On the road to nowhere with Fruits & Veggies, Durban's favourite Afropunk flops.
By ROGER YOUNG
Photographs by KEVIN GOSS-ROSS
“Are we getting the cover? I wanna do a rail off my own face,” says Loopy, Fruits & Veggies' self-proclaimed “racist bassist” and co-songwriter of dubious sexual definition. Loopy is the frontline of the band's publicity-generating machine. Sure, it's not the Idols brand of PR that the Fruits generate, but even someone as bullshit-brained as Gareth Cliff would be able to spot their X, or XXX, factor. Stories of degradation follow the Fruits like the bad smell of Splashy Fen's shit-smeared backstage couch. “Yeah, that couch,” says Purity Mkhize, the tiny bleached-headed, gold-toothed lead singer. “It's why we were banned from Splashy the first time.”
Less discussed is Fruits & Veggies' music, and how they've managed to survive so long causing so much mayhem, gaining such a reputation, while pretty much staying put in Durban, recording nothing beyond a single EP, Ndaa, just on two years ago. The answer is as simple as the construction of their maskandi-gypsy ska songs: they have a unique on-stage chemistry and the confidence of a band that has discovered some kind of meaning from all this rooting around in the compost of rock'n'roll. “I'm living on Gay-reth's couch because of the band. My parents' place is far, down the coast. So I live here, because this is where my band is,” says Loopy. “This is my life, I don't really have any other options. I'm not exactly employable.” Gay-reth is part of the F&V extended family, a dangerously smart professor whose house functions as a relative safe zone when the kids are down and out; if hanging out with a sexually ambiguous anarchist is any definition of a safe zone. The extended family is a big part of Fruits & Veggies.
Fruits & Veggies are more lifestyle choice than band; they don't have groupies, they have extra members. They've left songs abandoned in studios like unwanted children, while they've stalked off after drugs, girls, freedoms and destructions in all the small shitty bars you can imagine. Yet, after nearly six years of the perpetual “tour” of Durban, they're still going, and they still haven't properly pinned down their brand of mutiny in the shape of a recorded thing. That few people will allow them into their studio for fear of breakage won't make it easy. Look, it's déclassé for a journalist to insert himself into the story, but I have a personal connection; I mean, Loopy once pissed in my luggage. Not on, but in my luggage.
Fruits & Veggies started out as an all-girl band, the brainchild of Similo Gcingoba, Durban's self-styled foremost underground film-maker. Purity is the only member of the band left from this incarnation. There were pregnancies and jealousies, one of the girls wanted her boyfriend in the band and Similo quit or got bored or declared a revolution or some bullshit lost in the mists of recent time. Says Purity: “It became a huge mess, then those two waai'ed. And it was just me and Daryn Higginson, and somehow we became part of the pub scene, which is where we met Loopy, who then spoke to Lu [Dolphin], and that was the band for a few years.”
The pub scene she's referring to is The Winston, a rathole of a venue that's been the nexus of Durban's young punk and metal bands for the last 15 years, at least. It's just on the wrong side of town, on the edge of Umbilo, Glenwood, and a couple of blocks from the docks, in a building that once housed the first incarnation of the now defunct Burn. The Winston has been the sole survivor in the building for a while, until Origin, a dance music club, opened upstairs. Origin is part of the reason the Veggies no longer perform there. Loopy and James Cross (their guitarist of three years, Daryn's replacement and now chief riff-maker) were banned from the venue for throwing empty quart bottles up at the Origin entrance. “It needed to be done,” says Loopy. “I mean fuck those guys! Rave music? They should be ashamed.”
“It's more than that, though,” says Purity. “We don't necessarily want to play there anymore. It's one of the things we've promised ourselves that we'll never do again. The sound is shit, and there is just so much whack history in that space.” She pauses, quick to correct my coming assumption: “It's not like I'm trying to leave pub life behind… I'll always be a flop. I still go to the pub, I just won't play there.”
