David Kramer
Simon Wilson

There was a time in medieval Europe when wandering minstrels made their living by storytelling, singing songs and providing witty commentary on their society.

They were the mirrors of their time and social archaeology would have been so much the richer had their contribution been preserved.

Luckily for our times and our land, we have a storyteller of note, a man who is rooted in the legends and characters of the Western Cape. He is the voice of the ordinary man and has introduced us to unsung heroes of the dorpies.
In a coffee shop in Camps Bay I was lucky enough to meet and interview the unique David Kramer and learn more about a life’s journey which has taken him from small-town Worcester to meeting Nelson Mandela in London, from textile design to musical icon.

Journeys are in the Kramer blood, and in the name. In 1899, at the turn of the century, David’s grandfather, Mr Karavelnik came to our fine land from Lithuania to make a life for himself. On arrival he dropped his surname and replaced it with the name Kramer, which in German meant the same thing as the previous: a “peddler” or salesman. He stayed true to the name, making a living as a salesman, walking from farm to farm selling goods.

Years later David was born and he found himself growing up in the predominantly Afrikaans town of Worcester. I asked him if it was weird being an English boy in that situation and if he ever experienced discrimination.

After a sip of coffee he replied, “Ya, in some ways. I didn’t think it was weird, I suppose, at the time. I don’t think anybody sees the abnormality of a situation when you grow up in it.

“I mean, we all grew up in an insane world. When you grew up in the 50’s, in apartheid South Africa, everything was abnormal.

“I must say, when I think about all of that now, it was traumatic, and that’s probably why my work focuses on that background and that childhood experience. I’ve always tried to explore it with my writing because I’ve had ambivalent feelings about it.

“When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was to get out of that town. I had other aspirations and other dreams and I found the town claustrophobic. I once wrote ‘I was born for dreaming in a town too small for screaming’, and that was basically the feeling for me.

“But I still find myself going back to it all the time –- I have no desire to go back to it physically but I go back to it psychologically. That is the place that feeds my imagination and that childhood experience has always been a way for me to understand the world that I live in.

“I grew up in the apartheid South Africa in a small town in the Boland and that is the reality for me and that is what I write about.”

In the presence of this national treasure I found myself feeling quite nervous, I asked him when he was the most nervous.
“I have quite high anxiety levels before performing. And then I find when I go on stage that it is not a problem at all. So what’s happened to me is that I try and avoid performing, although I am always surprised at how much I enjoy it when I’m doing it.

“When I was younger I was much more keen to perform. The time I was most nervous was when I first went to England and was waiting for my first performance in front of a foreign audience.

“The first time that happened was with District Six, the musical, when we went to the Edinburgh Festival in 1988. Another time was when we were going to meet Nelson Mandela in London. It was an incredibly wonderful evening because he came to see our musical Kat and the Kings on the West End in London. He came up on stage at interval and made a great speech and congratulated us all. So that was a big moment.”

David Kramer might be an entertainment icon, but he came close to being lost to the entertainment industry with a narrow escape from becoming a civil engineer and then a stint as a textile designer.

“I got a bursary to study civil engineering but when I was in the army I started to think about that. What the hell does a civil engineer do?

“I had this bursary from Water Affairs, and I had a vision of myself in a safari suit standing on a bridge somewhere is the Freestate wearing grey socks, like all the other civil engineers who worked at Water Affairs, and I thought, ‘No, that isn’t me’.

“What I really wanted to do is study architecture; I felt that was a good combination of my interest in art and science. My parents did not have money and I could not get a bursary for that. But the local textile factory had a bursary to study BSc Textiles and they decided I should go to England to study textile designing because of my artistic leanings.
“I was not really interested in going into textiles, it was just something to do but suddenly I had this great opportunity to go and live in England. So that was fantastic.”

With his unique style of dressing, I was interested to know if working in the textile industry had heightened Kramer’s awareness of fashion.

He answered, “Yes, I am very aware of fashion, textile and colour. That experience has helped me a lot – it has contributed a lot to some of the success that I have had, especially in business and marketing.

“When I stopped being a designer, I moved into the marketing of textiles. I had not thought about business up until that point, and that forced me into thinking about projections and marketing analysis and all that kind of stuff, and I think I’ve used that very much in what I have done subsequently.

“Unfortunately a lot of musicians just kind of have a feeling of, ‘Oh, don’t talk to me about money or figures – I don’t deal with that stuff – I’m an artist.’ Well, I’m not like that, I think that one must be able to do all those things. But not everyone feels like that.”

Even when he was fully involved in the textile world, Kramer never lost his passion for writing and storytelling. I wondered when he had first decided to go into the entertainment industry.

“Well, I didn’t really decide to go into the entertainment industry; I’d been writing songs at school – poetry and songs. You know, I play the guitar and I write music, but I am not a person who is a musician; I’m very much more somebody who works with words and I’ve come to understand myself as a storyteller and the music is just one facet or one aspect that I use to tell stories.

“So, I was working in the textile industry, but I was writing starting to perform my songs and then in 1980 I recorded my first album. Well, that was banned and did not rocket me into the entertainment industry, and I got rejected by the SABC Television as well when I first went to audition.

