Born in Brakpan, bred in Belville, son of a Dutch Reformed dominee, Francois Badenhorst in his boyhood could hardly have been a more authentic model of traditional Afrikaans cultural norms and values. His greatest dream while at school was to play rugby for Western Province. Then something strange happened. He discovered music.
Not the graceful harmonies of gospel, nor the soaring arias of grand opera that were the family’s soundtrack at home, but the thrashing, angular discord of Punk and Metal. Naturally, he wanted to start his own band, and when he did, the name alone was enough to leave his mother in tears for two whole days. Fokopolisiekar.
But as the band grew in popularity, fast becoming a staple on the independent music scene, Francois, pledging to spare his family from further embarrassment, went as far as changing his own name.
Now he is Francois van Coke, solo-artist and frontman and founder of not one but two South African Punk bands: Fokopolisekar, sometimes more discreetly referred to Polisiekar or FPK, and the Van Coke Kartel.
Taking time off from the thrash and grind of his professional duties, Francois sat down with Ruda to tell his fascinating story of teenage rebellion, the challenges and opportunities of a modern musical career, and the joys of suburban life and fatherhood in – where else – his old home dorp of Belville.
Transcript:
R: Hello and a very warm welcome to another session of the Change Exchange. My guest, today, Francois Badenhorst, better known as Francois van Coke, the frontman and originator of Fokofpolisiekar. I met you when you just started out as Fokof, and that was about, we were just talking about that, 14 years ago. How did you … You wanted to be a rugby player. How did you get into music?
F: Ja, I think in high school, the only thing I cared about until about standard 8 was playing rugby. I am, it’s funny, if I can interrupt myself, I just told someone the story this week that I dreamt of playing for Western Province, and at that stage I don’t think there was professional rugby yet, it was like just coming in. It was just like after the ’95 World Cup and I dreamt to play for Western Province and the Springboks, and these days John Dobson, the Western Province coach, asks me to send voice notes to inspire the team, so that’s quite insane. I never expected that to happen to me, but rugby was my passion and I kind of fell in love with music in the Grunge era, where bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam made me want to play music, and that kind of just took over.
R: Did you grow up with a guitar in your hands?
F: My family is musical. My dad is a Dutch Reformed minister and he always used to be … He was singing very loud in church with my mom and my whole family used to sing. My sisters both sang in the choir and stuff like that, my dad played a little bit of guitar, they used to harmonise in church. It was very embarrassing for me when I was a kid, so I grew up with music in my house, but it wasn’t anything I really related to. My dad listened to classical music and opera and those two styles I kind of still despise to this day because … Not because of hearing, but I guess because of hearing it every Sunday of my life when I was a kid, but I wanted to listen to other things when I was a kid …
R: Sunday music.
F: Ja, but it was, it was … I come from a musical family, but no-one did that, did it professionally or anything like that.
R: So how did that change over happen? You were … It sounds as if there was a period when you were … I almost want to use the word, when you were drifting? You enrolled at university, but you never actually went. What did you do with your time?
F: Ja, ag, I think I finished school and I was kind of, I was very involved in the charismatic church. So I was thinking I was going to play music in the church band, I’m going to be, like, involved in music ministry, something like that. But I never knew what I was going to do with my life. I kind of enrolled in Stellenbosch, my parents asked me please, just enrol, you can go if you make the choice. I think I did that two years in a row, never went. I did like some computer courses and things and eventually realised I actually just want to play music. I went to study sound engineering in Cape Town, it’s like a very basic course, it doesn’t take up a lot of your time, but you know, as much as you put into it, you can get out of it. I finished doing that, and I started doing sound – live sound – but I just wanted to play music and never thought it would become a reality until we started Fokofpolisiekar in 2003.
R: Where did you meet the other members of that band?
F: I grew up kind of in the same area as all of them, me and Wynand, the base player, we went to school together. We were in Bellville High, and the other three guys were in DF Malan, they’re a little bit younger than us, and there was kind of, like I said, I was very involved in this church, there kind of was this punk scene, but Christian based punk bands in that church. So it kind of was like these biker, Christian, punk and metal church, and there was, like this revival in Bellville, in that scene. So all of us kind of hung out in that scene and played music together in various bands and things …
R: But from the church, to Fokofpolisiekar? Come on?!
F: Ja, I think that actually happened because of our dedication to that Christian theme for such a long time. One day we decided …
R: So it was a reaction against it?
F: Ja, I think it was. It was a reaction against that but also a reaction against our upbringing and just the traditional Afrikaans way of thinking and the suburban conformist lifestyle. Or at least that’s what we thought of it at that stage.
