| In 1992, soon after the breakup of Wanda DNA, I had a bad accident, falling off a hotel awning while retrieving a dropped mattress (don't ask!). I wound up lying concussed on the pavement, minus a tooth and with two broken wrists. Waking up in hospital the next day, I was confronted with the sight of both my arms swathed in bandages, with an external bone fixator (resembling a shiny TV aerial) protruding from my badly shattered left wrist. For the next 6 months I would not be able to play the guitar. I wept. Now rendered armless, I moved in with my mother for the following 3 months. Prior to the accident I had started writing two songs for a Youth Theatre musical production, Barkers. Having started them on guitar, I now had to finish them by warbling into a dictaphone, so that my mother could transcribe them for piano. Not exactly the pinnacle of my musical career! |
| Anyway, 3 months later I was down to only one plaster cast and back home in Yeoville, getting by with a lot of help from my friends. While I had been lying about, Sandi Schultz, fresh from her travels, was keen to do something constructive with the Mining Town Cowboys-era songs. She hooked up with singer/cabaret artiste Barbora Tellinger and enlisted Wayne Raath (guitar), JP Ridgeway (bass) and Andrew Cleland (drums). I added one-handed keyboard fills, the occasional backing vocal/sound effect and acted as sound engineer. |
| Posing as a cabaret show - we were really just a band, albeit with a schizophrenic repertoire - we secured a run upstairs at The Black Sun, a cabaret/bar on Rockey Street. Rockey Street was then still the cosmopolitan, trendy centre of Jo'burg, reasonably free from the pushers, muggers and killers who have since overrun and ruined the place. In deference to Paul Simon's Born At The Right Time tour, which ran concurrently, we called our show Forlorn At The Right Time. |
| Audience response was good. Behind keyboard, mixer and microphone at the back of the house, I got a kick out of watching people rubbernecking around to see where the mystery keyboards and rude interjections in Bastards were coming from. Critical response was lukewarm. The consensus was, good songs, good lyrics, sloppy presentation. No argument there. [click review on right for more] |
| While Lonely In The Saddle was not quite a roaring success, it was fun to be back in saddle, so to speak, playing music again and it had a special significance - it was first time I worked with JP and Andy. They would become key figures in my musical life, to say nothing of my most excellent friends. |
| LONELY IN THE SADDLE |
| -1992- |
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| We named ourselves Lonely In The Saddle (referring to the throwaway line at the end of Mining Town Cowboy, "It's been mighty lonely in the saddle since the horse died.") and set about finding a residence. |
| L-R: Andy, Sandi, Wayne, JP (front), Barbora, McGringo |
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| Flyers featured characters from the Old West - these two show Geronimo and Annie Oakley. |
| Star Tonight, Tues 25 Feb 1992 [click to enlarge] |