Syd Kitchen

Kitchen, who had meanwhile closed his guitar shop, spent the second half of the ‘80s leading his band named "Syd Kitchen & the Utensils", with male backing singers known as the Kitchenettes. Their self-released 1987 album "Waiting For The Heave"[16] was Kitchen's first commercial recording aside from tracks on a few hopelessly rare ‘70s folk festival compilations. The album reflected Kitchen's increasingly politicised songwriting, while living in a repressive apartheid regime.[17] Due to lack of radio play and South Africa's strict international boycotts, "Waiting for the Heave" was a commercial failure.[18]

In the late 1980s, live performance, low key and relatively infrequent, remained the only reliable way to hear Syd Kitchen.[19]

1990 marked the first annual Splashy Fen, a folk festival which has become one of the most celebrated festivals on the African continent.[20] For a number of South African music fans, the enduring memory of Syd Kitchen will be his performances at Splashy Fen each year from 1990 to 2010.[21]

Around this time David Marks, a local music veteran (who in 1968 had written "Master Jack", the first South African recorded song to reach the US Top 20), released the live album, Warts 'n All, on his Third Ear Music label in 1992. It was an honest and captivating demonstration of the attraction of a Syd Kitchen gig.[22]

In 1995 Kitchen released his second album entitled City Child. The creation of City Child was a lengthy process. Started in early 1988, the album went through several stop/start phases before its eventual completion. The rhythm section was recorded live in February 1988 before it went into storage for a period of years. Music was added slowly between 1991 and 1994, before finally emerging to excellent countrywide reviews in 1995. Initially recorded with a Fostex 16 track analogue machine, the album was digitally processed before being mastered in Stuttgart Germany.[23]

Kitchen says of City Child: "It was also difficult to do in so far as the subject matter I was writing about was concerned. Some of the songs had been written as early as 1975, and some while the album was being made. I was going through a seriously tough time of personal shit that all helped shape the course of the work. This introspective spin, and the quality of the (mainly jazz) musicians involved, contributed to the album’s eventual ambiance; 10 tight little quirky “jazz” tunes."[24]

In 1999 Syd Kitchen released Amakoologik. The title itself is a parody on the many names beginning with "ama" that South African's give to their sporting teams to galvanise national support and create a feeling of racial integration.[25] Kitchen himself said of the album title: "I have coined the name AMAKOOL (the cool) to signify the way we can go about life unconcerned with the guy in the gutter. We can sit eating supper and watch seemingly unaffected as CNN or the BBC delivers graphic images of Rwandan “stick people” or the like into our de-sensitized lives. Our collective apathy is the product of what I call AMAKOOLOGIK (the cool logic). My naïve hope is that millions will hear that word and ask themselves one central question: Aren’t you amazed that its so alive and still going on?”"[26]

The lyrics of the title track are perhaps one of the best examples of Kitchen's socio-political lyric writing, describing the opposite ends of the social spectrum, not just in South Africa but worldwide.[27]

Africa's Not for Sissies is probably the album that has earned him most plaudits. Released in 2001 on Kitchen's own No Budget Records, the album received much critical acclaim and was nominated 4th in the SA Rock Digest's Top 30 Albums of 2001.[28] Africa's Not for Sissies was also acclaimed for Kitchen's intricate guitar technique.[29]

Richard Haslop has commented that "Africa's Not for Sissies is a trenchant, if inimitably humorous and often moving reflection on his own status as a white South African committed to living in a country that so many of his compatriots were leaving."[30]

John Samson of SA Rock Digest said of the album: "He has struck at the very core of the new South Africa and everything it has to offer. Syd has the red dust of Africa running through his veins and a finger firmly on the pulse of a nation going through the birth pains of being born again. He is the hippest of hippies and has produced an album of extreme beauty and social awareness. This is a profound and important album, ignore it at your peril."[31]

In 2004 Kitchen embarked on a successful solo tour abroad during which he performed in England, Wales, Norway and Denmark, at among others, the Glastonbury Festival in England and the Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway.[32]

Africa's Not for Sissies was followed by the formation of Bafo Bafo. After years of friendship and informal "jamming" together at clubs and festivals, Madala Kunene and Syd Kitchen, two of South Africa's most enduring musical sons, joined forces in the creation of Bafo Bafo. This cross-cultural musical collaboration between two highly individual guitar stylists created a musical landscape that was absolutely unique, and culminated in the release of their only album together, "What Kind?". Bafo Bafo delivered a musical tapestry that was at once a living embodiment of the "new" South Africa, while their ability to naturally fuse cultural elements from the diversity abundant in multiethnic South Africa marked Bafo Bafo as a musical manifestation of the ethos behind the drive for Africa's renaissance.[33]

2007 saw Kitchen release what some call his finest album; Across consists of four long, solo acoustic guitar instrumentals named after the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, each of which references, if sometimes obliquely, the musical elements that have got him to this point.[34]

In 2008 Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Joshua Sternlicht made a feature film on Kitchen, entitled Fool in a Bubble. Fool in a Bubble is the story of South African folk singer and poet Syd Kitchen, “as seen through the eyes of Sternlicht. Filmed in Durban and New York, the documentary premiered at the 2010 Durban International Film Festival. The film detailed Kitchen's life and music, in Durban and as he travelled to perform in New York, where he also recorded with Paul Simon's Graceland band. An album entitled "Fool in a Bubble" was released in conjunction with the film.[35] Kitchen himself said of the film: " That is Josh Sternlicht's (Independent Filmmaker) take on my life. "[36]

About the last musical adventure of Kitchen's life was travelling to Scotland to record a version of the John Martyn song, Fine Lines, along with members of Martyn's band Alan Thomson, Foster Paterson and his close friend Suzi Chunk for a Martyn tribute album that seems destined to include a string of far better known artists than Kitchen himself.[37] The tribute album featuring his cover of John Martyn's Fine Lines is due for release in June. The album also features The Cure's Robert Smith, David Gray, Beck, Paolo Nutini and Phil Collins doing covers of Martyn's work. Martyn himself was apparently well aware of and quite taken with Kitchen's output.[38]