Loopy nods. “If people are seeing you every weekend, it takes away the effect, and you get less people at your shows. It was important to play every show for a long time, to get our name out there, and now that it is out there and thrown in the dirt, it's time to limit the gigs. But it was necessary for us to go through that, because that's where you learn your chops, that's where you pay your dues. Or the Jews, that's when you pay the Jews. That's where you learn don't get too drunk before the show or you'll miss your bass string. You need these learning curves. Some people don't, but me, I'm a slow learner.”
She pauses. “And besides, when we played at The Winston, we'd each get R30 a gig. So now we don't do poephol shows anymore. There is also the important thing that we have become better songwriters; we don't have four tempo changes in the same song. But playing in front of the same 20 people every weekend, it's not good for the band, or for the audience.
“We've got to get over being that drunk band with that drunk history that fucks up guest slots.” She slips into reminiscence mode: “I don't think Lark will ever play with us ever again, and,” she grins, “frankly I don't give a fuck. We were late for sound check and we got bounced off the bill and then we were drunk and we had a bet to see who could make out with [vocalist] Inge [Beckmann]. But it kind of turned into who could grab her breast but no way, I said, that chick is staunch, I wouldn't fuck with her, and Pure would probably win. So not only did we flop from the gig, we floppped from offending Inge.”
It's hard to be a musician in Durban. There are few venues and an even smaller audience to go around. Apart from The Winston which holds about 100 people, the only other real venue is LIVE, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and is hard to fill, even for touring bands. Part of the problem is Durban's long-settled audience apathy. In the smaller venue, the same bands play too often; in the larger venues, people would moan about prices, but the legendary and short-lived UNIT 11 changed all that. Andrew Loubser from LIVE sums it up: “Okes are finally coming out of their shells and realising that it's worth spending the money, that our bands are good, and we have UNIT to thank for that.” Loubser has recently come round to supporting Fruits & Veggies, having had them play the venue regularly. But he's not always been a fan. “Never in my life would I have booked them. Before, they were just amped to play a gig and get fucked, but I don't know what's happened, now they're unstoppable.”
In Durban, bands start up and die fast. Of all the bands that started up at the same time as F&V, only one other survives – the radio-punk Anti Retro Vinyls. While Durban is a great place to incubate ideas, it's not a great place to execute them. “It's a lot easier to survive in Durban without any income than any other city,” explains Loopy. “There is a lot more understanding toward broke people here… It's easier that way for artists and whatever to start out here. It's not like Jo'burg or Cape Town where you need a job; you can hone your art or whatever without too much pressure. You can always squat.” The waitress interrupts us. We're sitting at Badger's, at a table separate from the rest of the band. She asks us if we can all sit together, after, she says, “what happened last time”. Loopy shrugs. “Ja, last time. I am going to have to leave Durban soon, I am slowly but surely getting banned from every place in town.” We're at Badger's in the first place because Loopy has been banned from Amsterdam, across the street, for hitting someone with a chair. “The real reason,” she confides, “is because I tried to tuck into the owner's girlfriend.”
“Fruits and Veggies have ruined my life,” the newest member, violinist Hezron Chetty, tells me. It's something I've heard before from members long since departed. Daryn, their ex-guitarist, told me the same thing just before he left. Rowan (another ex-guitarist) said something similar during their badly orchestrated trip to record at Red Bull Studios in Cape Town, the same trip that ended in drummer Sweet Lu being, as Loopy puts it, “ass-raped” by a member of Cape Town ska band Captain Stu.
When I see Sweet Lu at The Winston he laughs off the incident, wants to talk about other things. “That Hezron kid wanted to join just before I left and I said to him, 'You look like a nice guy, leave while you still have a chance.' He didn't listen. Those okes, they chew people up.” There is not a hint of malice in his voice.
