By James Stoddart
I’ve only surfed Dunes twice – logistics and sharks deter me. It’s a heavy, peeling, right-hand slab of a wave by Noordhoek: here it’s a mean-looking mural inside Surfa Rosa. The ceiling is fitted with matte black surfboards, the walls are textured by stickers and posters: “FCK AFD”,skulls, snakes, illuminati-style eyes with thick creepy lashes, “WE MAKE STUPID PEOPLE FAMOUS”, trippy geometric patterns, caricatured lips that frame sharp pointy teeth annotated with “DELICIOUS MONSTERS”, a grotty pigeon, more anime, a QR code advertising someone’s Spotify. A goblin lurks beneath multiple stickers.
Early twenties white kids – 3OH5, the band opening for NANI!? – hug the bar. Two have stereotypically long curly hair; their drummer wears that popular Gen Z broccoli haircut. The sound is serrated but cathartic; waves of fucking angry guitar peaking and dumping. Even though the gig hasn’t officially started yet, a few patrons are occupying the dance floor, turning up to the music, recording the band. Brandon, NANI!?’s frontman, is pedantic, going back and forth with Surfa’s manager about the sound; by roughly 7pm he’s satisfied.
Surfa Rosa sounds like the playlist I made after my breakup last year, named “Get Punk’d Ya Little Emo Boi”. Brandon laughs with me as I tell him this. My writerly buddy Alec and I spend the downtime getting to know the bands. NANI!?’s drummer Reuben and bass player Andrew yap away with Alec. Andrew is huge, a very tall man, yet he doesn’t want to be perceived. He plugs away stoically at the bass in a yellow hoodie, basketball shorts, Carling Black label socks and Vans. The fourth member of NANI!? was the youngest and most enigmatic. Jude. Dude slinks about the place elusively and looks like the offspring of Flea and Flóki: tall, skinny, pale, a cropped mohawk dyed pink, black stars tattooed into the sides of his shaved head. He spends most of his time taking photos of his girlfriend.
Throaty guitars warm up the bar, as classic riffs from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” tease later high jinks. Chief mischief-maker Brandon looks like a character from “Friends”. His voice has a Kurt Cobain languor in it. He looks pleased with himself when I tell him. A curated montage of Neon Genesis Evangelion plays on the wall behind them, framed by twin gruesomely contorted absurdist face sculptures. Brandon says that NGE “looks to me how grunge sounds”. Personally, I think Cowboy Bebop is more grunge. We banter for ages, about Reddit, AI, Paul Simon’s Graceland, the human element of punk, his Cobain inspired singing voice, his convictions and his ambitions for the band. He desires success and cuts a demanding, authoritative figure.
There’s a thin line between nostalgia and nostalgia-bait. Brandon and Andrew have been playing together since they were six, first on Guitar Hero and then together in NANI!?. Their relationship brings a youthful sincerity to the band. They fucking adore Surfa Rosa, the most punk of all bars in Cape Town. It’s dark, slightly cramped, and brash, unlike the larger, more luxurious club Harrington’s upstairs. It’s smaller than most of the clubs the bands perform in, but Brandon finds those venues clinical. Even though the crowds get bigger, their setting still feels stark and empty.
Surfa’s dim lighting casts an intimate backdrop, and in the undercover alley overflow on the right of the bar patrons sit in relative privacy – basking in a warm orange-pink-blush from above. The waxing and waning crowd of fifteen to twenty people fill the bar with personality, and – as the night goes on – becomes more representative of Cape Town. Brandon has personality too, and a creative vision for NANI!?. They’ve launched an EP titled “Everyone’s Looking At Me”, and Brandon confides in me that gigs, while important to the band, don’t bring in enough money compared to what they could make streaming, and he wants to prioritize time in the studio as a result.
Eventually, the sets get going. 3OH5 announce that they’re happy to bring their “brand of punk to the Cape Town Stage”. A bait-and-switch gives us thirty seconds of slow melancholia in the strings paired with a hint of wistful aggression before the drums absolutely blast the set open. 3OH5 are jagged, rough; Albert and Tré project some edgy vocals and occasionally drag their notes. It doesn’t really matter though, because they are fucking FUN. Hard dramatic hooks imagine an audience much bigger than the fifteen-to-twenty people gathered here to throw limbs. Crisp time signature changes rumble over their aggressively mumbled lyrics, and they blatantly perform for the odd camera floating through the dance floor. But fucking hell, they rip their guitar solos. I can’t stop bouncing from the adrenaline in their strings. My ADHD is peaking, forcing a strong connection to their music.
