FOCUS ON TOAST COETZER AND THE BUCKFEVER UNDERGROUND

By Fred de Vries (copyright 2007)

Some day someone will make a film called Being Toast Coetzer. The story will be about how to be positive, humble and successful as a white male in post ’94 South Africa. And after seeing the movie, everyone will envy Toast.
Here’s the basics. Being equally fluent in English and Afrikaans, Toast has no hang ups about the Queen’s English or die taal. He’s 30 years old, so spent half his life under white rule. He’s quick to acknowledge the ‘fruits of apartheid’: never poor, never hungry, a good education. Therefore he has little time for the white whingers and whiners who still expect fortune and privilege to fall on their lap.
Toast’s suggestion: do it yourself, be your boss, so no one can fire you. “A lot of people are afraid of that. They want to walk from university straight into a job. And if they’re then confronted by affirmative action they get disheartened, blame the political situation, give up and go to Canada.”
For a number of years Toast was his own boss, working as a freelance journalist and photographer, sharing shabby flats with friends. He was offered salaried work, but declined. It wasn’t what he wanted. Then, last year, the ideal job came along, and he became a roving reporter for Go! magazine. Now he divides his time between being a travel writer, photographer, editor of a small independent literary magazine called Ons Kleintji and lyricist and deadpan singer with The Buckfever Underground.
Moreover he has written some of the finest lyrics this side of 1994. Die Volk (is in die kak) from the Buckfever’s 1998 debut Jou medemens is dood was recently nominated for a Top 100 of best protest songs ever in a Dutch survey. Depicting the shallowness of suburban life, it put The Buckfever Underground in the same league as Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, The Clash and U2.
“Die Volk pokes fun at the Afrikaners,” says Toast. “The materialism, people’s obsession with Steve Hofmeyr, pop culture, Die Huisgenoot. Yes, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. Not that I disagree with it now, but I know you can also sing ‘Xhosa in the kak’ and be just as right.”
We’re sitting in a restaurant in Kloof Street, with a view of Table Mountain. It’s quiet tonight, because of some rugby match. Toast orders tomato soup, I go for ostrich bobotie. We drink red wine. Life isn’t so bad. “Whites like to complain, but fuck they shouldn’t, because life for middle class people is actually great,” says Toast, whose real name is Reino. His brother used to call him Toast when he was a kid and found it hard to pronounce the –t at the end of toast. Toast stuck. Everyone knows him as Toast.
Toast grew up on a farm near Craddock, where being progressive meant voting ‘yes’ in the March 1992 referendum. He still has the badge. Old man Coetzer came to the Cape as a mercenary in 1719, married a local woman and decided to stay. His mother’s family were Dutch and settled near Bela-Bela.
Every winter young Toast had to come with his parents for the annual visit to Warmbaths. The mind numbing trips past burning veld, morning frost, small towns and squatter camps inspired him to write the lyrics for another Buckfever classic: The Highveld (is a shit place to be in winter), with astute observations like “I’m never here because I want to/ I’m a co-pilot a navigator a shotgun-sitter measuring the miles between historical sites and toilets for my mom.”
The five-piece Buckfever Underground are an odd bunch. They don’t have real songs, but improvise until they get into a groove, over which Toast then recites his poems, travelogues and short stories, like a modern day Jack Kerouac. As for the strange name, the word buckfever derives from the Afrikaans bokkoors, which is hunter’s fever, and refers to the rush of adrenalin the hunter feels when he takes aim at his prey. And underground? “Well, it sounds better than underpants,” says Toast. “And you immediately get the idea that these guys are gonna do something off middle of the road. You don’t expect a boy band.”
The Buckfevers gig sporadically and have only released three official albums in nine years. The last one, Saves, came out last month and is a genuine South African classic, cut from the same idiosyncratic fabric as Felix Laband, Benguela, Enkeleen and Battery9. Which means it probably won’t sell.
“We were never under any illusions about that,” says Toast. “We knew Buckfever were not going to be the next Nude Girls, not in our lifetime. So we made the music we liked and knew there would be someone out there who might like the record. Maybe a hundred, a thousand even. We’re fine with that.”
When he was young Toast hardly listened to pop. His parents liked classical, and while the Voëlvry tour with Kerkorrel and Kombuis happened Toast was busy on the rugby field. It was only at boarding school in Somerset East that he discovered that magical world of rock through 5FM dj Barney Simon. “I lay there listening to the radio playing softly, hoping that the teachers wouldn’t come down the corridor and give us shit. There was this Battery9 song Lucy from the Steakhouse in Delmas, a very hard industrial track. I really loved that sound. It was eerie. And Delmas...! I mean, it was like Jim Neversink’s Transfer to Harding, the kakkest town in KZN. And they made a song about it! I love that.”
Toast went on to study journalism in Grahamstown, where he met Gilad Hockman who played a bit of guitar. Occasionally they would perform at the Fireside Jam, a venue for local bands. Then they joined a competition for young songwriters, organised by the TV programme Geraas. They entered as The Buckfever Underground with a tune called Dink harder. Despite the fact that Gil couldn’t even get the guitar bit right and they had to loop it, they won. This gave them the time and money to record a whole album, which came out in 1998. And now they’ve reached the status of cult band, a hibernating project that occasionally awakes with a deafening roar.
The erratic nature of Buckfever doesn’t bother Toast. “It’s stays underground because we’re busy with other shit, Ons Kleintji, The Armchair Theatre, other bands, work. Man, it’s a full time job being underground.”
The restaurant fills up. Outside a bad wind blows. The mountain looks ominous. Inside it’s warm and cosy. Inevitably the conversation flows back to white fear and guilt. Toast recounts how he recently was a judge at a competition for Afrikaans high school rock bands. “There was this group from Oudtshoorn with a very Christian approach. They had a song called Die Hemel is Afrikaans, which glorifies Afrikaans language. The idea is that in heaven everyone speaks Afrikaans and talks about De la Rey. It was a very catchy song. But it’s so misguided.”
The waiter comes. We order coffee. Toast continues: “I grew up during the transition. But people of say eighteen, who were in open school, you’d think they’d be fine with so many more things, like having a black girlfriend or not calling blacks by the K-word. But it’s not the case. That Christian song was not extreme, but a 16-year old kid singing that… Is it something they get from their parents? Or because they grew up in traditionally more far right areas? That song had a slight fanaticism. Like we must preserve die taal. I mean by waking in the morning and saying kak instead of shit you’ve done your part for Afrikaans for that day. You don’t have to go: we’re special because we’re Afrikaans. It’s not the language you speak that makes you special.”
And while we’re at it, the government with its gratuitous name changes that smack of cheap symbolism is just as guilty of divisionism. “It seems we’re not done with apartheid yet,” says Toast. “If we’re ever done, what will we do then? Finally give people health, water and anti-retrorvirals? Fuck, I hope so. Because we’re wasting so much time and money on bullshit. It’s tokenism of the extreme order. Because whether it’s Pietersburg or Polokwane, it’s still a kak town.”