But Lu didn't leave because Loopy or Purity spurred someone to try and stick their dick up his ass while he was passed out. “As a drummer you have to be comfortable with the role you're put in, and that's in the background,” Loopy tells me. “Lu wasn't comfortable with being only the drummer, so he over-compensated and became a bully. The drummer is the most important person in the band. If your drummer is shit, you're fucked… Which is why Justin Grady is so great; he's so tight and doesn't get in anyone's faces.”
“Yeah,” says James, lanky lead guitarist and third-longest-standing member. “Justin plays for the song, not for himself. He's not a flashy drummer, he really gets the job done.” Hezron agrees. “He gets super nervous before he goes on stage. Like he's about to cry, he can't even talk. But when he's up there… man, I've played with a lot of drummers, and he's the best.” A few weeks later at Oppikoppi, I spot Justin sitting on his own and ask him about his role in the band. “No one even knows I'm in the band,” he says, only half joking. “After a gig, people will ask me if I watched the gig because of how good Fruits & Veggies are getting, and I'll have to remind them that I'm the drummer.”
In a small town with so many band-member changes, there's bound to be some simmering resentments about. “Nah,” says Purity. “There is no bad blood, I mean, we made out at Splashy. After the gig, Lu came up to me and he was like, wow! He said he was actually jealous of our drummer Justin, and he really wanted to be back in the band and he started crying. So I tucked into him, like, 'it's gonna be OK pal, we can still be friends, there doesn't need to be any bad vibes'. I still see him randomly at parties, but obviously it will never be the same.”
Purity is telling me this stuff while her six-month-old daughter, Naledi, is gurgling in her lap. Jerome (her partner, boyfriend, or just the guy she's living with right now… she won't say) approaches to ask if he can take care of Naledi for a while so that we can talk in peace. Jerome is a Durban pub scrap stalwart and they've been loosely together for a while now. “When I did realise I was pregnant, I eliminated the list of people and it fell on around the same time I was with Jerome and Gina, so Jerome was definitely the dad – until the birth, which was a great shock.” The shock she's referring to is Naledi's pinkish whiteness. Both Purity and Jerome are distinct shades of brown. “We were all hooking up with each other. But the pregnancy changed all that.”
So where did Naledi come from? “She came from the moon!” Purity laughs roughly. “Nah, she was created on a very odd night. I was at Lu's house, there were a lot of people there, I was absolutely drunk, and I just wanted to go cuddle with that person in that bed, and the next thing there is sexual intercourse and no protection and the next day I don't really remember much, and OK, so last night happened.” Purity moves on, the paternity of her child ain't no thang, “Naledi is the major thing, this whole event has made me want to get my head together, made me realise that the band needs to get serious now, to actually get our shit together.”
The blanket is on a lawn in Kloof, just outside Durban up the hill towards Pietermaritzburg. It's a place of dense tropical jungles, suburban Eighties money, and hippies who have retreated from the city proper. There they inhabit an old Spanish mansion that belongs to “a sweet old lady who had to go to an old-age home”, according to Purity. She checks me checking her. “No man, we aren't pulling a move, we pay some rent and shit.”
Ducks angrily patrol the deep-green swimming pool, a Great Dane puppy flounders around. In the distance you can hear the sounds from the freeway on one side and, on the other, coming from the upper house, the strains of Jim Morrison telling an audience that he thinks astrology is a bunch of bullshit. “The lady who runs the house, well the one guy keeps trying to cut down the trees because the cottage gets no light, and she basically hugged the trees and cried until he put down his axe,” she says. “I love it here, but yeah, the ducks sleeping inside is a bit much.”
When Purity is this chilled she hardly resembles the flap-legged whirlwind of sex and dare on stage. “Either this band works, or I move on. This is what I want, and I can't be flaky about it anymore,” she explains. “People moved through the band, we didn't care. It was all about being punk rock and shit, but now, well… Now I'm stoked about the new energy in the band. We're making new songs, we're tight. We're ready to record, we just haven't found the right producer yet.” She knows she's not being entirely upfront. “To be honest, we haven't been looking that hard,” she admits. “We've never been satisfied with our recordings. I'm always unhappy about my voice. Or maybe I'm just shit in studio. I would assume that the person who can capture us would have to spend a lot of time with us.” And so, the search for extended family continues.
