Now here’s a funny thing. Two-and-a-half years ago, whilst walking round Ayers Rock (ok, ‘Oluru’ ya PC pedant) with Bulawayo Johnno, he told me of a film that ‘I simply HAD to see’. Yeah, ain’t they all. It was called ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ and its ‘brilliant’. Yeah, ain’t they all. He gave me a precis but to be honest, it was in the mid-40s, I was dehydrated, exhausted and jet-lagged, so his words just washed over me. As they always do even when I’m hydrated and in my own time-zone.

In the ensuing 3 weeks, 7 flights and 47 koala bears, the conversation was forgotten. But not lost. They never are. They’re stored. In a little cabinet in the corner, just above my left ear, called ‘shit and stuff’.

Fast forward to June this year and my birthday. Which you forgot, ya bum. But the elder daughter didn’t forget and her and hubby bought me a dvd. Called ‘Searching for Sugar Man’. Telling me they’d seen it and ‘its brilliant’. I rumaged around for that earlier conversation and found it. Hmmmmm.

Then I forgot all about it once more.

Until last night when amazingly we were in. And Mel said: be great if we had a film to watch. No comment from me. And she rummaged and came up wit this dvd. What’s ‘Searching for Sugar Man’?? she asked. OMG. A ‘sign’.

What a superb movie. Its a documentary about the most fabulous musician that no-one’s ever heard of. Unless you happen to be South African. Even though the musician in question is a Mexican American from Detroit called Rodriguez. And he wrote and sang fantastic songs. And sang them beaufully. But they weren’t 60s kind of songs as everyone else sang. Rodriguez was a proto-Bob Dylan and he sang songs about things that actually mattered. He was a working class kid who wrote about unfairness, about misery, about life’s little pleasures, about how its ok to question the establishment and complain about it. And unlike Dylan, you could actually hear the words. Sadly though, no-one wanted to. Rodriguez had the top producers of the day (Detroit was Motown, so music was right there) lining up to work with him. The record labels fought over him. And no-one bought a single fucking copy of his albums. Well, maybe his mum. An aunt. So after 2 albums, both commercial failures, rumours started that at a disastrous concert, Rodriguez had killed himself. Voilently (gun or fire, there were tales of both) and in full view of the crowd of… not that many. End of Rodriguez, the music and the man.

Except somehow, one of the 15 copies in circulation made its way to Cape Town. And its anti-establishment message just ‘hit the spot’ massively amoung the young whites who, under apartheit, hated their country, their government, the grotesque unfairness in which they were forced to live and their complete lack of any freedom. Blah, blah, blah, they estimate 500,000 copies of Rodriguez albums sold in the province. And he was a god. But only there.

The movie is the story of 2 South Africans who tried to find the true story of their hero and their 25 year quest to do it.

And its wonderful, its marvellous and fantastically feel-good and up-beat.

Now wouldn’t it be an ironic tragedy if the dvd only sold copies in South Africa and not the rets of the world? History repeating?? Don’t let it happen. Buy it today. You’ll thank me. And Natalie, and Bulawayo Johnno.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx