Koos was a South African punk/noise band during the Apartheid regime. KOOS were the truly innovative band whose music defined and reflected South Africa’s increasingly dark eighties. The band was formed in 1986 by conceptual artist Neil Goedhals and actor Marcel Van Heerden, who were joined by Gys de Villiers, Megan Kruskal, Velile Nxazonke and Kendell Geers. The country’s original punk poet Johan van Wyk wrote some of the lyrics. KOOS was a
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Koos was a South African punk/noise band during the Apartheid regime. KOOS were the truly innovative band whose music defined and reflected South Africa’s increasingly dark eighties. The band was formed in 1986 by conceptual artist Neil Goedhals and actor Marcel Van Heerden, who were joined by Gys de Villiers, Megan Kruskal, Velile Nxazonke and Kendell Geers. The country’s original punk poet Johan van Wyk wrote some of the lyrics. KOOS was a highly personal reaction to the chaos and despair that had engulfed the country in the mid-eighties. States of emergency, burning townships, murder, bomb attacks and people who “fell from the window” of a police station or “slipped on a piece of soap.” That was the subject matter KOOS sang about in songs like Sing jy van Bomme, Tsafendas and the menacing Die Suid Afrikaanse Herfs, which referenced the German terrorists of the Rote Armee Faktion. Musically they were miles ahead of the 12 bar blues and folk that had inspired their alternative Afrikaner contemporaries. Their sound was artful anti-rock, fuelled by the noises that had reached Johannesburg from Berlin, Sheffield, Melbourne and Cologne: the metallic motorik and madness of Einstürzende Neubauten, Cabaret Voltaire, Birthday Party and Can, but all done in a unique style that has aged surprisingly well and would now probably be called post-punk. Van Heerden sang, spat and whispered. Sometimes he used pebbles to distort his voice, while Goedhals punished his guitar. KOOS disbanded in 1990. They had lived through the states of emergency of 1985 and 1986, they had been attacked, their name had partly been appropriated by Andre Letoit who became Koos Kombuis, but they had survived; battered, but unbowed. Then, in 1990, around the time of the release of Nelson Mandela, the group imploded. The country was going through monumental changes. Goedhals didn’t want to perform anymore. There was no big fight, no drama, together they decided to call it a day. Theraison d’être was gone. The band had made its statement: that one black tape, wrapped in a brown paper bag to accentuate its illicit content – a nod to the way the American bum must drink his alcohol. Later that same year, on the 16th of August, on Elvis Presley’s dying-day, Goedhals jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a flat in Yeoville. A few days later came the news that the Johannesburg Art Gallery had bought some of his works. It sounded like a Goedhals prank. The legend of KOOS wouldn’t rest though. First, Dutch journalist Fred de Vries immortalised them in his well received 80s underground book Club Risiko (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2006), where they share pages with international luminaries such as Sonic Youth, Laibach and Einstürzende Neubauten. Second, American underground label, S-S Records, intends to release some of Goedhals’s experimental pre-KOOS recordings later this year.