The line-up of the band seems to be solidifying. There is a level of dedication not there in the sloppy, raw early days, a commitment summed up by James: “I was working at Ocean Basket when I got the call to join the band. I quit the job right then and stole a piece of sushi. I didn't even own a guitar but I knew that this is what I wanted.” He shakes his head: “I'd get to the gig and be like, shit, I have to talk to the guitarist from the other band. I'd be like, 'shit dude, can I borrow your lead? Sure, OK, so can I borrow your amp? OK sure', and then, like, 'can I borrow your guitar?'” “Poephol times,” adds Loopy. “It was bad. For a while he didn't have a guitar and I didn't have a bass. I smashed my bass at Splashy, I thought I'd do a big rock star move.” James and Hezron laugh, shaking their heads. “During a five-in-the-afternoon set,” adds James. Loopy just shrugs, “So excited! 'This is it!' I thought we'd hit the big time. It took me a year to get it fixed, to save up the R800. The big time… right. I probably made R150 out of that gig.”
Speaking to the beatific Purity, lying sprawled in the sunshine, it occurs to me that it's this yin and yang, this absolute destruction and the absolute love, that make Fruits & Veggies so vital. And Purity knows it: “I come from a place where I think everything and everyone is in oneness with everyone and everything and that's the way it should be. Loopy comes from a slightly more destructive place.”
It's around 5am and I'm struggling to punch these notes into my phone, partially because I can't see properly and partially because a few moments ago it blew right out of my hand while I was trying to shoot video from the car window of Loopy, teeth askew, as she laments the quality of gay boys and lesbians at tonight's gig. Everyone is too easy, including us in the car, she says. So easy, in fact, that we should just give her more money so she can buy more cocaine so she can stay up, fuck, it doesn't have to be cocaine, she'll take slimming liquid or sangoma-grade ephedrine or whatever, but she has to busk at a craft market in the morning and fuck all of you. We're circling back to the weird after-party at the tiled and tacky Willowvale Hotel, a former live venue that now hosts electronic events, like the failed trance party straight out of my 1996 small-town nightmares. We have to stalk through the front to get back to the hotel room where Jacques [Moolman] from Shadowclub is jumping up and down on a fucked bed while pub scraps look on, bored and disdainful of his rockstar-attention whoring. People are making out in the bathtub and in the corridors, boys and boys, girls and boys and girls, a general messy sexual abandon seeps through the air, the rank smell of freedom. It's this sort of loose-flowing sexuality that's one of the defining points of the band lifestyle. Everyone shares, everyone switches teams, everyone doesn't care, yet cares excruciatingly too much.
I had come to town for Fruits & Veggies but I planned other distractions. I know the cunts and they're loose with time, appointments, etc. However, they were so, let's just say, “keen” to get some press that they decided – no, not they, James and Hezron decided – that I must HANG OUT WITH THEM. It's why, I suspect, this shitty hotel party is happening. A mission I'm grateful for and already regretting, half tweaking on shit drugs as we're escaping from a cheap hotel room where I swear we were thrown out by sex workers who saw how unprofitable we were, and trying to retrieve my phone from a pavement as the sun comes up, warm as fuck in winter, over a flat ocean, the chad fishermen pushing out their boats in ages-worn Mr Price summer clothes. Fruits & Veggies are stronger than me, and as much as I knew them, I was not prepared for the requirement to push it as far as we could, and then pass out on the side of the road (with a view to getting robbed or raped by vagrants?), just so there's a story to tell during sound check at the next gig.
At this hour, there is nothing insightful to say about the music; they're hard, fast, destructively structured, stupidly pop punk, with the kind of lame Gogol Bordello small-town aspirations that are both cringeworthy and awe-inspiring. In short, these fuckers of various birth are the most exciting, and most mystifyingly incapable, saviours that rock'n'roll has going for it right now. They're joyful prophets of systematic abandon, the champions of regretful sex.
