In apartheid South Africa the cultural boycott seriously messed with our intellectual development.
Instead of Sesame Street we had something called Pumpkin Patch. Before that we had Harry’s House. Pumpkin Patch seemed familiar when it came out since many of the costumes were previously Harry’s.
We never saw REM and newer chart toppers live; we had the washed-up bands like Status Quo and Wishbone Ash arriving on our shores long after the rest of the world had stopped caring. Mediocrity was such a way of life that it became entrenched. When the democratic order happened, being happy with second best immitations simply extended to everyone – how else could you explain Danny K and Ed Jordan?
While the US had The Limelight and Michael Aliq’s ‘club kids’ setting new trends in industrial clubbing, we had to make do with Club Alcatraz. Sometimes called Alice D because of licensing issues, it was like nothing else in Johannesburg. Remember ‘Traz? The basement under the second hand car park on Main Street, Johannesburg? Near where Absa Towers is? If you have to think, you were never there.
You never went past the owner at the door and his loud American girlfriend, the bouncer in a black bomber jacket who looked like a jelly baby and past the cloak room made out of chipboard where you only ever handed in things that you really, really didn’t mind never seeing again. You were never forced to gag at the piss smell from what were supposedly the toilets on your left and then go down a staircase that took a sharp right turn. Oh, there were a couple of couches on the way (one had cold vomit behind the cushions once as my brother found out one evening) too and a TV that always played the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’. Our misery was complete.
Downstairs stank of toilet cleaner and whatever it was that went into the smoke machine. All the walls were painted black and featured a series of murals. You could park off under the ‘Wall of Voodoo’ or a number of similar locales. The bar had a bad musty odour to it and the word ‘shit’ painted above it. Eventually this was replaced by a picture of a couple of goblins. Whoever did the newer painting probably realised that what he painted over was tautologous anyway. How else could you explain a bar where the beers were always warm and often stale? The manager, according to some of the patrons, bought them at police auctions. They might have been as old as we were. You only had a selection of two kinds of lager anyway: the kind that comes in a red tin which I’ve always suspected to be crap and the kind in a beige tin that I know is. The barman used to take forever to give you your change, I suppose he was hoping that you’d lose interest and eventually just let him keep it.
Unlike the resident drug dealer who moved around the place with the all the subtlety of a bad fart and who stole his whole identity from ‘Sid & Nancy’, the barman at least didn’t have to count on his fingers as he sold acid tabs (even the drugs at the time were ten years behind the rest of the world) for amounts in multiples of ten. If you didn’t want the beer you could score a Coke from the petrol station over the road. Nobody who knew any better would touch the water in the blue jug. During one very memorable lock-in for the much anticipated ‘Black Mass Party’ (Alcatraz parties never had anything to do with their names), the blue jug was used to help unblock the urinal. I’m not too sure but I think that was the same night that one member of the Gypsy Jokers motorbike gang accused another of looking at his ‘schlong’. The fight immediately afterwards resulted in the plywood toilet cubicle being demolished and the guy in there having to find somewhere else to sleep.
Considering that the Alcatraz ethos was based so squarely on a rejection of the ordinary, life’s ‘trendies’ and their conventions, it struck me as strange that the conventions in dress that applied there were stricter than anything you might find anywhere else. Having the wrong label at the back of your docs (‘airwair’ versus ‘bouncing soles’) could earn you some serious scorn. If you were wearing docs, it was a good idea not to fall asleep in them seeing as how they could be stolen from you by someone with a knife who simply cut through the laces. Oh yes, the laces… White laces might get you killed (as was rumoured to have happened to a skinhead called Liam courtesy of some of the regulars) for being a white power supporter, red laces were better since they advertised you were an anarchist while the green said you smoked dope.
Everyone at ‘Traz smoked dope anyway - second hand smoke and the lack of any ventilation made sure of that. I once wore brown laces borrowed from my army boots after the standard black one’s broke. When I was inevitably asked what they meant, I said it was a statement that I liked black women. For a bunch of supposed libertarians, I noticed that a lot less people were prepared to talk to me.
What sort of music was played at ‘Traz? Probably what you’d expect. It would start with about three songs that I’d like: Bauhaus, The Pixies and if I was very lucky, some Joy Division. After that it became what one poster advertised as ‘Hard Beat Industrial Cyber Doom Goth’. I’m serious. I couldn’t make that up. I even still have the poster if anyone would like it.
Most of what was played sounded like a recording of a toilet being flushed and then being forced backwards through a synthesiser. Identifying with the real forerunners of alternative culture (Frank Zappa, David Bowie or Arthur Brown) was uncool at Alcatraz. To be taken seriously, you had to pander to the newer copies who had stolen what had come before. You had to like things like Meat Beat Manifesto and Nurse with Wound. I gave up and stuck to the crappy beer. The music could have been left on autopilot as far as I was concerned, the same songs often seemed to play in the same order, night after night. It wouldn’t have surprised me. The DJ, I think his name was Mark, was a tonsil who must have misheard the political slogan of the day of ‘one man, one vote’ as ‘one man, one joke’ and insisted on living it thereafter. ‘Get a haircut!’ he’d shout repeatedly at head bangers making a request that would require him to interrupt the noise he had left looped in the DJ box.
Mark really thought he was a celebrity, a funny one. When he made attempts at humour on the microphone during his set, everyone would take on a glazed look, the same half-smile people get at a craft sale where everything is made by the mentally handicapped and they want to seem polite and understanding.
The place was a dump, I didn’t like the music much and the beer was feeble. Why did I go? More importantly why did I keep going? I thought it was funny. Where else could I have won second prize at the ‘Voodoo Party’ for having gone as a sacrificial chicken with a kiddie’s chicken-head-hat? The people – with a few exceptions - were interesting and genuine. Not once did I ever get asked about rugby, cricket or what school I had been at. There might not have been a Michael Aliq at Alcatraz but there was an Aragorn Ellis. Aragorn might never have come to ‘Traz in a suit made out of fresh meat as Aliq did at The Limelight but he did once wear a series of tampons hanging from his hair. He thought I was a poser – he was right. I was worse actually, I was a voyeur who went there to marvel at teenage girls pretending to be lipstick lezzies, people being sent to the nearby Carlton Centre to steal fire escape signs so that the club could at least go through the motions of being compliant and meet girls whose state of emotional fragility made the chat-up thing very easy. Mea culpa.
It wasn’t all fun though. The manager had me confused with someone else and get kept asking when I was going to introduce him to an illegal diamond dealer called ‘Izzy’. I denied that I knew him and then played along when he got persistent. Eventually my creative excuses that Izzy couldn’t meet him right now because of a series of bizarre and made up Jewish holidays, got very thin. The vibe in the club got more oppressive and the music even worse. You can only have the same conversation with someone about whether they could move into your mom’s garage (they promised to be very quite) a certain number of times before you get irritated. Eventually the joke wore off and the true nature of what some of these children (some were very young, I was only 18 at the time) were doing to themselves with the acid and alcohol become apparent.
I withdrew as quietly as I’d appeared.To everyone I met have met at Club Alcatraz, mea culpa again. I was a poser, I realise that now. In fact I knew it all along. I was a shameless voyeur who thought you were all hamming it up as much as I was with your claims to be pantheists (even though you might be wearing leather) and Marxist all at the same time while practicing Wicca and wearing pentagrams before singing the virtues of atheism. I should have listened to Mark earlier have gotten that haircut.
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