Sunday 3 March 2013 was another very hot day in
the City Bowl albeit with a bit of a breeze that did not quite cool down the
bowl but promised some relief. The streets around De Waal Park, and the
secondary park below Camp Street, was overcrowded with vehicles. It was a sure
indication that Arno Carstens was a very popular attraction. Inside the park it
was even more emphatically demonstrated by the numbers of people there. The
audience covered about the half the terrain sitting in clumps on blankets with
picnic baskets and wine cooler boxes, lots of kids and dogs running around.
Once again the scene resembled some inner city middle class version of
Woodstock. I'd thought that large numbers pitched up for Robin Auld and this
crowd was at least double that one. Most people were sitting in whatever shade
the park offered but by the end of the show the band stand was surrounded by
happy, dining people. There were no encored and the crowd did not insist on any
and dispersed quickly but up to that point it was pretty much your standard
rock audience. There were the young women, the young guys, the old hippies, the
strange looking people and a significant presence of older people who much have
simply come to the park to enjoy the ambience and got stuck with the music.
I guess Arno Carstens is pretty much rock
royalty in South African terms. He came up with the Springbok Nude Girls, the
premier hard rock act of the South African scene that erupted after 1994. He was the front man who was handsome,
articulate and could sing. As far as I know the famous local accordion player,
music composer and band leader Nico Carstens was a relative. From the Nude
Girls Carstens followed on with a solo career, ran with models, did some
modelling and became an all-round icon and celebrity. The solo career is about
4 albums old. I have the first two, Another Universe and The Hello
Goodbye Boys, of high end pop infused rock with serious production values.
Initially the project was called New Porn but the marketing strategy soon
demanded that his better known brand, Arno Carstens, replace any band name. He was
the man.
In October of 2004 Arno Carstens and his New
Porn band, featuring Albert Frost, played the Wellington Cultural Festival,
headlining above what was then a cream of local rock talent. I was blown away
by the sound of the Carstens band. It was loud, monolithic, powerful and
overwhelming and basically blew all the preceding acts away. The negative was
that it was difficult to discern any actual songs in the intricate arrangements
on which the music relied so heavily.
The albums are lighter though till produced to
within an inch of their lives. The melodies come through and the voice can
carry them. The debut album is the strongest but on the whole both of them show
an artist with ambition beyond his hard rock start and with intelligence and
craft. Not pretty pop, but pop nonetheless.
At De Waal Park Carstens played a show of two
halves. For the first part he was more or less the solo artist, backed by a guy
who added keyboard fills and trumpet solos. The songs were big ballads,
typically starting slowly and building to an anthemic climax. I did not
recognise any of these tunes. The crowd may have known Carstens’ music better
than I did. They were certainly appreciative enough.
The trumpet guy reminded me of the unique
feature of the Springbok Nude Girls where Adriaan Brand was the trumpet and
keyboard player that brought something unusual to the hard rock of the band.
Today the trumpet fills and solos gave the songs an elegiac feel of nostalgia
and heartbreak.
Carstens did a version of David Bowie’s “Let’s
Dance,” ostensibly because it was the man’s birthday and it was a brave choice
to do a basically acoustic version of an Eighties dance rock number that was a
big hit at the time, and featured a piercing Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo,
but has never been one of my favourite songs and comes from an era of Bowie
music that was pretty barren if you ask me. Anyhow, it was a quirky
interpretation and for that one has to give Arno Carstens kudos.
The full band came on stage for the last part
of the show and although the sound was not the same kind of monolithic
overpowering audio experience as I had encountered in Wellington it was still
quite loud and powerful. It was during this part of the set that Carstens
finally performed songs that I knew, including one Springbok Nude Girls song,
and started rocking the park.
The main issue I had with the show, and that I
have with Carstens’ music generally, is that arrangements and technical
perfection seems to be at the heart of what he does and not so much real
emotional commitment. This is big music
with big aspirations and not actually rock and roll with all its imperfections,
quirks and weirdness. The musicians are rehearsed and proficient and make an
effort to play faultlessly and with studied intensity and not much spontaneity.
The other problem is that the tunes are not very distinguishable. The impact
and power of the song lies in the performance and once the sound dies down, one
is hard pressed to recollect any particular song that stood out from the rest.
Something like “Genie” is memorable because it has a hook or two, and perhaps
because I’d heard it before, but the larger than life choruses of the earlier
ballads never did. After last week’s
show by Robin Auld I was quite keen on seeking any Auld albums I could find and
regretted, slightly, that I had not brought any cash to the park. For Carstens,
who was happy to accept credit cards, I had not such regret and no particular
interest in acquiring more of product than the first two albums I own. In part
it is because I do not truly care for his style of music and partly because the
songs did not act as magnets to draw me to him. I cannot see myself going out
of my way to attend another Arno Carstens performance.
The truth of the matter, though, is that
Carstens was a very big draw at the park and perhaps the biggest draw of this
season of concerts, and this must mean that he is a big deal in our music
industry and that people still remember him and revere him. More power to Arno
Carstens for that.
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