Wll, the gig went tremendously. The boys were very nervous, but sang beautifully. I was nervous too, the lead singer and songwriter couldnt come, so I stood in for him when they sang one of his songs, and I played his guitar part. Trouble is, he's got long black fingers and I've got short pink ones, so I didn't look or sound so cool as he does. But I made a point of not singing along, that would have been too much.
    The lads did a very nicely constructed half-set of five songs, and joined us for five of ours. They did a couple of African "standards"(Sho Sho Loza and the S African national anthem), plus one of Kays original songs, and a couple of stunning gospel pieces in Ndebele. The ensemle band numbers we'd tried were Run Come See. Titanic("it was sad,it was sad", not Celine Dion),I Walk to Joburg, jamaica Farewell, and Long Hot Summer Days. The latter wis a Lomax-cellected chaingang piece, we had an interesting discussion with the lads on how appropriate it was for a mixed race group to sing chain-gang songs. The general opinion was"if it's a good song, we'll sing it". So we did. It was extraordinary doing it with full-on African harmonies.
   So that's it, a milestone passed. The lads will do more gigs I hope, and next we're going to do an outing with Iraqi Kurdish guests.The ensemble playing will be confined to tunes probably. We are attempting t get to grips with each others songs, but the language and musical structure is so mutually alien that that may take a while. The Kurds are up for doing English disco hits and Queen numbers, but the trouble is we arent! We;'ll see what happens.