R: You just wanted to make a statement, you were getting out of this box.
F: Ja, we just wanted to do something that was different. Something that … We didn’t feel any connection to being Afrikaans. You know, it was kind of uncool to be Afrikaans? So we played in English bands until we kind of came up with that name. That gave us the reason to start an Afrikaans band. We were joking about this Afrikaans band, but it was kind of it’s not cool to be Afrikaans and then we came up with this name, and we were like, damn, we have to do it!
R: And your first album was a hit. How did you experience that to suddenly, now, people know you. You actually suddenly have a name?
F: I think we kind of planned it like that, because we were in bands before, we kind of saw what was happening in the scene and we kind of tried to do everything right with this project. When we started writing those songs in Afrikaans and we played it to our friends and there was this immediate reaction. Like, they get it.
R: It works.
F: Ja. We were like, we’ve got something here and we … You know, in our drunken, stoned haze, we focused on trying to do it properly, and we set goals for ourselves and we really went on a mission to make it happen.
R: Goals, like what?
F: Like we have to sell 3 000 albums of the first thing, we have to play at this event, this date. We have to get this album done. Just like basic things that a lot of musicians, especially young musicians, don’t care about or don’t think about. And we set these goals and we kind of achieved them.
R: Who was the business brain?
F: Wynand, the base player. He’s still the manager and the business mind behind all of it. So he kind of plotted all those things out with our backup and support. I think he’s very creative in that business sense.
R: Where did the Van Coke come from?
F: The Van Coke-thing … When the first Fokofpolisiekar review went in Die Burger, the Afrikaans newspaper, it was a very positive review. It was of that first EP, six songs. I think the guy rated it quite highly and he said it’s very good, the musicianship is good, and it’s good lyrics in there, which was fairly controversial at the time, and he had a big photo of us printed … It was like, third page. That was the first kind of main stream coverage that we had. And my name was printed Francois Badenhorst on the photo, and my dad was still a Dutch Reformed … Or he is again now, but at that stage he was a Dutch Reformed minister at a church in Bellville, and a lot of people from the church phoned Die Pastorie to find out what is going on with the …
R: Gits, dominee!
F: Ja, what’s going on with your son? And then, I wasn’t staying in the house, I was on my own mission. Before that even, it took me like, a year to tell my parents what the name of the band is, because I knew it was going to upset them. My mom cried for two days when she heard the name – nevermind the first album. But then my mom asked me, after they phoned the house, she asked me can you just not try and use your name in the media, or your surname? So I said cool, I am going to try. And we had this old running joke about Van Coke. There was this guy … There was this Coke factory in Vredendal and there was this guy from Vredendal who we know, and we knew about this thing and we thought it was really funny because this guy is Van Coke and we thought it’s funny if that was someone’s surname and we started joking around with it and in my next interview with Die Burger that year, at KKNK 2004, I said my name is Francois van Coke now. And it stuck!
R: And do you feel different? A name makes a big difference? And it’s very different to introduce yourself as Francois Badenhorst? Rather than Francois van Coke? I definitely feel more like Francois van Coke than Francois Badenhorst. I’m just Francois Badenhorst when I sign legal documents. So … ja. It is different.
R: And why do you think was Fokofpolisiekar such a hit? What did it resonate with? What did it find in the Afrikaans young community?
F: I think we gave a voice to Afrikaans youth that didn’t really know where they fit in at that stage. I think the politics were sorted out at that stage, but we just wanted to say goodbye to that old Afrikaner mentality. That was our main mission, to be a voice for … I don’t think we even thought of being a voice, but I think we became a voice for those Afrikaans kids who didn’t know where to fit in and where to go. So I think that resonated with a lot of people without us thinking about that.
R: And Van Coke Kartel? How did that happen?
F: In 2007 we took a break with Fokof after … We did, like, five years and it was jam-packed with events. Like a lot of things happened, you know? There was this blasphemy scandal in 2005, and it was all over the papers and everything. It took, kind of, it took a toll on us emotionally …
R: Sorry, just tell me about that?
F: In 2005 we played a show in Witbank, and our base player Wynand, the guy that I told you about the business side, he wrote something on a kid’s wallet, and a newsletter went out to the whole Afrikaans scene, because this person’s mom was kind of involved in the Afrikaans scene.
R: Music scene?
F: Ja, music scene. And then there was just this massive thing that blew out of proportion. Drunken statement in a bar went out as a public statement, and we were cancelled off festivals. They wanted to ban us from the KKNK and just like lank crazy things happened at that stage.
