Rasch is a gifted storyteller as he paints an untold history, detailing those tumultuous and giddy times with heartfelt irreverence. In brilliantly tragic and hilarious detail, Between Rock and a Hard Place is an epic memoir by musician, promoter and enthusiastic participant Carsten Rasch. This is history like you’ve never read it. However, this anarchic collection of guitar-wielding, pill-munching, dope-smoking musicians and their followers were in fact a second front in the struggle against apartheid. With guitars instead of guns and an insatiable hunger for freedom, the state saw this bizarre subculture as a hive of hedonists and drugged-up nihilists. Change was undeniably in the air.Īs the country heaved and hummed with resistant energy, in Joburg, Cape Town and Durban, tiny pockets of anti-apartheid whiteys were using music and parties to stage a punk-driven uprising against the tyrannical government. Resistance against the apartheid government was mounting while violence swamped the beleaguered land.
The ’80s in South Africa was a schmangled clusterfuck of a decade.
A cloud of dagga smoke envelops the entire scene. Further afield, folk are lounging on the lawn or huddling around fires, smooching and/or tripping on LSD.
The crowd is spilling out onto the large patio, where dozens of beer-drinking hippies, punks, mods, ethnoids, lefties and a splattering of Rastas on the lookout for pussy are trying their best to make conversation, but inevitably end up just talking kak. The organisers never anticipated this kind of turnout. Probably the largest gathering of its kind that year, this party lost control of itself hours ago. This is their commune, set in an acre of land in Sandton. The living room is packed, a sweaty crowd gathered in front of the impromptu stage, a wobbly affair of beer crates holding up sheets of board upon which Mapantsula are perched, ready to launch into their set. – Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart ‘A great book about zol, jol and beautiful losers struggling to make a buck and topple apartheid in the days when that shit really mattered.’ ‘This is history like you’ve never read it. A Misfit’s Tale of Punk Music & Rebellionīetween Rock and a Hard Place is Carsten Rasch’s irreverent memoir, uncovering South Africa’s counter-culture punk and new wave scene of the late seventies and early eighties.
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