CITY OF PRETTY African Blood runs deeper (& hotter too)
Finally - I feel less country and more rock & roll again. After three weeks of homeward bound movies in bed and diary writing (I’d be strumming my guitar if I had one), it’s high time to exhale some melancholy, dust off the leathers and head out of my head.
My close friend Kat arrived in London two weeks ago and has been staying with her school friends in the deep West, so I decide this is an ideal opportunity to combine sight seeing with my social reawakening by heading to the East. On Thursday night Kat, Flea and I get literal at a book swap party on Kingsland Road. Simple concept: take a book, carry it in one hand with the title visible and a drink in the other, and wait for a punned pounce. It’s like speed dating for geeks. Erotic novels and war crime stories change hands with flirty gestures, fingers brush under hard covers whilst luminous G&Ts lubricate pseudo intellectual banter. The crowd is arty-fashion-alternative and people are genuinely discussing the books they are swapping rather than the next person’s getup. This concept would never work in Cape Town. The party is at the same member’s club I found myself in the blow-up hot tub in not three months ago – here’s to coming full circle whilst turning another page.
On Friday I attend Catwalk Trash’s first live show in London. The girls, Ellenie and Steph from Worcester, play at a sprawling club in Shorditch called Cargo. Their sound is grinding guitars and growling Afrikaans accented vocals about sugar tits and lusty gayness. It’s raw, and oh so good. After the show I walk into the La Med of London at the back deck of the club, minus the stellar view. Blaring music evokes flashbacks of Sunday sunset sessions and jugs of sweet-tangy cocktails shared by girls in rara skirts take me back to pure nostalgia circa 17-years old. I amuse myself with people watching, reveling in my anonymity, when I spot an old friend from Cape Town. With her, another. And then – another one, and I recognise that face too! Soon everywhere I look there are familiar faces – from the music fundi who produced Lark, to the other half of Blush n’ Bass to the artist who co-founded the Bin in Harrington Street back in the day. Fuelled with unexpected patriotism, I am elated to rediscover so many inspiring people who I haven’t seen in years, all on a similar mission to me. There are 250 000 South Africans in London, and I’m beginning to see that I really might just be another one of them - and happily so.
Armed with a bottle of champagne in my jacket pocket from the off-license to celebrate our reunion, we march across the road to the George and Dragon, a more famous Shoreditch gay pub. Our crowd spills onto the street as I pour generously from my gun holstered pocket bar. I head home in the early hours with a phone full of new numbers and stoked to have made the circle bigger, so to speak. No wonder Cape Town felt so small – the movers have all moved to the East! We have breakfast on Hackney Road and as I drown my headache in a massive cup of coffee, Jarvis Cocker eats eggs Benedict at the table next to me. Yeah, London’s starting to feel like home all right.