
Can finally rain down
On all your hydrangeas
Who is this? I must know. I must know everything about this band.
Later that night, I’m in a bunfight for art at ‘Night of a Thousand Drawings’ in the bowels of the Good Hope Centre – which is a yarn about the telltale signs of true human nature for another time.
The band ‘Bateleur’ start to play at about the same time my mate puts his sticker – that’s meant to mark his territory on a piece of art – on the keyboardist’s proud gran. Laughs and high-fives and we are in with the family and my better-half whispers nonchalantly that this is the band of the song that I haven’t stopped playing all day. Or at least she thinks.
I don’t hear the last part as I’ve bumrushed the gran to get the keyboardist’s name and I’m now bumrushing him – Louis the grandchild, the keyboardist from Bateleur – with my sweet serenade while they’re in between songs.
“Please, please, please… you gotta play my favourite song of yours dude. I heard it today but I don’t know what it’s called”, I said.
“How does it go?”
“I’m a lazy student, in a circular library…”
“I don’t know dude. But I’m about to play. And please don’t be mean to my gran. She’s old dude.”
No dice. Long story short and shazam – it’s Beatenberg. Where have I been? In my late 30s, listening to This American Life podcasts too much and not 2oceansvibe radio enough, apparently.
I start to put the pieces of the puzzle together and stalk their Facebook page and YouTube their videos, consuming all that I can. I buy their album on iTunes South Africa for R99 and it’s the best hundred bucks I ever spent.
My daughter and I rock out to the same song, “The Prince of the Hanging Gardens”, on repeat, ad nauseum. I ask her what she thinks the chorus (“I had to be awful just to keep you from danger”) means… .
“It’s like when there’s a shark in the sea and you’re swimming next to it and you shout to me to get out of the water in a loud and scary way and it sounds nasty but you’re only trying to save my life… to keep me from danger,” she said.
That’s exactly it Bubs. That’s exactly it.
Now let’s just take a moment, if we may, to talk about those lyrics. These lyrics…
And after all that I’ve said
I want you to know me
I want you to throw me
In the river
So the clouds that follow my head
Can finally rain down
On all your hydrangeas
I never had a doubt that you would come through
I always adored you
I always ignored you
Just to make you try harder
To you do what you do
I had to be awful
Just to keep you from danger
I long to be a wordsmith of this calibre. I transcribed the chorus above myself, just to get a sense of what it’d feel like to write lines that good. It felt pretty good actually. Like a good wank. Not quite the real thing, but hey…
You have to know deep love for those words to resonate. It sums up the subtle sadism that exists in so many relationships. How we hurt the ones that we love the most.
And then there’s the Bougainvillea references and the hydrangeas. And songs that are literally titled ‘Cavendish Square’ and ‘Southern Suburbs’… all interlaced with wonderful literary references that speak of an understanding of the classics in an age where vintage is as old school as it gets.
I built the Cape to Cairo
I drank the Cape to Rio
I died an emperor
And came back as a griot
A griot is a West African storyteller. (I didn’t know either.) I did know that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may or may not have actually existed, and that if they did, we still do not where. Maybe somewhere beneath the River Euphrates, where it still flows too fast for us to excavate and know for sure.
I’m still digging for dirt on these kids. Who are they really, deep down? I am falling in love and I must know all that I can. In an almost synchronised fashion, a Westerford High School newsletter lands in my inbox and proudly trumpets their success. Two of them are ex-students of my alma mater and that explains the sound Latin education as the platform for their languid lyricism.
This past Friday night and it’s date night with the missus. Beatenberg are launching their album ‘The Hanging Gardens of Beatenberg’ at The Assembly and the boys and girls from the ’burbs are going balls out.
The buggers are smashing poppers on the dance floor and gazing with milky eyes at the lead singer of Gateway Drugs who looks like the lead singer of The Cure took a child actor from The Goonies for some kiddy-fiddling on a park swing. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. Just so yummy, think the buggers on animal nitrate as they bum lick the a-hole of their Black Label bottles with their loose, long tongues.
On walks Beatenberg, and it all makes sense. They’re bashful and brilliant in the most unassuming of ways. The drummer is somewhat removed, set up as he is at the back of the stage, so it’s hard to get a read on him. He’s vibing with the bassist, who’s got this Buddhist aura around him. I know, sounds wanky, but I call it as I see it. It’s the lead singer though, Matthew. He’s the love.
He’s like your cute kid brother. A little mascot that you want to pin to your lapel. An unassuming little bundle of… OK, enough with the crushing. I’m a grown man for God’s sake. Anyway, this kid croons his way through the entire album, tired from a week’s worth of album launches every night, but soldiering on undaunted, pouring his heart into his microphone, pausing for the obligatory audience rapport.
The guy uses proper English sentences and wraps up his own mic cable after the gig. He’s got that rock star sex appeal that you need to survive in these days of The Pirate Bay. Everybody in the room wanted to fuck him that night. Or at least eat him with a runcible spoon.
The sound of the album lilts its way between kwaito (Pluto) and house (Rafael), reggae (Cape to Rio) and straight up SA pop (Chelsea Blakemore), and many other blends of musical inferences in between. It’s their familiarity that is so infectious.
It is their ‘Nil Nisi Optimum’ upbringing that has seen them suddenly arrive, their humility that will keep them grounded on the global stage, their honesty that will remain their sex appeal, their smart pop sensibilities that will ensure their continued success, and their lyrical savvy that will continue to astound fathers and daughters alike.
Bablyon was what Cape Town likes to think of itself as: an independent city-state, autonomous unto herself. Whether or not the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ever existed, I am here to tell all autonomously minded Capetonians that may not yet have gotten the memo that one of the new Seven Wonders of the World is here: it is called The Hanging Gardens of Beatenberg and it is available for download on iTunes South Africa. You have every reason to feel very proud. Every reason to start a party in your opulent suburbs, to feel a pang in your heart.
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