Documentary Jiving and Dying - The Radio Rats Story rediscovers the alternative SA music culture of the 80s.
|||It would take a significant exercise of the imagination, you may think, to regard Springs on the East Rand as once being the centre of a South African rock revolution.
But once you’ve lapped up Michael Cross’s hugely enjoyable documentary, Jiving and Dying – The Radio Rats Story, you might be inclined to change your mind.
The film was well received at the Durban International Film Festival last month.
The movie is ostensibly about a band called The Radio Rats (anyone over 50 should remember their 1978 hit, ZX Dan), and bears witness to the alternative popular music culture of the 1980s.
Cross, from Durban, first heard ZX Dan as a “kid in shorts” and has done a brilliant archival and editing job in seamlessly piecing together much of the footage of the Rats, in and out of the studio and on stage. But he has done much more than that.
He has also used the group’s remarkable songwriter, guitarist and creative driving force, Jonathan Handley, as a kind of weathervane to describe his, and his band’s, musical career.
The droll Handley, a natural on screen, talks wittily about the occasional ups and more frequent downs of a “noisy little band from Springs” whose members cared little about commercial success compared to their simple love of music.
At one stage, Handley deadpans: “We never copied anyone else. Because we weren’t that good, we played our own stuff, and then nobody knew whether it had been played badly or not.”
Aside from their own musical achievements, Cross pinpoints the central role Handley and the Rats played in inspiring such luminaries as fellow Springs resident James Phillips (aka Bernoldus Niemand). It was Phillips who went on to initiate the alternative Afrikaans music scene of the mid-80s, the Voëlvry movement, which entertained and inspired thousands of disenchanted Afrikaners in that time of political crisis.
The movie, incidentally, features Phillips’s last recording shortly before his death in July 1995.
Cross has skillfully juxtaposed Handley as the movie’s main spokesman with other members of the band, including lead singer Dave Davies who provides a comic contrast to Handley, and guitarist Gil Gilchrist from Scotland who offers a coolly appreciative outsider’s perspective on all the madness going on.
Cross has spent more than 25 years producing, directing and editing documentaries. He first filmed The Rats in 1991, the same year he reviewed their “comeback” album, Big Beat, for Scope magazine. His verdict then, as now, is that the Rats are “perhaps the closest thing we have to a great rock 'n roll band”.
As well as music from the Rats, the movie features Niemand, The Cherry-Faced Lurchers and Titus Groan. It should also be remembered that, as a portrait of Springs in the 1980s, it takes some beating.
Jiving and Dying – The Radio Rats Story, will be screened on Saturday, August 27at 08:30 pm at the Labia Theatre, 68 Orange Street, Cape Town.