Live music has a habit of exposing the inadequacy of everything else. Dinner parties, for instance, are revealed for what they are: polite endurance tests lubricated by alcohol. Add a guitarist in the corner — even a dubious one-man band with a loop pedal and more ambition (or self-delusion) than talent — and suddenly the evening gets interesting. There’s risk. There’s possibility. There is, crucially, something happening — most often sing-alongs and spontaneous dancing.
I’ve spent a disproportionate portion of my life pursuing that sensation. I wouldn’t call myself a groupie — I’ve always retained enough self-respect to stay away from bands’ hotel rooms at all costs. At 12, my cousin and I infiltrated a Queen concert, wriggling through the crowd until we found ourselves in the front row — and then on stage. This wasn’t cheekiness; it was audacity — and the kindness of strangers, hoisting two pre-teens onto their shoulders. Once you’ve crossed that particular threshold — from audience to participant — ordinary concerts feel like watching life through glass.
After that, I made a habit of proximity. Living in England in my early 20s, I attended concerts alone, which was either confidence or social failure, depending on my mood. I drifted through the orbits of Isaac Hayes and Prince (or The Symbol, an identity crisis elevated to branding), and loitered near the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dr. John. A concert at Wembley featuring Bob Dylan and Van Morrison on the same stage felt less like entertainment and more like witnessing two weather systems collide, in musical terms.
In SA, the scale shifts, but the effect doesn’t. Watching Bruce Springsteen at FNB Stadium in 2014 was a masterclass in stamina and communion — and, in my case, a lapse in dignity when he hauled me onstage during Dancing in the Dark. At the other end of the spectrum, a performance at the Market Theatre by Gilberto Gil and Vusi Mahlasela offered something rarer: intimacy without smallness, an epiphany in melody.
Festivals, meanwhile, reveal the sociology of music. Franschhoek’s Oesfees is modest, communal, rooted in harvest and real humans — people who actually know one another, dancing to music that belongs to them. By contrast, the Montreux Jazz Festival’s local incarnation aspires to international scale: a curated convergence of global and local talent, including Msaki — whom we profile this week — performing new work with Jesse Clegg.
What unites all these experiences isn’t genre or geography, but presence. Live music is all about showing up — physically, emotionally, sometimes embarrassingly ... on stage. It’s inefficient, unpredictable, and occasionally disappointing, but most of the time, it knocks your socks off.
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