R: Did you learn a lesson? Did you start counting your words?
F: Ja, I think so. Obviously at that stage we were young, we were living in this bubble and us against the world in this van, we were like we can say what we want, there was no holds barred (sic), we express ourselves every moment in exactly the way we want to, and ja, we did learn to bite our tongues a little bit after that.
R: And that was even before social media.
F: Ja, you know, it was insane. If I think back to that time, we had death threats, we had everything you could possibly imagine, negative happen. It kind of attacked us, I think we were involved in bar fights and made the front pages of the newspaper and all of those things just … While gigging and partying very hard, I think everyone was just kind of burned out and some of the guys decided they want to do some other things. So Johnny the guitarist started a studio, and Hunter planned on starting … Oh no, Hunter didn’t have a plan. Me, I didn’t have a plan either. So some of us didn’t have plans, some of us had plans. And the guys that didn’t have plans started other bands probably in that same year. And that’s how Van Coke Kartel started.
R: With different people then?
F: Me and the bassist, Wynand, were together, and then other people.
R: And was the band different? Was the music different?
F: The music style? Yes, it was different. I think to someone who doesn’t really listen to rock music it probably sounds exactly the same.
R: I’m afraid so.
F: But to us it’s different, I guess. It’s guitars, bass and drums and singing.
R: And did you find a different audience?
F: I think we did eventually. We were playing mostly to Fokof fans. We would definitely find our own audience years down the line. We did that project for ten years, we recently stopped it.
R: Why?
F: We just didn’t really find time for it anymore. Because of my solo career that kicked off, like two years ago, Van Coke Kartel went on the backburner and there was a lot of confusion, what is Francois van Coke and what is Van Coke Kartel and some people obviously don’t understand. And I understand that it’s difficult to understand what is Fokofpolisiekar. There’s these three things that people …
R: There’s three different brands, ja. Why did you do the solo thing?
F: Basically how that happened was Van Coke Kartel’s drummer left. He wanted to go to America to make a career there or to try and make a career there. And that kind of changed the dynamic in the band. We got a new drummer in, but it never really clicked as it did before. And we decided we’re not going to make an album right now, we’re going to chill and just try and find our feet. But in that time, I had some time and I started writing songs and it became my first solo album.
R: How do you experience being the attraction, rather than being part of?
F: It’s nerve-wrecking. To this day, I’ve been doing it for two years now, it’s very … It makes me nervous all the time, putting my own name on something. And before I launched that first solo album, I couldn’t sleep for probably two weeks before the launch date. I couldn’t sleep. I had like constant anxiety and heart palpitations at night, it was intense. And then the project kicked off and we launched with that single with Karen. And it blew up, like, overnight. It was like, I was so excited, I almost couldn’t sleep for like … I didn’t sleep for a month. So it was hectic, and it still is, because I never imagined myself to be a solo artist. I grew up wanting to be in a band, since I wanted to play music, I wanted to play with guys and I kind of still do. I have my team that I work with, it’s a solid team, but it’s still … You know, it’s my name on something and it still makes me nervous.
R: How do you experience being in the glare of the spotlight all the time, because it also changes one’s personal life. You walk down the street and people know you?
F: Ja, it’s kind of become very normal over the last 14 years I have been doing it. Obviously it’s something to get used to. I still don’t get used to being in my local Pick n Pay and people ask me for a photo while I’m like in my sweetpak broek, you know? Like it’s hard that you have to think like someone might just actually stop you anywhere. Ja, it’s … I think I kind of got used to it. It depends on where you are, and I think that kind of attention is … I feel it’s bigger in places like Pretoria where there is a bigger Afrikaans contingent than Cape Town, but ja, it still happens.
R: And you’re now working with Fokofpolisiekar again?
F: Yes, ja.
R: How did that happen, in the first place, and then it is 14 years later? You are different people.
F: We are. We kind of did our last album in 2006, and that was before that break. And then in that break we released an EP with four songs on, and two songs after that. So in the last 11 years we have released six songs. And we have been playing since then, on and off, and it feels like our audience has actually been growing through the 10 years without us doing anything. You know, we’ve just played shows, we’ve probably played shows pretty badly and loosely, because we don’t rehearse that much, we kind of just do our thing. It’s always fun to do it, because it’s like a family reunion for us. We get on stage, we’re like old tjommies playing these songs that people really love, and we’ve been promising our fans an album since 2008. So that took us nine years. And it’s finally here, I think we wanted to do it for a long time, and Wynand the base player came up with the idea that we should crowdfund it, because people would ask us on a permanent basis when is the album coming, when is the album coming.