CV
1977 born in Cradock
1996 studies Media Studies & Journalism at Rhodes University
1998 releases Jou medemens is dood with The Buckfever Underground
1998 publishes Love songs for the government/ Liefdesliedjies vir die Regering (40 blank pages)
1999 takes over Ons Kleintji magazine, together with Erns Grundling
2000 works as Teaching Assistant in Photojournalism Department at Rhodes
2000 releases Survival Is Personal (demos, unofficial release) with The Buckfever Underground
2001 goes to the USA where he works at a summer camp
2002 freelance writer and photographer
2003 teaches English in South Korea
2003 releases TAFL - Teaching Afrikaans as a foreign language with The Buckfever Underground
2004 freelance writer and photographer
2005 releases Trying to do something about this goddamn terrible bleak winter (Live album, unofficial release) with The Buckfever Underground
2006 works as senior journalist at Go! magazine
2007 releases Saves with The Buckfever Underground

Heroes/influences
Musicians: Paul Riekert (“He does overground stuff which gives him enough money to run his own label, play with Battery9 and Die Menere and produce Trike and Rokkeloos.”); Chris Letcher and Matthew van der Want, Benguela, Ross Campbell (“Meeting and seeing them when we were young and realising that they were exactly like us when they were 20”); Ian Watson (“What a great guy. He’s even more underground than we are. He does sound, plays a gig once in a while, got a band or three, made the most diverse music that no one knows about because he hasn’t released the albums. In another world he would be Dave Grohl, here he’s the sound guy at the Armchair Theatre.”). Writers: John Miles, Willem Anker, Ryk Hattingh. R.R. Ryger (“Wrote Beertjie en sy boytjies about a fucked family with an elder brother who comes back from border and does fucked up shit for a week”). Photographers: early Life and Magnum; the boys from the Bang Bang Club; Dave Southwood (“A Cape Town photographer, who influenced me in straight photography, no fancy flashes.”) Annie Leibovitz, Sebastiao Salgado.