In his cut-up and complex world, electronica savant Felix Laband's burdens are also his freedoms: television advertising, drugs, a trail of fragmented relationships, and the ambient kwaito protest album that refuses to complete itself.
Words by ROGER YOUNG
Photograph by Justin McGee
“Everyone is all, like, just let it go, let it go, let it go. It can't just be let go.” Felix Laband is chain-smoking and laying out notebooks on the parquet floor of his one-bedroom Jo'burg flat that's mostly studio space. Spliced images from Seventies National Geographics and Nineties porn magazines are scrawled over, teeth blacked out, words written around bodies, encasing the Breitz-like figures in some kind of Burroughs cut-up nightmare spiral. Stacks of vinyls, magazines, CDs and books — predominantly first-person accounts of African wars, genocides, atrocities — spill off the windowsills. I'm here to listen to his new album Deaf Safari. It's been nearly finished for about three years. Laband has been up for days working on a song, tweaking but being unable to complete it. The windows are blacked out with blankets for soundproofing. Coffee cups and ashtrays litter the space. He looks up from the floor. “What all those fuckers don't understand is that I know the feeling, and I know I'll be able to recognise it when it's done. It's not something that eludes you once it's there.”
It's nearly seven years since Laband's Dark Days Exit carved a hole in South African electronica, and the path from there to here is littered with all kinds of disappointment, no-shows, sightings and conjecture — Laband's disastrous Fiction night, Laband at some after-party in 2008, Laband late for another gig, Laband and the unfinishable album, Laband asleep at the wheel of his incredible talent.
Recently, a different kind of conjecture has been bubbling to the surface. DJ Snakehips (Laband's DJ alter ego) started popping up in mid-2011, playing a mix of his own tracks from previous albums, odd electronica and kwaito just out of date. Professor's “Jezebel” seemed to be his favourite. Occasionally, in the middle of all of this, a new Felix Laband tune. After a few months, DJ Snakehips gave way to Laband playing as Laband and trying out new material. The album that would never be finished had poked its head out of the ground. At the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival earlier this year, Laband said that Deaf Safari would be out before the end of the year. Everyone connected to the business end of South African electronica shook their heads like weary veterans of some undocumented war. “He's been promising it for ages,” they said. So-and-so has heard it and it's finished, so-and-so has heard that it's no good, so-and-so says Laband has given up on it.
“I used to have a KISS cover band.” Laband is going through a box of old photographs, dug out from under a record crate of electronic detritus. He shows me a picture of three boys in their early teens clutching cardboard guitars. “I was pulled into the headmaster's office and accused of being a Satanist. I had to publicly burn all my KISS records. The other kids' moms wouldn't let me play with them any more.” He shrugs it off: “So I got into skateboarding.”
Getting Laband just to play the new material for me is proving to be more difficult than I imagined. It's not that he doesn't want to, but he's an ADD magpie and there is always something else to be enthusiastic about. None of the chaos in here is detritus to him.
Day Four in Johannesburg for the interview. Laband has already postponed more than a few times, because he was either finishing a commercial or a new track or having his car fixed or just needed to sleep. But now he is finally about to play me something. And then his keyboard fucks out.
“How much is a new keyboard?” he asks me, banging it against his desk. Then the doorbell rings. It's someone he works with, or for, making music for commercials. They want him to come to a brief tomorrow for a new job. He says he'll have to play the album for me another time.
I ask him about working in advertising, how it affects his music. “Commercial work has funded my entire new studio.” He indicates the trestle table covered in desks, pads, battered PCs, guitars, and turntables with a certain weariness. “But it affects me more than you can imagine. It's why I fucked out so much, because I hate it. They'll hire me to do an advert where they will literally get me to copy, note for note, some piece of shit music.” His frustration rises and he begins to pace. “They won't give me the opportunity to try my own thing. And I wonder, why are you hiring me? Because it's their opportunity to stick their cock in my face.
“And then — I get this a lot — you hear people saying, 'It's so sad seeing Felix like that, I feel so bad.' Well, whatever, bru! It's sad seeing you. You're the guy who's still doing adverts and paying off your big car. All those dreams you had, all those films you were going to make. All gone.”
He pauses for a second — you can see him searching in his head — and then he breaks into that gap-toothed grin. “You must promise me that you put that in,” he says with a wink in his voice, a child anticipating a future scolding.
