In 1993 I was a professional photographer in Cape Town, and I had started to notice the movement of hippies around. Beautiful people, usually with dreadlocks or tattoos, were starting to sell their wares on the street, and people were starting to play drums.
That year I went to the Grahamstown Arts Festival, which was held once a year. I took a lot of photographs of all the colourful people in the alleyways, the interesting hippie kind of people you don’t usually see anywhere else. It was a wonderful vibe and a great festival, very inspiring to me. It was to be the last professional photography shoot I ever did. Immediately after that festival, before I was able to print the photographs I had taken, my photographic studio burnt down.
My landlord asked me to leave, and with my notice he gave me a book, The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.
At the festival I had come across a band called The Earthlings and went to their performance. There was a person in the band who played the didgeridoo very well, and it enthralled me. I had never heard one before. I fell in love with the didgeridoo. Interestingly enough, the following year I performed with The Earthlings as their didgeridoo player.
Table Mountain, learning to play by the lake
It was at this time, after the fire, when I was kind of devastated, that I met Richard Kraak. He was an alternative thinker and had many interesting things to talk about. When I wanted to learn the didgeridoo, I asked Richard about the technique. He told me he could only show me the technique. To learn how to play, I would have to go and find a tree on the slopes of Table Mountain, sit by that tree every day for at least half an hour and play the didgeridoo. The tree would teach me how to play.
I was a bit sceptical about that, but I was close to Table Mountain and it was a beautiful walk up to the lake. I did not have a real didgeridoo. I had a 40 millimetre PVC pipe that reached from the ground to my chin, and that is what I learned to circular breathe on. Every day I walked up with my pipe, sat by the tree on the slopes of the mountain and played for about fifteen or twenty minutes, for as long as I could.
I learned really fast. Within three or four days I was circular breathing confidently and creating a sound that was nice to listen to. That is where I learned the didgeridoo.
After that I started making didgeridoos out of thick-walled bamboo, tuned to a specific note. Then, when I was in Sweden in about 1998, I cut open a piece of beechwood in the beech forest near Malmö and chiselled out wooden didgeridoos. They were beautiful. I brought one back with me and I still have it. I have used that same beechwood didgeridoo for all my performances and work with the didgeridoo since then, and it plays just as well as it did on the first day.
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