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- Toast Coetzer

Nostalgia, is what returning to the place is all about. Maybe because I've mixed girls and music here before, with great consequences. Maybe because I've shaped friendships here that will be part of my wrinkles until I die. Maybe because the music performed here tells me something about myself. Fuckit all, Oppikoppi is still the finest thing you can do with spare days of your life in August.

It's the smell of the place, that's important. Dust, smoke, weed, people, sunsets, farting in a tent, warm beer, cold sweats and that general feeling in the Bosveld air that you're part of something vital, even if you have to invent it yourself. But sometimes, there's some kind of hero up on stage behind a microphone and he tells you what to do, he points the way.

Like Paul Flynn, diamond at the head of Sugardrive, performing with Plum and taking both bands' music to a higher place. The crowd is with it, Paul is off his head with glee, he grabs at his heart and asks: "Can you feel that?". The crowd can and Paul reassures us: "Don't you worry about me, baby."

Matthew van der Want and Chris Letcher, not playing their best set, but still magnificent when they both point their guitars in the same direction, dipping low in their frames, squeezing out everything from their soul-reserves. It makes you want to cry. And that's it.

Waddy Jones becomes the new king of cool, rapping off his white head, representing the sleight of hand, the art of the storyteller, the mastery of a stage which he treats like his bedroom where he's singing to posters of his heroes. I'll be his groupie anytime.

Brasse Vannie Kaap, who make white Afrikaans people sing along in Cape Flats slang, who make an entire crowd jump, who attack their material like it's always up for moulding, who rule the country because they have decided it's time to.

A one-man act called Lilo, unknown and new, alone on a stage in the hot sun with only three people clapping. But he's unperturbed, not giving a fuck, rolling lo-fi poetry off his darkglasses like it's nothing, like he's always known how to do this but only recently decided to tell people about it.

That's the kind of stuff you need to go there for. There is of course, also the road that takes you there, but by now you should know about it. Let's just say that there isn't a Steers in Kroonstad.

(previously published in 'Activate', August 2000)