But Laband is not paying off a big car. Laband is trying to finish his long-overdue ambient kwaito protest album. Laband is dealing with a chronic drug addiction. Compost, his German record company, is nervous. He's touring Germany soon. He needs to stay clean. The evidence that he's trying is there. A pamphlet on Suboxone, a buprenorphine (the methadone replacement that Kurt Cobain was rumoured to be on when he killed himself), is on his work desk. Throughout the days I'm with him, on and off, we constantly return to the subject of “getting clean”. The drug does work for some, but it's a long road out, fraught with relapse and personal disappointment. It might be the only way out that works for Laband, though: he's fiercely against rehabs and Narcotics Anonymous. “I don't think I like to admit that the daily grind of doing drugs becomes part of the identity, but I'm trying to work out how to shed that identity,” he says.
“This is the thing, I had this kind of realisation. I hate feeling like a victim. I'm proud of who I am and what I do. And I'm tired of being like this… this whole 'Oooh I'm so bad, I'm so sorry.' I obviously choose to get high. I like to get high. I must just accept the consequences of my choices.” At this moment Laband is defiant with self-destructive pride, but it's quickly followed by a sadness. “But it's ridiculous, all everyone ever wants to talk about, all everyone ever writes about is the drugs.”
Laband's studio feels isolated from the present, like a lair of a historian or ethnographer of the recent past. I am with him on the day Brett Murray's Zuma penis scandal explodes in the press, and suggest to him we go to the exhibition. The Goodman Gallery is about five blocks from his house. He suggests we go to Spur instead. On the way up to Rosebank Mall, through its leafy streets and slasto flat blocks, we talk about the Angolan War, Koevoet and Vlakplaas. He's tired, been up all night working on a commercial.
“I'm doing a lot of reading on the ANC/Inkatha clashes. Stuff that happened when I was at school that I didn't understand. I remember fearing it without knowing it,” he says. We discover the escalators are broken, we climb and wheeze. “Even the guy who took the fall for everyone, Eugene de Kock… At the end of the day, the only guy who visited him was a black guy from his unit at Koevoet, a guy who named his son Eugene de Kock.” Laband stops short to light a cigarette. “I think there is something in that, in that aspect, something I'm trying to understand. And it comes down to this: who are the guys who speak the African languages? The Dutchmen, the farmers. They're supposed to be the racists, but they're the ones who learn the languages. Not us English speakers.”
At the Spur entrance, we wait as Laband finishes his smoke. “As children of liberals, it's our opportunity to speak now, and if we don't do that then we are cowards. We weren't old enough or wise enough to do our thing then, because, well, my parents voted PFP [Progressive Federal Party], but they never said to me, 'What's happening, it's terrible.' They kept us in the dark.” He orders a burger and a lime milkshake and goes into the smoking cubicle for a cigarette.
Laband's father is Dr John Laband, a professor in African history, now based in Canada. He is the author of Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, among other books, and a recipient of the Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Gold Medal for Service to the Zulu People. Laband's mother is an English teacher. There is a specific type of English emotional withholding among the liberals of old Natal, and I imagine this might be what Laband is talking about, that this is what's led to his insecurities and isolation.
When he comes out of the smoking room, he qualifies: “I've got wonderful parents, but they're not hippies, they're quite conservative. Aside from all the crap I put them through, we get on pretty well.” He pauses for a second, reaching. “I used to phone my mother at four in the morning, to ask for money. At the age of 30. It's so embarrassing.”
So would he want to live in another country, to escape the politics? “Whenever I go anywhere else, I want to come back. I can't be gone for more than four months.” Again I suggest we go to the Brett Murray exhibition, but Laband says no. It's time we heard some of the new album.
“Cambodia,” he says, snapping to attention. He had zoned out briefly at an ATM. “Lauren has a friend there. We can go stay, just to get away from this shit for a while, get some perspective after the album launch.” I am reminded of Melanie, the character in the hidden track on Laband's album 4/4 Down the Stairs. “It is not drugs Melanie seeks. It is purpose, reason for existence,” implores a woman's voice over the up-pulsing sequence.
Lauren (pronounced Loren) is Laband's partner of 10 years. A day or so before, while letting me listen to the samples of charismatic preachers she's sourced for him, he said, “Eventually, I want The Felix Laband Show to be tied to the visual. I hate common DJ-style visuals. I find it so obvious and crap, just a mishmash of stuff. I want to approach it almost like Kentridge uses life. But I also need someone to work with me, and I've realised that the best person is Lauren. She's the only person I trust. Artistically. I'm never sceptical of anything she makes.” In these moments, Laband has a penetrating honesty, something you can't but totally believe in.
