A few reflections on music. And they’re going to be brief, because I’m not particularly musical. Never have been. My parents—bless them—paid for guitar lessons when we were living in Mallorca. After school, at King’s College. A lovely old man tried to teach me, I can't remember his name and after a couple of weeks, he very kindly told my parents, “You’re wasting my time and your money.”
No hard feelings—I wasn’t offended. If anything, I admired his honesty. I’ve always respected people who play instruments. God, I wish I’d been one of them. It seems so civilised. But no—I didn’t become a musician. I became an excellent shot. Much less useful at dinner parties.
Still, I liked music. In Mallorca in the '70s, though, we didn’t have much access to it. My dad had a hi-fi and a passion for opera. Meanwhile, my mum got her hands on I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor and played it over and over again. Even at the time, I knew exactly why. She didn’t need to say anything—Gloria Gaynor was doing it for her. Except she hadn’t told him to "walk out the door". Not yet, anyway.
There was also Boney M—I had one of their tapes. We listened to it on a road trip once: “Rivers of Babylon,” “Rasputin,” all the disco madness. My dad also loved ABBA, which we’d hear playing from the boat. And Neil Diamond. Can’t forget Neil Diamond.
So that was my early exposure—opera, disco, a bit of Swedish pop, and a man who sang like he was permanently choking back tears.
It wasn’t until we moved into Illovo with Niels that I heard the good stuff. Niels had a vast record collection. Honestly, it was like stumbling into the archives of the BBC. Even now, he’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s music. LPs lined up in proper order, sleeve notes intact. And this was where I really discovered music that made sense to me.
I remember getting into Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, Cat Stevens, Rodriguez. Rodriguez especially—he was huge in South Africa, basically unknown anywhere else. Until decades later when Searching for Sugar Man came out and proved we weren’t just making him up.
One morning I walked into the kitchen and found Niels looking devastated. I asked him what was wrong. “John Lennon’s been shot,” he said. I blinked at him and said, “Who’s John Lennon?” He smacked me across the back of the head, which was entirely fair. I’d been listening to The Beatles for weeks and somehow never absorbed who they were.
Even then, I didn’t go out and buy music for myself. I liked it when I heard it—loved it, even—but I never built a collection, never scraped together money for a decent hi-fi. If I was saving for something, it was usually a piece of hardware I could shoot things with. A scope, a new rifle sling. I was more likely to clean a barrel than a record.
And part of it, I think, was the tech. Music just wasn’t very portable then. You had LPs, which were great until someone sneezed near them. Cassettes stretched and snapped. CDs had just started to appear, and people were being sold the idea that they were practically indestructible. I remember Niels got one of the first CD players. He was told you couldn’t scratch them. So he threw a CD onto the floor, scuffed it around with his shoe, and triumphantly shoved it back into his absurdly expensive machine—only to discover it no longer played. I remember watching that and thinking, maybe for the first time, he doesn’t always get it right. A tiny kink in what, until then, had felt like his infallibility.
There was Music Radio 702, —not yet the talk format it would become later. It had a rebellious edge. They played songs that didn’t always pass the censors, and just tuning in felt vaguely subversive. It broadcast out of one of the so-called “independent homelands”—a bit of apartheid fiction designed to make it all look more reasonable than it was. But it gave 702 a kind of pirate-radio energy, and we loved it for that.
Then there was Pink Floyd-The Wall. We don’t need no education. It came out in ’79 but became a sort of anthem a few years later. It didn’t matter that we barely knew what we were rebelling against—we were teenage boys. It had a beat, and it told the teachers to get stuffed. That was enough.
In my final year of school, we almost saw Queen live. They were scheduled to play at Sun City—Freddie Mercury, the whole band. We had tickets. James Wigley organised them. It was all happening.
Sun City, if you weren’t there, was a surreal creation—part fantasy resort, part political theatre. Built by hotel magnate Sol Kerzner in one of the “homelands” the apartheid government had cooked up to justify its own logic, it was a Las Vegas-style development about an hour and a half from Johannesburg. Gambling was legal there, along with just about everything else you couldn’t do elsewhere. And they paid absurd amounts to get international stars to come perform—big names who could pretend they weren’t playing in apartheid South Africa because, technically, they were in Bophuthatswana.
And in 1984, it was going to be Queen. We were going. And then, the day of the show, Freddie lost his voice. Gig cancelled. Just like that. I never got to see them. Still haven’t. And yeah, I’m still not over it.
So that was my relationship with music. I loved it when it came to me, but I never really chased it. I never collected it, curated it, made it mine. It was always playing in someone else’s room, someone else’s world. It would’ve been a much healthier obsession than firearms, if I’d gone that way. But I didn’t.
Maybe because music made you feel things. And I was already trying to outrun half the ones I had.