bios

Yes, I’m late to the party. I know this has been going on for a while. Texas is the open-air bar and live music venue that every Tom, Dick, Harry, and hipster Hillary wants to get into, including myself. When I see that Roz is heading up The Get Down, I’m even more keen.

When Bron Travolta and I arrive at The Get Down, the downstairs space is sparse. A handful of people. Maybe five.

Four weeks into gonzo journalism and I’m sharing tequilas with blaqkongo and Roz, some of the coolest people in the industry. Someone at the party even promotes me from mayor of Muizenberg to mayor of Cape Town. Enough about me. Enough about my clout. Enough about my expanding municipal responsibilities.

By now, it’s getting dark. The dance floor is filling up. But we have to rush. Internet Girl are playing over at District Studios. On the way in, I bump into a poes CityVarsity-branded foosball table. Fuck that place.

Internet Girl rock up in an album-launch-branded minibus taxi. The entrance? Fucking phenomenal. A Quantum. It doesn’t get more South African than that. The lads climb onto the roof and perform to a crowd of around 200, maybe 300 people. There are cars that look like they’ve driven straight off the set of Fast & Furious: South Africa—Killarney Kullid Koded. There are well-dressed fashionistas everywhere. Black, coloured, white. Everyone is too cool for school, and I’m all for it.

The sound, however, is kak.

The space itself has plenty of First-Thursday-coded things to do. There’s a photo booth charging R100 for a low-res photo shoot. Cute, but not that cute. There’s an entire shopfront section for Internet Girl merch, although I don’t see anyone manning the Yoco machine. The queue to the bar is insanely long. And yes, I’m a little disappointed there isn’t even a complimentary glass of wine. You go to an art launch, there’s usually some wine knocking about. It’s First Thursday, for fuck’s sake.

Perched atop their Quantum throne, Internet Girl give it their all. From the back, though, that energy isn’t reaching us properly. The sound seems to disappear into the open space, competing with the wind and the other sounds of Cape Town. They should have rented a taxi with a badass sound system, because whatever is being used here doesn’t seem up to the job. From where I’m standing, it sounds more like a Logitech PC sound system than something equipped for this crowd and this space.

I can only tell you what it sounds like from the back. And from the back, a band clearly giving it their all is being let down. Internet Girl are fucking good. From what I can make out, there’s good shit happening in the new tunes. Even Mike Zietsman, aka PHFAT, who mastered the album, agrees that the sound, the setup, or both aren’t great.

At this point I should head back to Roz and The Get Down. There’s more partying to be done there. But I leave town’s First Thursday behind and mission back to Muizenberg for the smaller, less hyped celebrations down south. A band playing on a fucking taxi should have kept me in town.