Laband fell in love with kwaito at an early age, while growing up in Pietermaritzburg. “When I was at school, my girlfriend at the time, Janine, her maid's son gave me this Brothers of Peace album, Traffic Cop, you know? That was my first. And I just fell in love with it. I've been buying it ever since. The only music I buy is kwaito. All the white people's music I just download.”
Janine Tilley was Laband's first love while at school, and ostensibly the reason he moved to Jo'burg after a brief stint at art school in Durban. “One of the big reasons he wanted to move to Jo'burg was because of his deep respect and love for kwaito,” she tells me. “He used to listen to Brothers of Peace a lot. But in Durban, musicians are very thin on the ground. I think that was one of his dreams, to not just be this isolated rich white, but to actually work with what he loved.
“Felix was never happy with his physical appearance. He didn't like his big nose and his big lips, the gap in his teeth. He never found himself to be attractive.”
When Tilley speaks of Laband's formative years, it becomes easier to understand not only his insecurities but his unease with the legitimacy of the white man's take on kwaito. “It was apartheid, so it was still safe,” Tilley continues. “So we just ran around and hung out on the fields all night, and did fridge gas. It was another world that we don't really have today. He had strong relationships with amazing people, like Len Cockcroft [now of The Wild Eyes, and sometime part of Fingerhead], [artist] James Beckett and [artist and electronic musician] Dean Henning. And we used to have these incredible parties, largely initiated by our love for industrial music. We'd build smoke with fires and we'd have strobes and we'd listen to Skinny Puppy really loud and Fingerhead would jam. We just banded around Felix. People are drawn to him because he's down-to-earth and he's funny, you know? He's quite self-effacing, and he's quite, well, he's intensely romantic.”
Young and ambitious, Tilley moved to Jo'burg to work in film. Laband followed. Soon the relationship was over and Laband moved back to Durban, where he found himself making music for television adverts and honing his production talent. He started on his first solo album. He also began working with a kwaito performer.
“The only music I buy is kwaito. All the white people's music I just download.”
“There was this guy, Pappi.” Laband hands me a CD. It is a typical late-Nineties kwaito album cover, all bright colours, simple text, a dude flossing. “I made a bunch of stuff with him and none of it was released.” He takes the CD back, keeps it in his hand. “The problem was that they used to come to my house every day. Every day. Him and all of his mates, while I was trying to finish Thin Shoes. And that's part of the reason I left Durban. I just left. I couldn't face having to tell them. So I went to Cape Town.”
I'm taken aback by this. Here was the very thing that he was seeking, the opportunity to produce real KZN kwaito, and he walked away from it? Laband registers my scepticism. “Just after I got to Cape Town, he got my number from somewhere and we spoke. It was great. I'd love to get hold of him now, see what he's doing. We were actually quite close; they started to take me to a lot of their parties. I was the only whitey there. I think they liked me.”
Laband has a crippling awareness of the accepted place of a white person in the field of kwaito. It's part of why he shies away from the task. “There is nothing worse,” he tells me, “than those Danny K and Mandoza things; they make me want to puke. It's like the advert with the one black guy, and they're all up in the yacht or something? Ja, right. Or there's the one white guy just sitting there, looking transformed. It's a joke.” And he would like nothing more than to change this. It is his defining mission; one he hasn't figured out a strategy for yet.
“I've always loved the rhythms, and the vocal rhythms. I just hate the way I can't understand, I can't speak the fucking language, you know?” Laband places the Pappi CD back on his bookshelf. “It's basically, if you understand maskandi, you would understand why all those guys from Durban are so good, because it's in their blood. Maskandi is now what kwaito is today.”
And there it is. Laband adores the music but doesn't speak the language. He is on the outside and it embarrasses him, yet he hasn't taken the step to learn Zulu. “I think it's a subconscious imperial fucking thing – we've been taught that if we speak English we are superior, and that they must speak to us [in English].”