Albert eventually relaxes into the performance and cracks jokes about their “crowd favourites”. He teaches them a line to belt out for their next song: “SCREW MY HEAD ON BACKWARDS AND SHOVE IT THROUGH THE WALL!”. Werner throws a drumstick at him, and they both pretend not to know the projectile’s origin. Tré, despite the long hair, looks kinda nerdy in a collared tee with thin horizontal white stripes patterned onto the darker fabric. His unusual, ethereal back-up vocals sporadically cut through the relentless assault on my ears. Their music becomes somewhat brutish after a while, and I wish for more range. Then again, Albert is an excellent performer and rallies the crowd with calls for them to “mosh” and “two step”, and the crowd fucking OBLIGES. The bands’ fraternal bond is on display as NANI!? form the core of the mosh; Jude produces an impressive two-step. My inner critic whispers that, somehow, 3OH5 have made cringe cool again, and yet, I can’t stop beaming. Brandon was right. Punk is human.
We stand outside the bar in the break between sets. A joint is shared on our left. It smells like burnt citrus. Alec says to me with a wry smile that, to a certain extent, all music that isn’t classical is kind of cringe to him, and that we should be operating from a place of sincerity. Inner critic dispelled, I go into NANI!?’s set wholly invested in their sound.
NANI!? warm-up again, and eerie, radically creepy vocals snake through the bar. Jude is intoning an elongated E into EEGH into AAGH. Brandon charismatically aggravates the crowd. First, he claims that their set is just “Smoke on the Water” for the next hour, before he casually remarks “alright, enough shenanigans”, and finally fucking LAUNCHESinto their opening song “Spaghetti Legs”. They play with controlled aggression. I can see why Albert holds them in high esteem. The aura builds. Brandon and Jude fucking tweak out on stage and yet it all looks natural, like an extension of their sound. It’s frenetic. At one point Jude stops playing and starts dancing in the crowd. It’s giving Måneskin. A mosh starts again, with 3OH5 at the heart of it. Limbs are fucking flying everywhere, even though it’s maybe only five or six people in the nucleus of fraternal solidarity. Bodies are smashing into each other without malice. Cobain and Nirvana influence the band again as they play a cover of “School” and the music swells in anger. Meaty drums reverberate through my chest.
They mess around between songs, yelling “Yee-haw” as they lick a riff of “Sweet Home Alabama” again. Albert does a wolf-howl in the background and Jude changes guitars more often than Cape Town changes its weather. I see hips thrust and listen to the guitars yowl and get hit with another bait-and-switch as I am teased by the prospect of a power ballad before they explode with MORE aggression. I also see three creepy older men slowly converge on younger, early twentysomething women minding their own business. The women disappear swiftly after the set.
NANI!? are assertive, angry, and self-conscious, ending their set with a ferocious cover of Teddy Bears’ “Punkrocker”. Well, not before there’s a minor hiccup and the sound cuts. Brandon demonstrates his comedic chops as he entertains the confused crowd. He parodies George Ezra and gets a few laughs. Everyone joins in for the chorus of “And I’m a punk-rocker/Yes I am” once they get going again to close out the night. Brandon thanks the crowd for coming and I’m left thinking: the kids are alright.
I did have a few issues with both sets. The bar was completely overwhelmed with the energy from their performance, and differentiating between songs was incredibly difficult. I had only parsed three songs from NANI!? and two from 3OH5 (“Attack on Titan” – what a jam – and the aforementioned “Screw My Head on Backwards”). They could have contoured their performances better. Even Nirvana had songs like “Come as You Are” that exercised restraint. Despite this, I’d completely forgotten that my night started with a callback to the end of the most pivotal relationship of my twenties. Performing punk can feel like nostalgia bait. Yet, the adrenaline from their music had kept me from thinking too hard. Surfa Rosa sounds like my breakup playlist, but fucking FUN.