R: So you said if you want to pay for it upfront …
F: Ja, exactly.
R: And how did that work?
F: It worked amazingly. It blew us away. We asked for R500 000 to make the album – that would be like the recording, the marketing, the first music video … Just kind of the basic. And we had 60 days to raise the money in, and we got it in nine days, the target. And we eventually raised more than R1 million for this album. So we made an album that I think we’re really proud of, and I think our fans are really going to enjoy it. So last week we gave it to the people that contributed to the fund, and it’s coming out to the rest of the people in October.
R: How did you put the word out? How does one do crowdfunding?
F: Ja, we obviously have our social networks, did all the work on that.
R: And what did you ask for? R10, R20, R100? R1000?
F: Different things. We started at R80 for a digital album – so you get the MP3s. And then R120 for a CD. R300 for a vinyl. R300 for a t-shirt and the songs, digitally. And it went up to R100 000 for a show, and someone bought that. And then R50 000 for a private show, which someone had bought as well, which we played to a couple in a hotel room. It was insane! Very weird. But cool.
R: And very loud.
F: No, we played an acoustic set, but it was still weird to play to two people, but they were actually very cool. And then our sponsors contributed maybe R100 000 and we had like all kinds of stuff. Like branded fridges that we got from Jagermeister, we’d sell for like R10 000. Shoes, Converse …
R: So it’s not just help us make this. Here is a specific thing that you will buy kind of … It’s a lay bye …
F: It’s like an e-commerce store, but people will just have to wait for their product to come a little later. And that really worked very well. We gave them … You call it rewards in the crowdfunding world, and we gave them great rewards for their trust in …
R: How do you handle change in general? Because, I mean, in the media world, music as part of that, everything is shifting and changing and the old model doesn’t work anymore and the new model doesn’t really exist yet. How do you work with that?
F: I think obviously we adapted very well with this project. You know, we never sold a lot of CDs in the Fokofpolisiekar history, so for us it doesn’t make that much of a difference. I think for South African pop artists that sold like 100 000 units five years ago, going down to selling 10 000 units … It’s a massive thing. But for us it was always never such a big selling album market – we kind of made our money on the road. I think these days if you make an album that sells, you have to count yourself very lucky and if you have a big hit and that sells your album, be very thankful, but don’t expect it to come soon again. Because there is no value in recorded music anymore. Everything is going to streaming, and the money that you make off streaming just does not come close to what you would have made if you have been selling those kind of units in the old world.
R: Jis!
F: And you know, especially being from South Africa and Afrikaans, playing only for Afrikaans people, if you break a Rihanna or Kendrik Lamar that play to the whole world, and they stream your music in the whole world … It’s a lot more than people streaming in South Africa or Afrikaans people all over the world streaming it wherever they are. But it’s still very small.
R: But it’s a hard life. If you have to make your living out of appearances. Out of concerts.
F: Ja, it is. But I find it gets harder the older you get, and the more stuff you have. You know, when I started playing live music, I was 23 and it was all I wanted to do. I was going on the road, I was … I had better accommodation on the road than I would have at home. I was staying in a yellow room with only a mattress and some porn magazines or something … I had literally nothing, so it was amazing to be on the road, go with your friends, play music, every night party, hang out, and it’s amazing. The older you get, you know, I’ve … I’m married, I love my wife, I’ve got a child that I love, I’ve got a dog that I love, I’ve got a house that I love, that I like to stay in. It gets a lot harder to be on the road, but at least I get to do what I want to do. And I do a lot to be able to do that.
R: How do you see the future, the long term?
F: Long term I think I will be playing music until I pass out.
R: Like Leonard Cohen?
F: Probably. But I definitely … I don’t know if I’m going to be playing live like this until I’m 70. I don’t think I will be able to do that. But I will do it in some shape or form, and I think there’s smarter ways of doing it than being on the road constantly.
R: How did you meet Lauren, and how did you decide that she was the one?
F: We met when I was 21, when I moved from the suburbs to Cape Town and started doing live sound in Cape Town. It was always my dream to get out of Bellville, if you grow up there and you look at Cape Town, you look up there, that mystical place down there, we want to go there. So it’s like, good, I’ll move to town. And I moved into a block of flats, next to Gardens, it’s called St. Martini Gardens, and one day I walked past this girl in the block of flats, and she had red Etnies skate shoes on, and I was like I like this girl, and it was kind of like, I wouldn’t say love at first sight, but it was like, when I saw her the first time I knew … I don’t know …
R: There was something there.