So is this why he hasn't continued his quest for collaboration? “There are guys who I really respect and want to work with, but I'm nervous of it,” he replies. “It's kind of like wanting to ask the cheerleader out and being nervous of rejection. And I've been away from the scene so long that I don't really have a name. No one knows who I am any more. I'm waiting to release this album so they take me seriously.” He points at his kwaito collection. “I want to work with the older guys like Spikiri. I really want to work with Professor but I've heard he's quite difficult. Who knows? But I guess I'm difficult too.”
Laband is in the grip of a dilemma, leaning forward on his chair and punctuating his sentences by pointing at me. In an attempt to cut the tension, I affirm that he has a reputation for being difficult. I mean it as a joke. He is visibly cut by this.
“Do people still think of me as a dick?” He gets quite anxious, starts pacing around his studio space, stubbing out his cigarette. “It's when I'm insecure that I put other people down. I don't have any apologies because I don't feel I need to make any. When I was younger, yes, but not now. My motives are more clear. I had a stint when it was about ego, but that's not what I want. I can't stand the failure from building myself up so high.”
It might be true that a few of the older kwaito musicians don't know Laband's work. But that's not to say he's been forgotten, or unknown. Witness the crowd response at any of his recent gigs, the immense draw he has at festivals. And hear the awe in the voices of musicians who become fanboys the moment you mention his name.
“Well,” says BLK JKS guitarist Mpumi Mcata, “I think he had a substantial influence over that whole heavy bass era of kwaito production: the Yizo-Yizo, 'Donkey Rattle' generation, if you will. His music is really open, vulnerable, not trapped in itself. It's ready and honest, which is rare in the world of electronic music!”
Warrick Sony, of The Kalahari Surfers, who has worked with Laband over the years, agrees. “More interesting, though, is his usage of kwaito. It's a funny subtlety, the way that's seeped in, even in his earlier stuff,” says Sony. “His music always had that ethereal heroin thing about it, that 'thin' sound. That Thin Shoes sound. I don't know what it is. You can hear it in The Velvet Underground, you know. It's a trance-y thing, a dronal thing, but it's also a frequency thing. It's more Indian and it's avoiding aggression too.”
Laband's former label boss from African Dope, Hilton “Roach” Roth, says it best. “There is a scene in a Bond movie, where the villain says, 'The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.' That's Felix for me.”
When Laband asks me what people are saying about him “out there”, I tell him. “They want you to release this album already.” He's blunt about its delay. “I've created this pressure. I am aware of the fact that I'm not just another electronic musician, I know I'm doing something special. And I've been rewarded in the sense that I have listeners far afield. And so often people tell me that my albums have meant so much to them, that I don't want to let them down.” A pause, a drag on his Aspen. “I don't want to become another Goldfish in stonewashed jeans just doing a tour. I mean, I could have already been on a whole different path, if I had moved to Europe and not gotten caught up in all this crap over here. Although, I don't know how much I really…” He looks at me, to make sure I understand. “Do you know what I mean? It's almost been cool for me.”
When he finally plays me nearly two hours of what will eventually become Deaf Safari, what is revealed is this: he's angry. He's built worlds of rhythm, but this time with the vocal clicks of South African languages, discarding meaning for rhythm. And he has an incredible, mystifying singing voice. “I think I can sing,” he says, “I mean I used to be in bands.”
So when did he decide to go electronic? “The problem was that I was always the leader of the band. And I suppose every band needs somebody but it's a bit crap, always telling everyone what to do,” he says. “Then after school you actually have to make a living out of it. To be in a real band, other people need to be as committed as you are. The best time to be in a band is during school. You've got nothing else to do, and you can play in someone's garage. Poor parents. Jesus, it was so loud. You've got no idea how loud it is to be in a band.” He selects more of the album to play for me and shuffles off to make coffee, apologising for the chaos of his kitchen.
“Anyway,” he says, returning, “these days I have to work pretty fucking quietly because I can't afford to have a studio as well. I like the comfort of my own space. But it doesn't really work because I can't play loud and I think it's been affecting my music in some ways. When you play through a big sound system, one sound without much else has a lot more impact than a whole bunch of sounds. I tend to be overcrowding my new stuff a little bit.” He selects another track, abruptly stopping in the middle of a mesmerising song that may or may not be called “Bag of Bones”.
“Anyway, I'm not happy with it yet. It's cool, but it's not ready. I'm missing a layer, the last part, which is normally the easiest for me. It's usually the part I struggle with least, the melodies, the vocal, the guitar. But it's the stuff I'm struggling with most. I'm maybe scared that I don't have those melodies any more.” From what I have just heard, he's wrong.
