Reconciliation Day

Koos Kombuis

I first saw Koos at Wingerstok in about 1997, he played a blistering show with a full band and it was as energetic as it gets. He ran around with an SA flag as a cape and drank his bottle of Tassies. He took us through a set of his own brand of South African protest music. It was when he got close to the end of the show and had the whole field full of rabid, drunken students, drop-outs and miscellaneous hippies singing along to ‘Johnny is nie Dood Nie’ that I realised what genius we had up there on stage.

I have seen Koos many times but my best memory was when we went to watch him do an acoustic show at, I think The Klein Theatre, not sure but anyway it was a classic show. Koos always used to get a bottle of Tassies and drink it out the bottle during the show. When the bottle was empty the show was over. On this particular night Koos decided that he was having so much fun a second bottle was required. We managed to get the empty first bottle and ‘Koos’s backwash” became the weekly Canasta trophy for years.

JAMES DAUBENEY