Image: vimeo.com

You tweeted about your Cape Town visit and asked your followers what to do. Responses included ‘roll a huge one’, ‘visit your biggest fan’ and ‘go on a Muizenberg train trip’. Did you get to do any of these?

Hardus: Not those ones.
Jono: Those are still things we need to do.
Brad: We spent four hours playing with squirrels in The Company Gardens.
Josh: You just have to give them nuts. Lure them out.
Brad: At one stage I had a pigeon on each hand and a squirrel on my lap.

Does everyone have a tour duty? What do you always take with you and who is the worst when it comes to ‘Van Livin’?

Hardus: Merch guy!
Jono: Van Livin…we won’t go into that.
Josh: Jono is terrible at van living.
Brad: We’ve got a manager so he kind of…manages us.

You played Oppikoppi this year, you played Daisies, you’re playing Synergy. So in all honesty, which festival is the best?

Hardus: Well, we didn’t get to spend too much time at Daisies, so it’s difficult to say, but we had fun playing.
Brad: Daisies was awesome.
Jono: I mean they’re all doing their own thing. Oppikoppi has the dust, Daisies is green and beautiful… and windy.
Brad: The crowd was awesome; it was just such an amazing energy. That’s the main thing for us. We wish we could have spent more time there.

Image: samusicscene.co.za

The coffees arrive and we have to decide which mocha belongs to whom and who ordered the flat white. oss now has insight to the boys’ coffee choices.

You took part in MK’s BandAid series with Gary Cool, where fans got to ask you industry-related questions. Anything unexpected come up?

Josh: I don’t think any of them were expected. There were some really good questions and I think there are not enough people asking those questions. It was really cool.
Brad: My favourite interview. It was really interesting. I think it’s nice to see people actually thinking about touring and management and all those kinds of things. It’s not just like jump in a van and do whatever you like. You just can’t afford to do that, unfortunately. It would be awesome if you could just jump in a van and play whereever you wanted, you just can’t do that nowadays.

Is it important for you to connect with your fans on a personal level?

Jono: Yeah, I mean, before we were in a band we were fans. I think it’s the only way you get going places. We’ve sat down with bands and asked them how to do stuff. It’s so much easier if you can ask someone ‘how did you do it?’

You invited fans to go up Signal Hill a while ago, to join you guys for a drink:
a. Did they pick?
b. Did they bring anything cool to drink?

Jono: There were so many people there… but we didn’t know any of them. No-one came for us (laughs).
Josh: No-one came.
Hardus: It was too short notice.
Josh: It’s quite unfriendly.
Jono: My sister was there.
Josh: In all fairness, people would have been a little mad if they did come, we were literally there for 10 minutes. We had to go to Gary’s interview. We didn’t plan our day very well.
Jono: But it was beautiful.

Image: axe-effect.co.za

‘Hello Sweet World’’s success thrusted you into the international spotlight. Did you expect the response to be as big as it was?

Brad: It’s kinda weird, you know like, if you think back in the day, if you got a video on VH1 America, you cracked it. I think the interesting thing for me was we got a lot of hits on that video quite quickly, but the turn-over in the industry is so quick nowadays that we were just another band. Which is a little bit scary for bands coming up because, although there was some initial excitement, we didn’t have record labels phoning us saying ‘who are these guys?’ We’re part of such a huge pool. Everyone can do it themselves now and it’s just getting wider and wider. It was quite an interesting experience.

Would you get VH1 tattooed on you, to thank them for playing such a big role in your international success?

Josh: That would be a hell no.
Jono: We’ll draw it with a marker and wear it for a day.
Hardus: Would you rather get VH1 or Bad Boy tattooed?
Jono: That’s one thing I just can’t. Tattoos are a no-go, or maybe… nah, I wouldn’t.

I’ve read a few of your interviews and people really hate on Durban. Do you feel like you constantly have to defend it or are you patiently waiting for Durban to become a local music mecca and everyone to eat their words?