Laband is moving into protest electronica, utilising politically incorrect and polarising samples of political rallies and religious sermons. And it's not surprising, given his liberal upbringing, punk roots and all the time spent hanging out with sonic terrorists such as Jan Welter, Syd Kitchen and Live Jimi Presley in the early Nineties. But how does just using a sample of something say anything about it?
“It used to work around… A song would begin with a sample, I would use that to create a key, or whatnot,” he replies. “But these days it's been more an idea, like I want to try this or try that. I've always liked the way you can take a sample of someone crying and, with the right music and the right context, you can make it sound like they're having sex. I like using samples that are quite hard, taking someone who is saying something hectic and then making the music beautiful. It gives it a lot of power. Controlling the way the statement is consumed. I've got this song called 'Kill the Boer'. It's all these samples of people singing dubhula ibhunu.”
He stops for a second, wondering if he got the phrase right. “I'm turning it into what is hopefully quite a cool song. I have to. It's a statement on how we are playing with fire. If we look at history in all the instances where it was socially acceptable to say such hectic things and get away with it, like Nazi Germany or Rwanda before the genocide, where people could actually get away with saying 'kill these people'… It's quite a heavy thing to get away with and I don't think we should take it lightly.”
He pauses. Inhales, exhales, shrugs. “A lot of it is going to be political. This is not going to be an album you can put on and take a bubble bath to. I'm tired of that. I grew up on punk music. My poor mother had to listen to it in the car.
“I used to purposefully not listen to any other electronica, and that was good for me – I've been exposed to the world of mp3s, I've been given entire record collections from a variety of musicians and DJs, just ridiculous amounts of music. And it frightened me.” He takes a moment, trying to place the fear. “I think, subconsciously, it's affected how I've been doing things without me realising it. I don't even know if people will hear all the stuff I'm putting in. Because no doubt it will be listened to the way I now listen to music, with my mouse, in five seconds…” His voice rises, his thoughts speeding up.
“The thing I'm struggling with the most at this stage is finding anything to hold onto that makes me feel good or excites me about the world, or music as a whole. Or what it means to be an artist. Or like, the respect that you should have created by being an artist your whole life, instead of this from zero to hero in 10 seconds new world order. It upsets me quite a lot. These days everything is so attainable. To get to a sound that is considered a song can take two minutes with pre-settings. It doesn't require much skill. When I started this, we had to have more equipment; now you can do everything inside the computer. I prefer to use equipment; it gives you your own sound and your own thing. Analogue synths and desks and stuff.”
He's gone back to his workspace, intensely staring into the graffitied CRT [old-style] monitor. “But what's irritating me the most about the album is the polishedness of it. It's started to become how I imagine creating a stop-frame animation. To create a minute of music will take three weeks. I've started recording endless options. When you have no limitations you end up with crap.”
He pauses to do some mental arithmetic. “But yes, there are about 150 titles in progress. I think I've narrowed it down to 25 or 30 that I think are cool. My idea is that the ones that finish themselves are the ones that are supposed to be finished. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Something bad, I know. I have this feeling it's all going to come together in a stroke of lightning. And I'll just finish everything down in one go. I want it to be this punk recording and that's it.”
Scattered around his workspace — mixed in with the pads, desks and guitars — are scrapbooks, notebooks, cut up magazines, glue and pens. “I'm quite fluent with scissors,” he says. “This album, it's been a process, almost to ease my mind a little bit. With cutting things up, it's kind of a release for me. I suppose some people would go for a run. I make my books. The process where I get ready for a three-, four-, five-day non-stop session with a song… I begin that with a new page that I stick things on, write ideas on, stuff like that. It started off being more fun, porn, noise, mess stuff.”
He pulls out the box of notebooks, starts piling them onto the floor. He begins flipping through them maniacally, past images of women cut up, spliced, heels and hands trimmed to sharp points, giant mouths, text. “It started off more of just a mess. I collect and dismember old National Geographics. I'm very into the qualities of the print; if you use a magazine from the Seventies it's so different. I'm very much into the different textures.”
Like the textures of samples? “It's a way of using crap source material. With music and art it's the same thing; it's the context that you place it in that gives it relevance. I like doing it by hand; you're forced to work with the size, and you can't shrink or cheat.”