“And then, I became kind of a cult figure in the late 70's with “Leftie” and the university students. Then I released the “Blokkies Joubert” song on a single, because the SABC had canned my album, and we were kind of scratching around for what they might like. And that’s why I got this song about a rugby player, you know – they’d probably like that! That song became a Number One hit on Springbok Radio for about four or five weeks, and it was on the charts for a long time.
And then I released the album “The Story of Blokkies Joubert”, and that was a massive hit for me, and then suddenly I became known nationally, and all the newspapers and magazines were suddenly interviewing me and I got on to a TV programme as well.

“They had a huge problem with that because I was singing songs that had been banned on my album, so they didn’t want to actually show me singing on television. An innocuous song like “Christiaan Swart” about a guy who has pigeons. I mean there was no political message or anything in some of these songs.

“Then I started to get a lot of pressure from people wanting me to perform and I had a job as well so in 1981 I decided to leave the textile industry and become a professional musician for a while, at least, I thought. (Laughter). See how it goes.
“My wife Renaye was very encouraging but I was quite nervous because we had just had our first child.”

But, luckily the lure of the storyteller won out over the textile executive: “I was giving up quite a big job –with a company car and that kind of thing, and suddenly I was going out on my own with no financial security whatsoever.

“But I had this feeling that I didn’t want to one day – at this age – having spent my life in textiles, and look back with regret and think, like, ‘I wonder what could’ve happened if I’d done that,’ you know. Could’ve. Would’ve. Should’ve.
“Ya, so we went for it, and that’s it. And I haven’t done anything else since. That was more than 20 years ago.”
After getting banned by the country’s broadcaster most people would have thrown in the towel or at least have been a little discouraged but Kramer wouldn’t let these people in high places get him down.

“I never expected them to play my music in the first place. I didn’t think of myself as a pop star or an entertainer or anything. I saw myself as a performer of my own work – that’s what I was doing. I had something to say. The fact that people really liked what I was doing was kind of outside of SABC or the norm.

“But today – the radio formats of today don’t really allow for this kind of work. But in those years there were still opportunities, there were still gaps that you could find. But I never really fitted into any genre or format. I wasn’t rock ‘n roll, I wasn’t country and western.

“If you were a country and western in those days, there was a TV programme – Bobby Angel’s – and you got onto that. If you were a cabaret singer in the Sun City mould, then there were the Jerry Bosman shows and you could walk down a silver staircase singing “I did it my way”, and then you would be on television.

But if you were an original artist, writer trying to say something about your own world, you were regarded as a bit of a joke. I know that originally when our stuff arrived at EMI, there were producers that fell off their chairs laughing, thinking, like, what a joke! And eventually ended up copying me.
“So, ja.”

As a voice and a focus for so many others out there I was interested to find out who influenced this influence. Names like Bob Dylan came up, not for what he stood for but for finding a voice and trying to connect folk music to national tradition.
“Jeremy Taylor and Des Lynburgh influenced me in that when I was a teenager they sang with South African accents and they also did sort of satirical work, which appealed to me a lot. It was satire and it was very South African and was quite unusual, and it certainly made me think of the validity of working in that way. Not much has changed since I was young, and unfortunately so, in that there was always that sort of attraction to become something else, to model yourself on the Beatles or Bob Dylan or whoever from overseas or popular or any icon of the time.

“I say Jeremy Taylor and Des Lynburgh because they did this very South African satirical work, which was enormously amusing because of that. Who would want to make such a fool of themselves to be a South African?”

“Jeremy Taylor wasn’t South African – he was English and came out to South Africa as a teacher, and he was so amused by the South African accent that he wrote “Ag Please Daddy” and many other songs, and he was part of the folk scene as a young man.

“A friend of mine who lived two doors away from me had the Jeremy Taylor album and we used to listen to that a lot because we found it hell of a funny, because it was quite subversive in a way because of the situation one found oneself in.

“At that time I was still playing Rolling Stones songs because I wanted to be in a rock and roll band and I was not thinking I wanted to be Jeremy Taylor, but it stuck with me. When I started to write my own songs, I started to think … did I want to say something or did I just want to play other people’s music?

“I studied at Leeds University in England and when I got there I was confronted with the reality that I was not Donavan or anyone else from overseas, and that I was Dawid from South Africa, you know, and either I was going to run away from that and hide behind some sort of pretension, or I was going to face up to it, and say, ‘That is who I am’.
“So it was an identity issue which fuelled my imagination tremendously.

“That was very much the subject of the work I that I was involved in. I think that is what I was trying to do in my songs.
“Each song is another attempt to learn more about yourself. I’ve said before, that the songs were like answers to questions I was asking myself and when I look back now it was a way of coping with the dilemma or the trauma or whatever it was that I had experienced and to try and make some kind of sense of my growing up.

“I might not have known it at the time. I wasn’t that that aware. You know, you do things – but you don’t know why you do them, but you know you need to do them. I suppose that is how your subconscious pushes through.”