I have lived in Jo’burg for four months and, since moving here, I have come to learn that, as far as the live music scene goes, it’s usually a case of feast or famine. Granted, there’s always something on, and one could probably go out every night for about three weeks without hearing the same performers twice, but there have been more than a few weekends where I have been perfectly happy to stay in and catch up on my sleep, knowing that I’m not missing out on anything special.
Weekends like these are normally followed by one like the one just past, where I was determined to fit six different parties into two nights. I hated the idea of missing out on any of them (and didn’t want to offend any of my friends who were either organisers or performers at the various gigs) and, to make it worse, friends from Cape Town were up for the weekend. A strange sense of pride in my new home city left me determined to show these people how much fun could be squeezed into a Jozi weekend.
Maps were brought out, line-up schedules were consulted and the planning began. We would leave the first gig as soon as the Blk Jks were finished, unless the whole thing was running late, in which case we would dash to the closer party (which sounded promising on Facebook) and then come back later. The third party was all the way in Sandton, but it was an all-night doof-doof affair (complete with glowsticks) so we could get there late without feeling like we had missed too much. The next night was a repeat, with three events to negotiate, except that the stakes were higher. Getting our timing wrong on Saturday would mean missing out on Sweat.X at Rollercoaster, and accidentally catching the Dirty Skirts. It would mean missing out on Five Men Three Missing at Carfax.
Of course it turned out terribly. We never saw any of the bands we wanted to on Friday, and our attempts to find the second party involved two Capetonians and two recent Jozi residents wandering the wrong way down unlit one-way streets in the Jo’burg CBD. We gave up on the idea and ended up in Benmore at around 1am, perfectly happy to leave for home as soon as the first person suggested it. Saturday wasn’t much better (I am not known for learning my lesson first time around) but at least we were able to say that we saw some of the bands we were hoping to see, and not many of the bands we didn’t.
One of the good things about Jozi is that there will almost always be a chance to catch up on the bands you missed, without too torturous a wait between gigs. It makes a nice change, and it’s something I’ll have to get used to (I tend to give myself away as being new to the city by rushing around frantically while everyone else seems coolly indifferent). It’ll come, with time, but at least I know that, for people like me, there will also be time to recover. This weekend is a long one, but the only thing that seems really interesting is the Fire on the Mountain mini-fest. Other than that it seems like a good weekend to recover from the Pavement Special launch (at The Bo tomorrow night) and get enough sleep to be ready for the next barrage of great gigs.
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