My life has been a tapestry of incredible synchronicities. The parallel of the Capital Radio 604 Reboot happening in the year I was restarting my life is definitely in the top ten.
We left South Africa on New Year’s Day 2021 with 2 suitcases and a piece of hand luggage each. After months of reminding myself that every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end, my mantra for the ordeal of the journey to Greece became, “Don’t bend, don’t break, baby don’t back down”. That lasted until a customs official at Cairo airport confiscated gifts from Athena and Tristan. I’ll resist the temptation to go off on a tangent here about the sentimental value of the gifts or the details of my emotional reaction. I was sleep deprived and still reeling from the devastation of giving up our lives in South Africa. It was less than 24 hours after I walked away from my daughters and grandson at Johannesburg International Airport, not knowing when I would see any of them again. I bent. I broke. I backed down. For the next few months there were tears on my pillow almost every single night. In Johannesburg we had owned a 3 bedroom house with 2 bathrooms, a kitchen large enough to fit a table where we usually ate, a separate dining room for when we had guests, a lounge big enough to fit a king sized mattress next to a single bed mattress on the floor in front of the fireplace in winter, a study with two desks and a garden with a jungle gym and a trampoline. The entire semi basement flat in Athens would have fit into the lounge and dining room of the house we had sold a few months earlier. Don’t get me wrong. I will be eternally grateful to the friend who so generously allowed us the use of her flat rent free for 6 months so we could find our feet again. It is possible to be grateful and devastated at the same time. In fact it is in our moments of greatest despair that we are able to truly appreciate the generosity of others. During those first few months of crying in my sleep, I wished I’d never learned to weep. The excitement of getting a job interview in my first week in Athens was tempered by the realization that I could do nothing until I had a work permit. It was a reminder that this was not my home. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t speak the language. I held no currency. It took all my energy to hold back the tears all day until my boys were asleep before I could go to the bathroom to cry quietly enough not to wake them. I didn’t always succeed. There were nights when the tears started to slip out the second my brain wasn’t distracted by the daily grind of adjusting to the new reality of our lives. Facebook became my favourite escape and torture. It was a bittersweet symphony of memories and following the lives of friends and family that we had left behind. Somewhere in this melancholy and the infinite sadness, I commented on a friend’s post about something musical. One of his friends replied to my comment. The banter led to an invitation to join the Capital Radio 604 Facebook group. Nersan Govender couldn’t possibly have understood the significance of offering me that link to South Africa. It was so much more than just hearing the language, accents, and music of home. It was a connection to the courage and confidence of my youth. I have been obsessed with radio for as long as I can remember. It probably has something to do with being born 2 years before televisions were allowed in apartheid South Africa. The broadcast was so limited and censored that we spent more time listening to the radio. My parents had a little portable transistor radio that I can still see clearly in my mind’s eye. We huddled around it to listen to stories and danced madly around the lounge to the top 20 charts. As I got older I started paying closer attention to the DJs. It was fun to listen to the different accents, clever banter, and of course the fantastic music. Winning competitions was as much about the prizes as it was about proving how well I understood the musical trends, trivia, timing the phone calls, and generally being in tune with the people who were my heroes and role models. The most exciting thing about university for me was the campus radio station, AUDWAX radio – A University of Durban Westville Auditory eXperience. While my friends from high school hung out in the lecture halls and library, I immediately auditioned to be a DJ. It opened up a whole new world of learning. It was 1992. Some of the older members of the radio station leadership team had been around in the days when the apartheid government had tear gassed the studios and wrecked their equipment. They had been friends with students who were murdered in detention. It was an honour to share a studio with people who had been such an incredibly strong voice for freedom through the 80s. These people were part of the reason that the first open ANC meeting after they were unbanned was hosted at the University of Durban Westville. My obsession with radio also gave me access to the South African Students Press Union. I got to chair a panel discussion at the National Conference at Wits University in Johannesburg in 1993, and did a show on the Voice of Wits radio station while I was there. It was so much fun I considered a career in radio for a while. One of my mentors at Audwax became a DJ on Capital Radio which was based in Durban at the time. Sadly, by the time I completed a radio DJ course (the only time in my life that I actually enjoyed doing homework) Capital Radio had been forced to close down by the new governing body for broadcasting. Life took me on a different journey and for a while I ended up on the other side of the microphone. One of the most surreal experiences of my life was being interviewed by Shado Twala (go do your own research). I still cringe at the thought that I actually told her, live on air in the first 5 seconds, how hard I was fangirling. There was no way to play it cool on that phone call. Another huge adjustment to life in Greece was giving up the media presence. I went from being invited to talk about gender issues on radio and TV in South Africa to living in a country where I don’t even speak the language. All of the above serves as context for the significance of Nersan’s invitation to join the Facebook group. You cannot imagine my joy at finding out that Capital Radio was being resurrected. It was incredible to find that there were other people who shared my excitement. When Darren Scott presented that first hitline reboot on the 6th of September 2021, I suggested that we comment on the Facebook post to show our support. There were a few people early on that joined the conversation around the hitlines. At some point somebody said something about comments from the peanut gallery and it stuck. Since I was the one who initially started tagging people in the hitline peanut gallery, they voted me Chief Peanut. When my life got busy again, Nersan Govender, Pearl Mahabir Naicker, Danny Greef and Jason Hadley Thomas stepped up to run the peanut gallery so that we all had one day a week of active duty. We started with a tag list of about twenty people who regularly participated in the banter, shared memories and chatted about life in general. 