‘You have to see this band. They paint music.” We were at Mieliepop and a fine artist friend of mine was dragging me to the front of the stage.
“Die See are brilliant.”
She was not far from wrong. They are Pretoria’s best-kept secret even though they have released two albums and been nominated for two South African Music Awards.
The band was formed in 2009 and consist of Henry Ferreira on vocals, Dylan Graham on guitar, Dean Basson on drums and Jaco Mans on bass guitar.
Their music is rock-based but unpredictable in an ethereal way without being pretentious.
Ferreira has brilliant poetic wit which uplifts the sometimes melancholic mood of their music.
Guitarist Graham could be the love child of Jimmy Page and Hunter Kennedy and he plays like that love child, too. It’s not so much strict chords as it is emotions.
A few days later I met them in Rosebank where Ferreira was very impressed with the fact that he had taken the Gautrain for the second time. Graham seems to be the main spokesperson for the band, though creatively the whole band worked on their second album, Die See 11.
So why are they so low-key even though their music is really good?
Graham begins: “When we started out we decided to do it the way we want to. It was an idea to make something beautiful. We don’t have a record company. Plus, it’s not about making it, it’s about sound. From the get-go we wanted to make music that we wanted to make.”
While their lyrics are in Afrikaans, do they see themselves as an Afrikaans band? Ferreira replies: “No. It’s my most comfortable way to write.”
Die See say that creatively it’s a combined synergy where they don’t tell each other what to do.
“Henry writes the lyrics and we get the riffs and rarely change things, but it also needs to be fun,” says Graham. Considering that he certainly knows his way around the guitar, did he study music?
“I went to lessons and they said: ‘If you don’t learn this you will never get anywhere’ so I stopped going. I think music should be subversive. It is art so it should be questioning something.”
Drummer Basson was inspired by David Grohl.
“I saw him playing on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and it looked like fun. My oldest brother committed suicide when I was 16 so I got a drum kit.
“But this music is different. It is soul space music.”
Ferriera says that he always had music in his head. “Since I was little I always enjoyed making music in my head. Now I feel like I am making real music.”
Obviously their music would never reach radio in this country, but there are videos on YouTube and CDs at gigs and on their Facebook page.