F: Maybe it’s because I know what happened, but there was definitely some kind of connection from my side, I don’t know if she even saw me, but I saw her and I felt something, got to know her and we were kind of together since I was 21, and she was 18 and she just started studying graphic art …
R: Design.
F: Design at the Tech, and we kind of fell in love immediately, and we only got married in 2012, that’s like 11 years later. We broke up, probably 10 times in that 11 years, but I think we always knew we were going to get back together.
R: And what made you take that final decision to now get married?
F: Ja, I think I was always kind of pushing against that thing because it was always a part of …
R: Conventional …
F: That’s why it probably took so long. I was like, fighting against everything that’s normal and eventually I just realised she really wants to get married, I love her, I want to be with her forever … We had to do it.
R: What does marriage mean? When you stand up in front of people and you say this is the person I promise to be with?
F: Ja, that’s weird because it didn’t change all that much. I think it probably is a commitment thing if you put that ring on your finger, or I actually tattooed my finger, so I’m in it for the long haul, for sure. I think it’s just a commitment thing. Just putting it out there, saying it in front of all of your loved ones and making a thing about it.
R: Why did you choose an anchor?
F: It means hope. So that’s why. But I got a ring for a month, and lost it in our house, luckily Lauren found it – thank goodness – because if I lost it on the jol she would never forgive me. And then after I lost it, I was like no, I’m going to get it tattooed, because I don’t wear any jewellery, I’m not used to things like that.
R: And do you think being married has made a difference? Has it changed you?
F: I don’t think it’s changed me that much. Part of being married has changed me, because I think having a child has changed me immensely.
R: In what way?
F: It made me feel less important and made me focus on someone else. And I think that is amazing that that happened, because I think you can get old and you can get stuck in this rut and think that this is all that this is about, and a child just changes all of that and your focus has to go somewhere else and you have to make sure this little person survives and are cool all the time.
R: Can you remember the first time you held her?
F: Yes, I do, it was quite a weird situation. Lauren had a Caesarean, so after Alex was born, they put me in a room. Obviously you don’t have a clue what’s going on. It’s your first time! So they put me in the room and a nurse said do you want to hold the baby skin on skin? So I’m like okay, cool, I’ll do it. So there I was, sitting with this baby, I was … I never imagined I was going to be a parent, you know what I mean? That freaked me out, but it was amazing. And in that same – I think they leave you like 45 minutes before they … they obviously clean Lauren up and bring her back into that room, and it’s quite intense, because you have no clue what you’re doing. And in that time the nurse …
R: How did Alex respond? Was she quiet? Or did she cry?
F: She was looking for the boob on my chest, so … That’s also a freak out, you know?
R: Because you know you can’t.
F: But in that period, the funny thing that happened, was one of the nurses that came to me, while I was sitting there without my shirt on, which made me feel quite self-conscious about my body, this nurse came in and said she was going, like off shift now, can she quickly take a photo with me because maybe she was not going to see me again? And I was like, I’ve got this baby, I don’t know what’s going on. Can someone hold the baby? And I put on a shirt and so that was weird. So it was weird, but awesome.
R: Ja … And what do you want to teach her?
F: I want to teach her to love people. I want to teach her to be brave, strong and individual.
R: Tell me something about your home? What made you choose it? What is it like? And what made you choose it?
F: I stay in Bellville right now.
R: No!
F: Back in the ‘burbs. I never imagined that I was going to go back, so when me and Lauren … We had a dog before we had a child, and he is very close to our hearts too. His name is Ringo, he’s a bulldog. And when we stayed in Cape Town we thought we want to get more space, so we moved out to Bellville. So we’ve been back there for five years and it’s kind of weird because it’s like two and a half kilometers from where I grew up, so the connection is real and I see people in my local stores that I went to school with and stuff like that, but I think that inside our walls, in that house, it really feels like it’s our space. So we’re really happy with that.
R: So you chose it for the space? For where you could have a dog?
F: Ja, I think that was the first plan. And obviously I think we’re going to stay there for the long term. That also freaks me out from time to time, but I’m trying to deal with it. We’ll see how it goes.
R: Isn’t it interesting that you have found a way to be back there, but you’re now confident enough that you are who you are, that the place doesn’t define you?
F: For sure. I think obviously it’s 10 years of doing something that you are, or 14 years of doing something that you are passionate about. Where you are does not define you anymore. That’s right. You’re right.
R: Thank you sir. Thank you for being with us, and good luck! I hope you sing until you’re 70.
F: Thank you. I’m going to try.
R: Okay. Thank you, we’ll see you another time.
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