5-6 PM on weekday evenings became our happy hour. The Famous Five became the Secret Seven with the addition of Gregg Cornell and Sandrasen Govender. The group has grown so much that many of the newbies missed a lot of the early jokes and references. Here are the stories behind some of the inside jokes so you understand our cryptic references. Please note that everything is completely tongue in cheek. Oupas and Spring Chickens: As our preferences for different decades of music became apparent we separated into generational groups based on a few tunes that we disagreed about. Someone made a joke about Danny and Nersan being Oupas. They replied, making Pearl, Jason and I the spring chickens. I was very excited to be admitted into the grown up group when I turned 50 and now proudly call myself an Ouma. While we’re on the subject of age and birthdays I must tell you about the references you might see to the “Capital Twins”. This may come as a surprise to some but Jason and I are not actually twins. LOL. What happened was that we both commented on some quiz about what song was at number one on our birthdays in a specific year. Our song was on the charts for about 6 weeks so we asked each other about our birthdays and found out that were both born in Durban on the 25th of January 1974. But wait, there’s more. We both have sons who were born within days of each other in October 2009. So if you see me refer to him as “Twinsie” or we talk about, “our birthday”, that’s the story behind it. Now, let’s get back to the rest of the peanut gallery. The age gap was also apparent in what we remembered as our “garage party” songs. These were the songs that we had our first slow dances to when we were too young to go out to clubs and had to settle for little parties with our friends in somebody’s garage. Now we refer to most soppy love songs as garage party tunes. The undisputed greatest garage party song of all time is Wham’s Careless Whispers. Another undisputed classic is Bridge over Troubled Water – the Simon and Garfunkel version, which was the first and last song to be played on Capital 604. There are some lively disputes over the cover versions. We learned each other’s musical tastes quite quickly and now there are artists that we all associate with specific peanuts. Pearl loves Duran Duran so much that she became Mrs le Bon. I love Bon Jovi so I became Mrs Bon Jovi. The turned us into the two Mrs Bons. Then Anshal Bodasing joined us. She has a picture of her with Morten Harket of A-Ha so we now have three peanut celeb wives. I’m thinking of a few new peanuts who may want start thinking about their surnames to join the club. Differing opinions about what should be on the charts led to Peanut Butter Conspiracies. Somebody would suggest a song and try to get others to vote for it. Sometimes it worked beautifully. Other times peanuts thought it would be funny to do conspiracies behind the conspiracies and a different number one would take us by surprise. It was hilarious and so much fun playing these games behind the scenes. The ultimate Peanut Butter Conspiracy was Danny Greef and Nersan Govender taking over the hitline. Darren Scott took one look at the number of votes they had sent in that week and said that the only way all those songs would be played was if the Oupas hosted the show. They agreed and another peanut gallery memory was made. We’ve had loads of fun getting to know each other and have become close friends. When somebody said something silly about one of my Facebook posts, Danny Greef and Nersan Govender were there immediately with comments about how “her Oupas have got her back”. We’ve also connected on WhatsApp. One of my best birthday presents in 2023 was a video call from Pearl. It was such a lovely surprise. While so many of my friends and family members had drifted out of my life with the move to Greece, the Peanut Gallery was proof that I could build a tribe anywhere. That tribe was an essential part of me surviving my first New Year’s Eve in Greece. I was prepared for the worst night of homesickness I had ever experienced - until Dave Simons started his live broadcast. The party music combined with the fun banter from the peanut gallery rescued me from complete and utter misery. They also brought me practical experience of the line “the things I detest I will almost like”. This brings us to one of the reasons I wrote this – Number 28. References to this song pop up all over the peanut gallery chat line from time to time. Newbies often ask about it, so here’s the story. Feel free to copy and paste it where necessary. I made the mistake of being very vehement about my dislike of McCully Workshop’s Buccaneer (The fact that I actually tainted my keyboard by typing that out in full proves how deep is my love for the peanut gallery). The Oupas teased me mercilessly about it. Somebody asked, “How does a pirate hear?” the answer was, “with his Buccaneers” – take as long as you need. I didn’t say it was a good joke. There was a fairly long thread in the chats using Buccan as a replacement swearword. It was hilarious. The Oupas then started requesting that song to tease me. They somehow managed to get it to number 28 on one of the top 100 charts. I responded with the appropriate shock and horror, and now that song is forever immortalized as number 28 despite it not making an appearance at all (thankfully) on any other charts. The worst part of this story is that now it reminds me of all the happy memories of laughing and joking about it with the peanuts. The other day I found myself smiling when I heard it on the radio instead of immediately swapping to my own playlists. Some may consider this a happy ending but I’m not so sure. The other reason I wrote this is that I have to step down from my role as Chief. I will always be a Peanut, heart and soul, but my new day job cuts into my happy hour. The timing of Capital establishing itself so firmly with the addition of new shows every month coincides beautifully with me finally finding my feet in Greece. May we all continue to rise together. Anthony Duke created a new category of listener for me. He said that they used to talk about active and passive listeners but I was the first hyperactive listener he’d ever met. Now let’s see how many hyperactive readers we have here. My parting gift to you all is a music trivia challenge. There are song titles, artists and lyrics scattered throughout this blog post, sometimes at the expense of correct grammar. Tell me which ones you spotted and share your own memories in the comments. I will never say goodbye, but thanks for the memories.
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