Warrick Sony

Warrick Swinney (born in 1958), more commonly known as Warrick Sony, is a South African composer, producer, musician and sound designer.

He is the founder and sole permanent member of the Kalahari Surfers.

Sony was born in Port Elizabeth on 12 September 1958.

He grew up in the Cowies Hill area of Durban, attending Westville High School where he played in school-based groups doing covers of songs by Jimi Hendrix and The Who.

He was influenced by Indian music and cuisine and by the work of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.

He learned to play tabla at the Hindu Surat school in Durban.

In 1976 he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force, where he declared himself a Hindu pacifist, and was assigned to medical duties and then to band work.

During his military service, Sony played B♭ horn, euphonium and drums.

He changed his surname from Swinney to Sony to make it harder for the army to get in touch with him for camps; he chose Sony because he liked their products.

While Sony was in the army in 1977, his father brought him punk rock albums from an overseas trip.

This was his first exposure to the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

The Kalahari Surfers are a "fictional group" which have served as a long-standing stage name for Warrick Sony's music.

He is the only permanent member of the band, and brings in other musicians as and when needed.

He adopted the name partly to protect himself from the authorities.

They made politically radical satirical music in 1980s South Africa, and released it through the London-based Recommended Records.

During this time the Surfers toured Europe with English session musicians.

The Surfers' music was the first radical white anti-apartheid pop in South Africa, and began with a 1982 home-recorded cassette titled "Gross National Products".

Sony distributed it himself; the South African Sunday Times described it as a "daring home-mixed collection of subliminal jive rhythms, sad-sweet jazz sounds, tabla burps, church bells, bird shrieks, political speeches and... other... found sounds", and chose it as one of their three "Terrific Tapes of 1983".

The second release was a double single package, "Burning Tractors Keep Us Warm", released by Pure Freude Records.

German group Can were involved with this label.

Warrick Sony worked as a freelance sound engineer in the South African film industry, and used this to acquire many of the sound samples he later used in his music.

Shifty Records tried to release the 1984 album Own Affairs, but could not find a vinyl plant which would press it.

Chris Cutler's London-based Recommended Records pressed the album, the start of a long-standing alliance.

Own Affairs was hailed as breathtaking, innovative and humorous by the Weekly Mail.

The Sunday Times called it "a music born from the spilled seed of our national sickness and nurtured to nightmarehood in the moral drought of daily life/politics".

Cutler helped set up tours, and in 1985 a second album, Living in the Heart of the Beast, was released.

Jon Savage wrote in the New Statesman that it was a "success", praised its "viciously critical (and historically intelligent) lyrics", and compared it with early Zappa.

The NME called it "brave".

In 1986, with a live band comprising Mick Hobbs on bass, Alig (from Family Fodder) on keyboards, Tim Hodgkinson (keyboards, sax and slide guitar), and Chris Cutler on drums, Sony performed in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, the Festival des Politischen Liedes in East Berlin, and London.

The third album, Sleep Armed (1987), has been called "the best snapshot we have of South Africa at the time, right down to the jacket photo of rich surfers on Umhlanga Roxx, a posh White beach in Durban".

In 1989 they were the first South African band invited to play in the Soviet Union, where they played Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga.

In 1989 the South African authorities banned the fourth album Bigger Than Jesus, due to concerns about the song "Gutted with the Glory"' and the use of the Lord's Prayer.

This album was deemed "abhorrent and hurtful".

A shopper, Mevrou Mulder of Cape Town, was so offended by seeing the record on sale that she organised a petition to the Directorate of Publications.

She complained: "The name alone is enough to make any Christian furious, not to mention the words. We as reborn Christians object to the publication of this record and also the distribution of it."

Sony has produced albums, and ran the Shifty Music label at BMG (Africa) for two years in the mid-1990s.

He has also worked as a film sound recordist, sound designer and sound artist.

Now based in Cape Town, Sony has released more Kalahari Surfers albums, and been involved in art, music and DJ events in the city.

He currently works on film scores, music for theatre and sonic art exhibitions.

He graduated with a Master of Fine Art degree in 2019 from Michaelis School of Art University of Cape Town.