This is not to say that they're breaking any sonic boundaries. They remind me of Lou Reed's maxim, “Drums, bass, guitar, vocals is all you'll ever need.” Their simplicity and their heart-wrenching rawness is all they have. They're practically the punk-rock little engine that could.
OK, enough of this misty-eyed bullshit. Loopy's desire to “tuck into” a trance bunny is starting to grate. It's a ridiculous exercise. They're cooning it up for me and I just want more shitty speed, less chance of arrest, and maybe not to vomit. I feel stupid and exploitative because of the way they play up to their “ROLLING STONE feature”, shouting at and cajoling me, calling me The Enemy and trying to remember lines from that awful cliché of a film. But still, their gig earlier at LIVE was nothing less than magnificent and deranged, chaos constructed so seamlessly that the band's untogetherness is suddenly held in doubt.
“I started off listening to hip-hop,” says Loopy. “I was an underground MC – it's how I got the name. We started a rap group. I was Loopy Lucia. Alliteration was huge in the Nineties. Then I got into punk, and then I grew up and I realised genres don't matter. I don't give a fuck what genre a thing is. Which is why we throw the reggae in with the Balkan and the maskandi. We write songs about being stoked, sometimes about being burnt out, about growing up in Durban.”
Purity is less amped. “I don't think the rest of the band knows all the lyrics to all the songs,” she sighs. It would be nice if they did, if someone asks what do you guys sing about, I shouldn't be the only one to be able to answer.” Her despondency about this is justified, because hidden among all the destruction and chaos are some pretty serious thoughts on capitalism and freedom, aiming often for Strummer levels of engagement.
“Toya Delazy tried to join our band. Before her big record deal.” James is talking me through the period a few years ago when they were casting about for new members. “We wanted a keyboardist and Pure brought her along. So, before practice, we went to a liquor store and she was boasting how she had once drunk a whole quart by herself.” Loopy butts in: “It was so awkward. Then we do this thing where we jam together for like 15 minutes to warm up and then we do a bong. And she was like, WHAT, BEFORE A PRACTICE?” James keeps up the banter: “Shame, poor thing, I don't think she even got to play her instrument once. She came to four or five practices but I always used her lead, because I didn't have one. We didn't even give her an amp.”
Loopy again: “I think Toya Delazy is going to top herself.” Then she pauses, “Shit, I shouldn't have said that, we're supporting her in a few weeks, and they're paying well. Please tell me this will come out after that gig.” I check my dates. Loopy continues: “Have you been following her Facebook statuses? She's depressed; it must be that sell-out deal. We have a betting pool going – I have her for December.” “Fuck you Loopy,” says James, “that was my idea.”
And where did Hezron come from? “I asked Hez if he would jam with us at Splashy,” James tells me. “He rehearsed with us, he jammed Splashy, but we still weren't sure. Then, two weeks later, I found out he was on acid for that gig, and I said, he has the job.” So how the fuck does a violinist end up in a ska-punk band? “I grew up being told the violin was a classical instrument and I always wanted to prove them wrong,” Hez explains. “Plus, being an Indian in a ska band who plays the violin, we're quite rare. Yellow Card has a Jamaican violinist but that's about it.” Loopy takes over: “From the beginning, we wanted brass and then we realised that that would put us in the ska-punk corner forever, and we want to constantly expand our music.”
The current line-up is rounded out by Cameron Lofstrand on guitar, lead singer of Black Math. “Actually,” says James, “Black Math wanted me to play keyboard for them, but I didn't own one. So I said to them, if one of you joins our band, I'll join your band. And that's how we got Cameron. I still haven't played for Black Math yet.” Loopy, forever instilling the “Fruits & Veggies ruined my life” mantra takes over. “Cameron was so sweet when he joined the band. Now he's becoming an arsehole. We're so proud.” Out of nowhere, James suddenly leans forward: “Do you think it's too late to change our name?” Hezron takes the gap: “It is a bit of a shit name.”
