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Fact #170970

When:

Short story:

Man On The Moon by Ballyhoo enters the Springbok Chart in South Africa, where it will peak at No1 during a 19-week run.

Full article:

Attie Van Wyk (keyboards/songwriter, Ballyhoo) : Like everybody of my generation, I grew up loving The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and I always wanted to play music, but my parents were against that idea. They told me to get a degree, so I did a Bachelor's degree in commerce at the University of Pretoria. I majored in accountancy.

The ideal was to have a day job … I worked as an accountant in a government department because they assisted me in the costs of my studies. Then I enrolled for a law degree, a correspondence course at the University of South Africa. I worked full time and studied at the Conservatoire of Music. I wanted to complete my grade 8 in classical piano, so I did that plus I got a weekend gig playing in a band. I really had my hands full.

I thought a law degree would follow nicely from accountancy, and I also felt I needed to qualify myself better as a musician. I was playing three nights a week in a covers band in a restaurant, and then I received an offer from a professional band, an Irish band called Blarney, for six nights a week.

So at that point I decided to leave my day job and then I enrolled by correspondence at Berklee School Of Music in a classical studies arranging course. Eventually, after my one year law degree, I decided to pack that in. There just wasn't enough time.

All in all I studied music theory and practice for another three years, while also working with the band.

Then a couple of the guys in Blarney couldn't get an extension of their work permits, so the band split up. That left two Irish and three South Africans, and we formed the band Ballyhoo.

Then we started doing club gigs, and got our first recording contract in 1977 with Gallo Records, then started touring in 78, and in 1979 I wrote Man On The Moon, long before Michael Stipe of R.E.M.wrote his song of that name, and it became a No1 hit in 1980. It was funny because I sat next to him at dinner a couple of years ago when they toured here and we spoke about it then.

It became a hit against competition like Queen's Another One Bites The Dust and Diana Ross's Upside Down, so I was very pleased.

Then in mid-1982 the record company asked me to become a record producer, songwriter and arranger, which appealed to me so I left the band and spent several years producing artists. Most of the songs I produced, us being a country with a majority of black people, the record company asked me to develop that side of the business.

They teamed me with a black guy, Chicco Twala, who was also one of our artists, as a partnership, because it is very hard for a white guy to create authentic black rhythms. We wrote quite a few hits. There was another guy called Herbert Xulu who would come up with bass riffs, and we'd record them in the studio with me on piano, and he'd say, 'OK, now we've got a basic rhythm track. Let's go and research it.' So they'd go, my black producers, and research it in the shibeens (pubs) in the black areas, and then come back and refine it according to how people had responded to it.

Then I'd write the melodies and English lyrics to go with it. Actually, a lot of the English lyrics were mixed in with African lyrics as well. That started around the time Paul Simon was recording Graceland. In fact, we were doing it at exactly the same time, with Paul Simon working in the studio next door. I used a lot of the same musicians that he used. They'd come out of his studio, walk over and do some session work for me.
(Source : Interview with Johnny Black, for Audience magazine, September 2009)