There are pages of porn images where he has cut the genitalia out, leaving negative white spaces of cock. I remark on them. “Trasi Henen copied that, the bitch,” he says and then quickly moves on. “And now it's not so much as punk, it's more thought about, as my own spacing. I'm enjoying cutting shapes out of things that don't exist, working with stuff I can't resize.”
He's got his scissors out now and is cutting up something. He zones out on the blades cutting through the paper, slows down, puts it on the page, moves it around, cigarette dangling from his lips. Sticks it down, scribbles “Deaf Safari” on it, then black spirals.
“It's fucking me up,” he blurts out. “I never really understood MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface], so all my synths and shit I would record as audio, and it's the same as collaging. You can chop it up and shit and do what you want, but you can't change its DNA. And now, well, the rabbit hole, I haven't got out.”
He stands up and goes to get another box of notebooks, mumbling, “Millions of these damn things, these small books, more notes. The Prestik marks, coming through here.”
I remark on how all the teeth in the cut-out images are blacked out. “Maybe it's due to the fact that my own teeth are barely there any more. I've basically destroyed them.”
And as you destroy your own teeth, you destroy other people's? “I've never thought of it like that,” he says. “I mean, I've always grown up with a gap. Which I've sort of grown to like, because it gives you a naughty sort of thing. But now I've got a gap at the bottom.” He pulls back his gums. “Look at that, dude.” His gums have receded; his teeth bare the rot of years of drug use. “All these gaps, all from the drugs, it's bad, bad, bad.”
Laband has said in the past that he's afraid to come off the drugs, because he's worried that he will lose his ability to make music. He's in this half-lit world now, where he knows his dark days must come to an end, either way. He has a cocky pride in the extremes he has gone to. He is reaching towards emergence, while fearing it. Scared of not measuring up. It's exactly the same Felix Laband I met in Durban back when he was making Thin Shoes, before the drugs took hold. He was as scattered, as manic; a hoarder of sounds who felt unsure of his legitimacy. He hasn't changed, and the drugs have very little to do with his genius. This is not something I can explain to him. His life is a reflection of the agonies of our time.
He dumps another box of notebooks on the rickety faded couch. I start flipping through them. “Are these lyrics?” I ask. “No, they're the things I thought I would complete that day. Lists. I should call this album Lists. Unfinished Lists.”
Recently, Laband had an incident with the ANC. He had posted a picture on Facebook of himself at six years old, playing horsey with another boy, riding on this kid's back. The other boy was black, the son of a farm hand. He tagged a friend of his in the picture, who, Laband tells me, was enraged by the implication and accused him of being a “typical Natal Midlands little boertjie boy”. Then in 2011 it was used, without permission, in the ANC election campaign with the slogan: “See if they won't do it again.” A minor blog storm erupted: enraged white people asked how could it be that such an innocent childhood game could be framed as racism. When I ask him about it, he just says, “I don't really want to talk about it yet. It's going to resurface and I don't know how to explain how I feel about it.”
This is what you hear on Deaf Safari, this struggle. Laband is trying to work out the strange politics of this land, while doubting his legitimacy as an English-only-speaking son of liberals. You can hear him lurching through the twilight, disturbing the silt of the recent past, trying to escape with his soul intact.
The photographer arrives. Laband jokes around with him about the state of the studio and starts unhooking the blankets to let more light in, the heaviness of what we've been talking about dissipated by the unfamiliarity of a new person in the studio.
There is one question I haven't asked him yet, about an unreleased album, from back in Cape Town, called Guavarama.
He stops with the blankets. “It's an electro-punk thing, I made it the same time as Dark Days Exit. It was a product of me and Mark van Niekerk playing together. He is the greatest musician I've ever worked with and I ruined our relationship.” Then Laband breaks off to pose on the couch. “Please, I'm old,” he says to the photographer, laughing. “Try not to make me look too damaged.”
As we're getting ready to leave, he steers the conversation back to Van Niekerk. “Honestly, he's a genius. He's the one musician I'm most comfortable with. He ended up having to be my mother. I pushed his friendship to the limits. He made up his mind to stay clear of me. I have to prove myself to him; hopefully I can win him back. I've let a lot of people down. My honesty buys me leeway to behave badly.” And then, like someone who knows his purpose, his reason for existence, Laband says: “The only thing that will be enough will be for me to follow through. To do everything I promised I would do.”
Rolling Stone South Africa — August 2012
Photograph by David Southwood