Loopy switches back to the subject at hand: “That's the thing about changing the line-up. With every member change, Fruits & Veggies have started from scratch, throwing out the old songs and writing new material; they've tossed a lot of good melodies and lyrics to the side of the road. “I keep suggesting that we relook the old songs,” Purity says. “But people are just amped on creating new things. And the music has changed a fuckload. The drumming is tighter. We still stick with the groove, the reggae bits that we will never neglect, and the ska. And with Hezron in the band we're experimenting with more of a gypsy feel as well. James is learning accordion.” I immediately posit that Balkan music is becoming a bit passé.
The people in the band now have all reached the point that we know: this is what I want to do with the rest of my life, so I'm not going to get wasted before a gig. There's plenty of time to do that afterwards, away from the venue. And I'm not going to rock up drunk to a show. It's also an issue of respecting the audience. They came to see a show, not to see you fucking out.”
A few days before at a gig where F&V are supporting Black Math, Similo stumbles into me drunkenly, looking like a thin-toothed hobo. I ask him what he thinks of the new Fruits line-up and songs. “They're shit now,” is all he has to offer before he wanders off into the night.
Purity waves it aside: “We don't look at music that way, whether it's been done before or other people are doing it. When we want to explore something, we explore it. It's always going to be different anyway, because it's us doing it. We're not a full-on gypsy band, we don't have a tuba, we're just dabbling.
“Back then, we were singing about that lifestyle, and the things we didn't like. It was just honesty about the lives that we were living. The new songs have calmed down, they're not in your face, they're not that 'fuck you' straightforward. For 'Taste of Love', me and Loopy had a huge fight. She still was 'let's say “fuck you”, let's say “dick”, let's say “cunt”', and I was like, 'Seriously? We've grown from that.' And I seriously felt like I was the only one who had. And I want more for her and the rest of the band. We're fucking close, me and Loopy. We're pretty fucking tight.”
In one of the Fruits' earlier incarnations, Purity used to drop a bit of Zulu into the mix, a bit of wild punk ululating. Whatever happened to that? “We left those songs behind. I do only the things I'm comfortable with. And that may be a little naive because it's not all about me… ” As if on cue, her baby starts crying. She sticks her finger in the moon mouth. “It's also about reaching other people and making them identify with what you're trying to do. But for me, singing in Zulu doesn't hit the spot. Singing in Zulu with a rock riff behind me just doesn't make sense. The rhythm of the language… how do I explain it… I think a song would absolutely have to be crafted in that language totally. And I wouldn't do it justice. Unless it's created Zulu from the ground up. And I'm not Zulu, I'm Mswati. I lived a Zulu life, my mom is from Swaziland, my dad was Somalian, but I was born in KZN. Yet, I don't even speak Mswati, unless I see my grandmother. But I lived a Zulu life.” Both Purity and Loopy talk about their relationships with their parents and to culture as if it's something in the distant past.
“Yes,” she continues, “it's necessary to stay true to your roots and where you come from, but at the same time you can be inspired by so many things. To be quite honest, we're more influenced by international artists. Who is there to be influenced by locally really – Stimela? Certainly not the BLK JKS, I don't get them. They take themselves way too seriously. And to be quite honest, I saw Spoek live and he was shit.”
Loopy knows her parents don't approve but she tells me they're learning to accept her life choices. When I see her a few weeks later at Oppikoppi, it's changed entirely. “They fucking want me to settle down! They can't accept it, they're trying to cut me off!” she shrieks as they arrive in the dust bowl, 20 hours or so of straight-driving momentum in her voice. James, on the other hand, has no such problem. His father, Michael Cross, manages Fruits & Veggies (as well as Brendan Shields). He follows them around for the duration of Oppikoppi, making sure they stay just on the right side of out of hand, at least until after the gig when Loopy is unleashed into Mordor like some kind of avenging rhinoceros.
