‘It’s a creature’: Arno Carstens on new Springbok Nude Girls album Partypocalypse

The memory of the pandemonium that would break out at Roxy’s in Johannesburg whenever the Nudies played here is how my conversation with Arno Carstens began a few days before the long-awaited release of the band’s latest album Partypocalypse, which arrives 26 years after the band played its first, hometown show.

“Roxy’s was a weird place,” the Nudies’ frontman says with a mischievous smile on his face. “The backstage was in the kitchen and there was the owner, a French woman, Lynn, and her German husband who had these dogs. She would come out and she would go like, ‘Arnooo, ça vaaaa! Tequilas!’ And we would just drink tequila. Once, there was a guy stage diving from the second storey. It was insane.”

But this was then, when Barney Simon punted alternative music on his The Night Zoo radio show and when rock bands made the 5FM charts. Today, things are a little different: rock doesn’t work for the commercially centred big radio stations, most rock venues have closed down, and bands are rehearsing and recording in their home studios to release music digitally without too many live appearances, even before COVID-19 decided to flip the world on its head. 

“I think these type of things only happen once and then it’s over,” the 49-year-old Carstens says. “I was thinking the other day, with Charlie Watts from The Rolling Stones passing away, that this generation is starting to move on now. They were considered the original rebels of rock, a kind of spillover from Elvis Presley but with a bad-boy, hedonistic attitude. There might never be that kind of thing ever again. Everything’s got its time in the sun, and it’s quite interesting because I don’t know if those types of people will exist again. I think a lot of the people these days are totally different, like the kids and so on. With the rock thing, or with any type of music, I really struggle to see anything blowing me away at the moment. It’s like all music has been made and is now replicating sideways, like a regurgitation of the same thing into different formats. In this crazy world of all this different music happening, I think the best thing musicians can do is concentrate on writing good songs – ­lyrically and melodically. It’s the only thing you need to do.”

Carstens admits that good songwriting escapes all musicians, present company included, and says that his musical ideas are always in the background like one’s children, even “if they only have one arm.”

“I had this dream once where I lost this awesome album somewhere, and the whole thing was that this album does exist. And I can sort of remember it, but I can’t. If you could only remember the songs, then it’s like the best album ever. Then, luckily, you remember it’s a dream.” 

Unlike the nightmare of losing your best work in the ether, Partypocalypse is very much real and arguably the Nude Girls’ best collection to date. It’s an anthology that combines the band’s signature elements and gets straight to the point without unnecessary distractions. Most of the songs on the album are short and snappy, with some of them (like ‘Best Friends, Best Enemies’, ‘Get the Picture’ and ‘Robot’) harking back to the kinetic character of the ‘90s college scene. It amalgamates carefully collected and tested influences from the grunge and Palm Desert scenes in the US with elements of Brit rock and punk, the motorik approach of krautrock, and of course the Afrikaans singer-songwriter sensibility. Tracks like ‘Crystal Ball’ and ‘SA Tan on the Beaches’, which bears the 13-track album’s most striking guitar hook, are anthemic and come at the listener with grounded sobriety. There’s a lot of tension and contrast in ‘SA Tan on the Beaches’, but Carstens is wary of talking profusely about the content; he doesn’t want to be overly prescriptive about the thematic nuances of his art and would rather let his lyrics function as invocations of the listener’s own imagination and experiences. 

“I get an uneasy feeling when I listen to the song,” he says about ‘SA Tan on the Beaches’. “The song ‘Crystal Ball’ also has this ‘mistaking your goodwill for kindness’ thing, pushing it too far constantly with a vision of more dread, actually. The name of the album, Partypocalypse, suits the whole vibe of the thing. We didn’t plan it. It was written before COVID, but it’s very edgy, like the world is on edge.”  

‘Beautiful Evolution’, a song released as a single in 2018, was recorded with the rest of the tracks on this album, but it took the Nudies about three years of streamlining before they could share more of the compositions with their fans. 

“It took a long time, but fuck, it’s cool,” Carstens says. “‘The polishing of the turd’ is a kind of nice phase of creating. You go like, ‘This sucks, this sucks so badly’ and then you start tweaking things. Then it’s more of this and that, more percussion, and it starts building layers and becomes a whole thing of its own. That’s why I’m so fascinated by this album, because you don’t know what you’re going to get at the end. I mean, we added hand claps, which is something the Nude Girls wouldn’t do normally, but I like this kind of stuff because it enhances the snare drum and gives movement to the song.”

He adds: “The songs took a life of their own, the album has its own life, and so does the cover art. It’s a creature. I would never have thought in a million years that it would come together like this. Every time I listen to it, I go, ‘What is this thing?’ But that’s the thing about the Springbok Nude Girls, or being part of a magical thing where it’s a bunch of people that come together and then a certain sound comes out. It’s cool and quite interesting at the same time listening to it objectively.”

The Springbok Nude Girls are the subject of a 2016 documentary that archives the ups and downs of a burnt-out band reaching a ceiling in South Africa and searching for international success abroad to no avail. In 2001, everything seemed to crash down and the Nudies broke up. The fans moved on to newer bands and trends while Carstens plunged himself into an uncertain solo career. 

“We were making a living out of playing live and gave all that up because of it just not going anywhere. It was definitely quite a sobering experience. The telephone literally stops ringing, it’s true. And then I went solo – because I thought that I was just going to go on – and recorded an album that two buddies helped me pay for – no record company, no nothing. Suddenly when one of my songs, ‘Another Universe’, got onto this Volkswagen ad, it became a massive hit. But with the Nude Girls, it felt like a whole lifetime, although it was just seven years before we broke up. And you know, once you break up, you can never really get that thing going the same way again. Or maybe you can...”

In 2006, the Nudies regrouped and released Peace Breaker featuring the positively received ‘Illuminate’. The band also recorded the experimental Apes With Shades EP, which flirts with doom metal and space rock, on the Isle of Wight in 2011. Partypocalypse is the group’s first offering in 10 years. It seems that a real break-up could be as traumatic as a divorce for five friends who have been making music for close to three decades, and perhaps that’s why the Nudies won’t go through with it for good. But Carstens says it’s more than that.

“Look, it’s difficult. It’s a relationship individually with bandmates but also this relationship with the Springbok Nude Girls music and the body of work. I always look at R.E.M. and I think, how did they do that? How can you just walk away and say you’re never going to do these songs again with these people? It’s a weird thing to say, ‘No more, no more.’ I’m a painter as well and the fact is you make thousands of paintings that no one likes. But if you’re part of a process as a musician, you keep creating ... After so many years, we realised that we missed playing the music and producing the music. I said, ‘It's obvious we're never going to play as much as we used to, but let’s keep producing music and putting it out.’ I mean, I don’t care, I‘m okay with never playing live again, as long as we can see what we can still come up with. Now it’s purely about the music.”

Download and listen to Partypocalypse here. Buy the vinyl here.