Brad: I think you have to be honest about what Durban is. We are the most Durban-proud people you’ll ever meet. I don’t think we have to defend it. There’s so much talent that has come out of Durban. There’s a whole creative hub, and it’s definitely stepping up. It’s not just music, it’s markets, a lot of artists and designers that are coming out of there as well. I know the music scene is shaky but it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Jono: I think they just need some fire under their butts, but it’s getting there.

What’s next for Gangs of Ballet?

Jono: Go home and have ‘n lekker dos. We’re working on some tours, so we’re going to be pretty busy. Everyone must come and say hello to us. We’re going to try to go to all these little places.

Click here to buy their latest release Yes / No / Grey.

ISO – Heaven (2013)

‘Heaven’ is the first single from Piece by Piece that is in a minor key. It has an epic chorus coupled with a sad and melancholic verse. It differs significantly from the first two singles which were up-beat and more dance-orientated. The lyrics are also more vague and mysterious.

Richard Brokensha from ISO came up with the concept of being buried alive by the rest of the band and the video was shot over the course of two days in Pretoria East. His concept became the basis for an entire story-line which plays out over the course of the video, which was directed by Dave De Gasperi. After a long night out, Alex, Franco and Marko are on their way home when they hit Richard with their car. They then decide to bury him and leave no loose ends.

ISO – “Heaven”, image: Louise Pieterse

ISO – “Heaven”, image: Louise Pieterse

‘Heaven’ is a dark song and we felt the video should incorporate that feeling. Whereas ‘No Fire’ was a bright and clean sounding tune, ‘Heaven’ is epic, yet eerie. The video encapsulates this feeling and highlights the different nuances in the music through solid editing and clever cinematography.

Heaven Credits:

Director and Editor: Dave De Gasperi
Produced by Richard Brokensha and Marko Benini
Make-up and Wardrobe by Linnybibo (Mandy September and Lesley September)
Photography: Louise Pieterse

ISO Live at Synergy (2011)

Isochronous Live at Synergy from one small seed on Vimeo

RELEVANT INFO:

ISO is:

Marko Benini – Drums & Backing Vocals
Richard Brokensha – Vocals & Guitar
Alex Parker – Keyboards & Backing Vocals
Franco Schoeman – Bass & Backing Vocals

ISO Contact

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c/o: RACHELLE CROUS PUBLICITY

image: Laura McCullagh

You guys have played at Rock the River, Up the Creek, and Synergy, but this is your debut album. How did you manage to book shows without an album on hand?

Rob: In Cape Town the industry is small, so once you’ve played good gigs and you get the right people to come check you out, the more contacts you make you kind of fit yourself in. We were very lucky that we did make the right contacts for quite a lot of the festivals. In certain places we haven’t made other contacts and we haven’t been able to play a lot of venues – in Assembly we’ve only played twice in four years, but we’ve played Rock the River twice, Up the Creek three times, Synergy three times, Rocking the Daisies only once. It’s very much you play as much as you can, but you try and make as many contacts as possible too in the same way.
 

Stephane: You going to the gigs for the past ten years, you know a lot of people in the industry are _ so it’s very good with networking, always talking to everyone, obviously it helped us to get the name out there even if we didn’t have an album yet.
 
 

These days CDs don’t get sold as much because of the Internet. Do you think festivals are a good way to get your music out there and make money at the same time rather than replying on an album?

Rob: Absolutely! And gigs, lately, that’s the only way you pretty much can make money is through gigs because the festivals we’d love to make money out of festivals but sometimes if you want to play at festivals you’ll take what they can give you. It’s tough, but for us we wanted to have a CD. For us being in a band, one of the iconic things is having your own album and not just putting the songs online. We wanted an actual physical thing right in front of us. For us, we’d rather spend the money and have that physical thing in our hands because that’s what all great bands have! We want to be a normal band, not just an Internet band! (laughs) You know we could’ve made everything on Fruit Loops or whatever these kind of programmes [people use], but we recorded it!
 

