This song from A Padded Room is a bunch of in-jokes which I thought I would “out” and explain. The story goes like this: in 2009, Tuckers Lilla Kapell went to South Africa to play a bunch of gigs over a couple of weeks, mostly together with great South African band The Hip Replacements (you can still dance with a replacement hip). The gigs were in Johannesburg, Cape Town and the tiny village of Nieu Bethesda, which is right out in the middle of the semi-desert, the Great Karoo.
After flying from Johannesburg, we rented a van in Port Elizabeth by the coast and drove 400 km north to Nieu Bethesda, where there were, I was told, 69 inhabitants. Almost all of them are artists (painters, sculptors), writers and musicians. A proper artist commune. The 69 didn’t include the black township, which was “over there”, on the other side of an area of sand and rocks. I asked Herb if there were any lions in the Great Karoo, and of course he replied: “There are no lions in the Great Karoo!” On the other hand, when we talked about that earlier this year, he’s not so sure any more.
We played at The Bat Barn, which not surprisingly used to be a barn many years ago, but is now owned by Dr. Jonathan Handley, whose day job is anaesthetist and night job prolific songwriter, guitarist, cartoonist etc. He has many strings on his Gibson SG. “The Bat Barn’s haunted by the Callahan ghost” is a reference to one of my favorite Tuckers songs: The Ghost of Callahan. Jonathan had invited the whole village to the Tuckers gig at the Bat Barn, with a braai (the South African equivalent of a grill-party) afterwards. Most of them came, so the place was full and there were even plenty of kids around. Outdoors by the grill, the stars were stunning to see in the night sky – thicker than a bluegum grows.
Also in Nieu Bethesda is The Owl House, a museum of animal statues (around 300 of them, including many owls, camels and peacocks) made by artist Helen Martins. The house itself is quite weird and decorated with crushed coloured glass on doors and walls. Constant exposure over many years to all that glass powder which she crushed herself, finally made Martins so ill that in 1976 she took her own life, aged 78. I called it the “house of glass”.
“Dizzy heights” and “spaceship lands” are references to Jonathan’s song ZX-Dan, which was a big hit for the Radio Rats in 1978 and is still heard on the radio now and again in South Africa. “The Brandy flows…”: national drink: brandy and coke and it’s only ever a short while to the next one.
You can find the lyrics here: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyri…/A-Padded-Room/Out-of-Africa
And the song can be found on Spotify, iTunes etc.
Breaking news: Tuckers Lilla Kapell are playing tomorrow (Saturday 22nd December, 2018), at The Church in Sandviken, Sweden. Free entry! Come early! Stay late!