Back in Durban, Loopy had told me that her parents are pretty liberal on all fronts. “I mean they're not happy, they'd prefer it if I got a job. But when I first failed school, my mom said, 'I don't know what's disturbing your schoolwork, it couldn't be boys, because you've never been into boys but even if it's girls it shouldn't be affecting your marks.'
“And my mom knows that I smoke pot, and she's not happy – what parent would be? But I've tried to explain to her that the reason weed is illegal is because of the racist propaganda of the Thirties. You know the whole Hearst thing, negroes tempting white women with marijuana, which is what I'm doing, carrying on the tradition.” This is typical Loopy, breaking a serious thought with a joke, and then diverting. More agit-punk propaganda from the self-titled “racist bassist”? “No man, we don't see each other as, like, there is White James, we like to take the piss out of people who think like that, you know, blacking out at the cafeteria and all that. I was raised in a multiracial environment.”
Purity has deeper thoughts on all of this. “I only see colour when I'm around black people,” she says. “Day to day, partying, I surround myself with people that I want to and those people I love, who love me back. But as soon as I get out of that realm and I take a taxi at the market, that's when I realise that black people are so ignorant. I mean, I should be able to relate more with a black person than a white person but it's the complete opposite. I want to be able to feel more open with black people than with white people. It's harder for me to make black friends than with any other race. Growing up, all my friends were black. Then I chose to live this different life, this completely different life, and it switched.”
“I lost my phone,” Loopy shrugs while flirting with a skinny mall goth waitress. “I was shagging in public and it fell out my pocket.” Stylist-photographer Tessa-Mae Hadlow, another vital part of the entourage, exclaims, “Fuck you, Loopy! She's the worst lesbian. She fucked a pilot.”
Loopy explains: “I met him at Flagons and he said, 'You want to get a bag?' so I shagged him at The Cube [a notorious make-out spot]. Pulled some muscles.” Tessa holds Loopy's hand in an attached sort of way. “Fuck you Tessa!” says Loopy, pushing it away. “You've got a boyfriend now.” As much as anything else, this loose sexual affection is part of the F&V lifestyle. “I hate women,” Loopy tells me days later. “I'm a misogynist lesbian.” Her reasoning for the sexual escapades? “All our friends are bi, it's pretty much, 'you take what you can get'... we're all desperate.” But she takes a moment to think. When Loopy is sober you begin to realise that she's no fool. “Nah, I think people put too much pressure on putting themselves into boxes. I prefer women because they're gorgeous and they smell nice and they've always been sweet to me. When it comes to being with someone there is a difference between our sex drive and our pair-bond drive. There is a difference between fucking and wanting to be in a relationship.”
For Purity, the sex-drive-boundary-pushing is more of an evolutionary impetus, a moral imperative. “I think kids are exploring things on so many levels, and sexuality is one of them,” she says. “If I was to be introduced to a different group of people, I'd start seeing things differently, I'd start receiving things differently, I'd start questioning everything about what I think I believe. And when you explore things, everything is put in question, and sexuality is one of them. I think now is a time when young people are starting to question things that their parents never experienced, things beyond the human scope.”
There is competition of course. “There's no shame with Pure,” says Loopy. “I'll tell her I really like a girl and she'll just tuck into her.”
On stage, Purity is a punk-rock Brenda Fassie, a ska Skin, a surf-rock Against Me!, a real do-not-give-a-fuck-falling-over funster. But she's held up by Loopy. The honest truth is that as much as the line-up has changed over the years, Loopy and Purity are the core of the band, the songwriters, the push and the pull, the all-loving and the all-destroying; the Kali of ska. And as much as they pretend to not give a fuck, both of them are filled with a righteous anger at all kinds of systems. It's no wonder they're still stuck in Durban; it's no wonder no festivals feel comfortable booking them. They crave headline slots and then they shit on the organisers or backstage couches. “Yeah,” says Purity. “There are different versions. Loopy was drunk and lost, and she claims she only pissed on it, but witnesses say – and that's including the guy who was about to go on stage – that she pooped on the backstage couch at Splashy.”
