Last year Chantelle and I started attending the Old Mutual Summer Sunset Concerts at Kirstenbosch and it turned out to be quite an enjoyable experience. One of the acts in particular that I thoroughly enjoyed was that of a solo Shaun Morgan (formerly Shaun Welgemoed), lead singer of ex-SA band Seether (formerly Saron Gas).
As it turned out Shaun’s powerful voice is particular adept at rendering some awesome acoustic, unplugged versions of his own material as well as that of others, making it one of the best ‘unplugged’ sessions you as a rock fan will ever encounter. Put it this way: not even the cold, rain nor wind that accompanied last year’s session could dampen the audience’s overbearing enthusiasm! (And besides, as a fan of their material ever since their Fragile release back when they were all still lighties from up country, there was no way I wasn’t going to be enthusiastic about the performance – soaked jeans and all!)
So of course, this all means that I am thoroughly overjoyed to see that he is once again listed on this year’s Summer Sunset Concerts lineup, all of which starts from the 23 November. Actually, browsing through the list, there are quite a number of worthwhile acts to go and check out, including Just Jinjer (of which I’m a huge fan) on the 21st of Dec., Shaun Morgan on the 28th of Dec., Watershed on the 11th of Jan., Prime Circle on the 25th of Jan., Arno Carstens (of Springbok Nude Girls fame) on the 8th of Feb. and aKING (a particularly fresh and decent sounding Afrikaans-rooted lineup) on the 22nd of March.
Tickets range between R50 and R70 (depending on the act) for adults and I see for a change that Kirstenbosch has finally organised for online bookings through the new http://www.tunegum.com service. For more information you can contact the organisers at 021 799 8783/8620/8773 or visit http://www.oldmutual.co.za/music
Oh, and just for the record, this is my very first post made entirely on my Ubuntu 8.10 install on my brand spanking new machine that I took delivery of on Sunday. No installations of OpenOffice or GIMP were harmed in the making of this blog post. Thankfully. I’m not sure about my Windows partition though – These two don’t seem to play nice with one another!