Stephane: Also the process of doing it was very exciting! Dreaming all my life of recording an album and finally we went through the process of doing it and it’s like to be in a studio with a sound engineer…
 
 

image: Carole Moreau

The album is called Blazing Trails and Fiery Tales. What’s the tale behind the album?

Rob: It’s pretty much as I said we’ve been going for four years and the journey that the four of us have taken together has been awesome because before the band the four of us… Steph I hardly knew, and Nick I went to school with but he left the school under bad circumstances so I thought he was trash! (laughs) I’d been friends with Kyle for quiet a few years but I never heard him play drums, so for me the last four years has been our trail together and we’ve made the songs that have been our tales and yeah, our ‘tails’ and the blazing and fiery just come together in the whole fox comet thing and comet and red hair. (laughs) No, but actually it comes together and that’s exactly it, the songs are very personal, and the lyrics play out our personal lives, personal development and the four of us coming together that’s a development story – the friendships, the band and the music has developed. None of us were really in bands before this. Well, Steph was in a band back in France –
 

Stephane: I was younger. (laughs)

Rob: — When he was younger. So yeah, it’s been a blazing trail and we’ve been telling our fiery tales. (laughs)
 
 

You guys have been working on the album for four years, but ‘Ginger Ninja’ is one of your oldest tracks, so it is in some way very close to you.

Stephane: You know, in four years we probably created about thirty songs so this is the eleven songs that we chose that represented the different phases we went through in those four years.
 

Rob: ‘See the World’ was also one of our first. One of the first gigs we ever played was in our friend’s garage in Vredehoek and I still remember playing that song in our soundcheck with literally two speakers and a friend of Kyle’s was setting it up. He was a DJ and he was the only guy who knew how to work these kind of things that we knew at the time. We played that song and for me that was the hardest type of rock I’d ever sung before. Out of singing I’d been in the choir and done jazzy songs when I worked in restaurants and random cabaret shows, but I’d never been that hard before. We had written the song and for me it was quite hard so I was a bit worried about doing the song. I remember playing that song with that one guy and his mouth just opened and after that it was like ‘that’s my favourite song’. We’ve literally played that song every single gig and it’s progressed, it’s got better. But for me it’s quite close to my heart because we played it almost 80 gigs and I was worried about singing that song at first.
 
 

Tell us about your affinity for gingers.

Rob: (laughs) How much time do you have?! No, I’ve always been a proud redhead and I always thought it was funny that people took the piss out of gingers. I never got ripped of because of my hair colour, but other people did and people got really worked up about it and there’s a lot of us, only 1% of the world’s population is ginger so I like to bring that minority – the South African ginger population – bring them towards me if I can! I think it’s slowly working. I’m stoked that we finally have an audible copy of the song that hopefully gingers can hear. I never wanted to be in a band that would just go up and play a song and then we go ‘oh that song was nice’. I wanted to be in a a band that when people came and watched up play they got entertained. Not just the music is cool, but they really enjoying it and they really liking it, they really going crazy. And for me personally, it’s just a selfish kind of thing. The more I can push the ‘gingerness’ the more it’s stuck in their head.
 
 

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You also do some acting and entertainment is an important part of your work as a band. Does the acting help you on stage to be more entertaining and develop your stage persona?

Rob: My whole life I’ve always been a performer; I’ve always been an entertainer. I’ve never just been an actor, I’ve never just been a musician, I’ve been all of them. I wouldn’t say that I’m better at the one than I am at the other, so I combine all of them together. I definitely think that the acting really helps me confidence-wise on the stage but also the singing really helps me when I perform because all of them work together to create who I am and as a persona I would like to be known as the ginger guy who can do anything really entertaining except for magic.
 

Stephane: It definitely helped the band because from the beginning we saw that he had this thing of interacting with the audience and that’s very important. I’ve been to so many gigs in South Africa where the music is good and if you don’t have a guy on stage that can interact and really make the show then even if the music is really good, people get easily bored. So it definitely helped us to have this guy jumping all around and really confident with the audience and it shows on stage. Also, you can see with Rob that he’s not taking himself too seriously so I think it helps us because he can do anything on stage. Sometimes the singer could seem a bit arrogant, but you can see with Rob he’s just having a laugh all the time.
 
 

You had the launch and it was pretty successful. How did you guys experience your debut album launch?

Rob: It was our first gig of the year and going from the first two years where we were gigging all the time, all the time the third year not as much but we played big gigs we chose festivals and big gigs playing with big bands so playing this gig was such an important night for us. We really rehearsed and made sure that our performance would be top notch and we were so happy afterwards because for us it was kind of like a milestone done. We’re going for four years now and we finally have our album and we’re happy. To have a performance that went down so well to be able to have a five month break and go on and play thirteen songs was awesome and we were really really proud of the night and proud of our performance and yeah it was awesome.
 

Stephane: It’s a happy conclusion to that whole process.
 
 

Image: Nadine Aucamp

What would make the album a success?

Stephane: The video is very important so that’s something we going to do in the next few months, because in South Africa you need to have a video on MK if you want to do well, if you want to get good big festivals, if you want to get the big gigs you need to have a cool video on MK so that’s definitely something we’re going to do soon. We tried already and it didn’t really work out, we didn’t have enough budget, but now we’re putting everything together so that we can do something really cool.
 

Rob: I think what really equates to success in South Africa is a whole balanced and rounded product. If you have good songs, a good live performance, a brand that people can relate to and then a video or something visually to check out… If you can get all of that then it’s going to make you successful in South Africa. But it’s also hard to say what is successful especially in South Africa, because our style of rock music is still happening in South Africa and it’s so hard to actually make a living out of it, but for us to be successful would just to sell as many CDs as we can for people to want to listen to us and to still come to our gigs and still book us for festivals. That would make us a success.
 

Stephane: We want to send the album to all the radio stations and hopefully we can get a few songs played. That would probably also help us a lot to get the name out there.
 
 

Where can fans buy the album?

Rob: The best way would be to contact us online on our website and then we can organise from there. Will we be launching our iTunes in the next week, so stay tuned!
 

Kevin Mc Elvaney, Post-Production: gldn.de

Images: image: Nadine Aucamp Photography, Kevin Mc Elvaney , Carole Moreau, Laura McCullagh, Facebook, banner: Michelle Ramsay

How does it work?

For Round 1 of the competition, entrants will submit their best live music photographs. Entrants can submit their best work to competition@ormsconnect.co.za. Submissions will open on 17 October 2011, and close on 14 November 2011. Just to be clear, only one photograph per person is allowed.

After all you budding photographers have submitted your best live music photographs, the judges panel, CTSP, Synergy, one small seed and Orms Connect, will select the ten best images to be displayed here, where users will vote for their favourite photograph in the comments section. The three entrants with the highest amount of votes will each receive a double-ticket to Synergy, as well as an official Photographers Pass for the event.

Once the festival is over, each photographer will have three days to edit and submit their best three photographs taken at Synergy. The judges panel will select the best picture from the nine submitted images and pick a winner.

The prizes

The winning photographer will receive an eight week Social Documentary Course from The Cape Town School of Photography, an A2 mounted print of the winning photograph, as well as a double-ticket to Synergy 2012.

Terms & Conditions:

• The competition is open to South African residents only.
• Only one vote per user will be counted.
• Winners of the first round will have to cover their own travel costs.
• Only one image per entrant is allowed for Round 1.
• Prizes are non-transferable.
• In the event that a first round winner is unable to attend the festival, another entrant will be selected.
• Entries close on 14 November 2011.

Decisions by the competition judging panel are final.

Please contact Larry at competition@ormsconnect.co.za for any further queries.