Splashy banned the group and then two years later, after some favours and begging, allowed them to come back. After the festival, Loopy returned the favour. “Splashy put out this thing saying 300 days until the next Splashy Fen,” she tells me. “And then me and James were a bit tipsy and we commented, saying 300 days until Durban musicians get ripped off again. And Pedro Carlo got upset. But here is the thing: we aren't the first ones to say it. When you're paying bands R1 000 to jam at your festival in 2012, and it doesn't even cover the petrol, then well… As a KZN festival, it's just shit that the Durban bands are treated like second-class citizens.”
Loopy is well into her tirade now. “The worst thing about being in this industry is that you're doing what you love, and the organisers are business people, they're not artists, and they exploit that. Musicians, let's face it, get pretty shafted most of the time. We don't want to play there anymore. What are they going to give us – exposure? Fuck that…”
Is Loopy an anarchist? “A lot of people give faith and power to people who exploit them. I believe in a socialist democracy as a way toward proper anarchy, because education needs to happen, people need to work, the economy is in a shambles, etcetera,” she says. “Trying to create an anarchist state now would just lead to, well, anarchy. And actually, I am a terrible anarchist. I'm an anarchist that eats McDonalds. I believe that the people should govern themselves. I trust you more than I trust…” she stops. “Nah, I don't trust you.”
Purity is again beatific about her politics: “I don't have all the answers, only suggestions really… I will carry on writing about the way I see things, and the way I want other people to see things, that people shouldn't rely on the things that they are told, or their handed-down assumptions about what is right; people should question more, there is always more to the story.”
There's a desperation to Loopy's I-don't-give-a-fuckness, a dare to go further that is flipside to Purity's free-love-overthrow-the-system-with-positive-vibes attitude. This is the balance and the entropy of their performance. Purity is electric sex, high-kicks and humility, Loopy is the stand-up comedian who treats everyone as her bitch. Yet the combination of the lyrics they both write, grounded with Loopy's groove, is their joy.
The first glimpse I get of them at Oppi is backstage, where they're struggling with the set list. Their manager tells them to just write the order of the songs. “We haven't even named half the songs,” says James. A day later, they burst on stage in the afternoon sun, glorious with manic feral energy. It doesn't take them long to have the crowd off the grass and skanking furiously. Purity announces: “Man, when the sun goes down tonight, things are going to get messy!” She then extends an open invitation to anyone who wants to camp with them, before launching into “Without A Gwaai or a Cent”, a celebration of, yes, being broke and without cigarettes. The crowd eats up Purity's open-leg-flapping dance and James' grasshopper flings. Loopy is smiling like a Moomin on crack, lapping up the waves of energy they're swapping with the crowd. It's a good moment for Fruits & Veggies and they ride it hard into the ground.
Much, much later, or the following night, I find Loopy up at Klein Bar where she's berating a relatively sober and well-coiffed random for being mediocre. What he's done to deserve this is lost in the fog. “I don't mean to be this way,” she tells me almost forlornly. And then she's distracted by Hennie from aKING who is trying to steal a security golf cart. She rushes off to help him. It's fruitless – they have no keys. She returns and tries to bum a smoke. “Let's face it, I am the story,” she says. She gets that hooded look. “I'm the clown. I'm the entertainment.” It's only momentary, this self-reflection. “Do you think Zahara will ever party with us?” she asks. I can only offer her a shrug and ask where the rest of her band is.
“Pure is hooking up with the guys from Circus Maximus,” she says. It might be a lie, it might be an exaggeration, but this is what endears us to Loopy, and to Fruits & Veggies: they're making up their own story as they go along, constantly reinventing themselves and then trying to live up to the reinvention