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Quello che per altri era "political, pornographic and anti religious" - e che per questo venne rifiutato - lo pubblicò nel 1984 Recommended Records, con esplicito inserto informativo in forma di collage e note personali di Chris Cutler in forma di lettera ('South Africa as it is Today'). Oggi torna in copia identica in vinile - limitatamente a 500 copie - per iniziativa a Montreuil dell'etichetta Via Parigi: Own Affairs, il primo album completo a nome Kalahari Surfers.
Da Johannesburg ne (ri)racconta la storia l'autore, Warrick Swinney, ovvero Warrick Sony: "This is an album made during a crucial period in South Africa’s history during which there was a palpable feeling of a slow turning towards the collapse of the apartheid state side by side with an increasingly well-organised culture of resistance through the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and various affiliated bodies. However, as a result, there was increased pushback from the state security establishment, a turning to dirty tricks and the formation of hit squads whose members murdered and tortured many of our friends and created chaos throughout South Africa as well as neighbouring countries.
This album is situated in this political environment however it took advantage of the new do-it-yourself music technologies available at that time. Technologies that made it possible to make and release records without interference from traditional record company executives. Two musician friends of mine pooled their resources after their respective bands had broken up. Ivan Kadey (National Wake) and Lloyd Ross (Radio Rats) built an 8-track recording studio control room and fitted it out in a second hand caravan and called it Shifty. They parked it in a garage attached to the only house left in a demolished and derelict mining village near Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
All the work on this album was completed there, mainly after hours and mostly alone where I enjoyed an exhilarating freedom to develop a whole new set of musical skills and ideas, incorporating my love of a wide range of music I’d grown up with. Influences of 1970s progressive/kraut/and psychedelic rock combined with mbaqanga bass styles, early reggae/dub and Indian tabla rhythms. Stockhausen, early Zappa and Holger Czukay were radio text and shredding influences, and Chris Cutler’s bands Henry Cow and Art Bears helped me see a way to political expression. Mostly though was the exciting post-punk and no-wave music coming through to us from Europe and America: bands like This Heat, Mekons, Raincoats, Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu were immensely important to me as was my reading from the period: J.M.Coetzee’s first 3 novels are strong influences on Free State Fence; the stark landscape, superstition, ritual, and sexual repression are in many of his settings. JG Ballard was a constant presence throughout that period, especially whilst living in such a surreal environment, surrounded by mine dumps, but mostly I think the whole French post-modern philosophical movement - Derrida, Foucault and of course, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation - set out a new sense of possibilities, possible ways to express oneself, ways to think, and ways to try and analyse the political intersection of public and private life. Most important at that time was the influence of sound recordings I had made and experiences garnered from working as a sound recordist on documentary films. These financed my work and later the studio and were consistent employment throughout the 1980s. Film work also enabled me to experience much of South Africa that was hidden from most. The track Independence Day is a good example; drawn from some time spent in the rural homeland of Venda.
This then was the first full length Kalahari Surfers album, completed in summer of 1984 it was taken to EMI pressing plant but rejected. Chris Cutler at Recommended Records took up the challenge and released the album through his label. He wrote the original liner note."