Sacred Ground

“I’m glad I never fell in love with him.” A woman I know said that once about Guy Tillim, as though that summed him up. I can see what she meant – if he was a character in a novel, someone’s heart would get broken. He’s so unaffected, and kind of soulful, and he’s a surfer. My friend knew Tillim years ago, when he had just begun making a name for himself as a photographer.

 She’s lucky she lost touch with him, because now he has branched out into music and has released a CD of songs so beautiful and seductive they become part of the texture and rhythm of your breath. When she hears it, she will be smitten.  

Andre Geldenhuys, Guy Tillim

The album, Sacred Ground, was recorded over several months earlier this year with Andre Geldenhuys on lead guitar, Roger Bashew on bass and keyboards, Barry van Zyl on drums, and Lani Pieters on backing vocals. Tillim sings, plays guitar and wrote all the songs, sharing the credit on one of them – Shadows – with Rian Malan, another newsperson who has made a mid-career switch to music.

Tillim’s stature as a leading photographer is well-established. Since starting out in the mid-1980s, he has exhibited around the world and won widespread recognition, including two Mondi awards for photojournalism, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005, and a Robert Gardner fellowship from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. UK art critic Jonathan Jones, writing in the Guardian three years ago, called Tillim a “dark genius”.

Dark is an adjective that also fits much of the music on Sacred Ground.   

“Andre came up with a good name for the music, it’s acid folk,” says Tillim, laughing. “Somehow it rings true.  You can get more specific, acid folk south peninsula …”

“South peninsula” because that’s where the music originated, in the homes and garages of Tillim and his friends and neighbours in Kommetjie, the laid-back village on the Atlantic as you head south from Noordhoek along the coastal road to the end of Africa. Among the neighbours were Geldenhuys – recently of the rock group Machineri -- and filmmaker Joji Chesselet.

Tillim moved here six years ago, and dates the evolution of his musical career from then.

“If you come to Kommetjie you have to have a guitar and a surfboard, they’re the conditions of entry,” he says. “I played with Joji, she kind of encouraged me, then I met Andre. We sort of jammed, for a year or two, and then started putting down songs. It was a natural process. Then we got a drummer involved.  Initially we were called the KGB – the Kommetjie Garage Band --  we played a few gigs, I’m sure they were disastrous.  It was harrowing for me because I’d never performed before.”

 They started out in Tillim’s garage. “Then we moved from being a garage band to being a lounge band. We migrated. Then the whole place just became a place where we played.”

In between photography projects, Tillim, now 51,  began writing songs and lyrics. “I hadn’t done that before.”

Part of the reason he got into it was the synergy of playing with others, in which  the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. “We get together and make music. Usually I’m trucking around, on my ace, making pictures like in a sort of echo chamber, and it’s like ‘argh, oh no’. Whereas this, you build something, make something, and it’s collaborative. It’s amazing, I’m quite attracted to it just for that. Just for that alone.”

Much of the chemistry on the album is thanks to the creative relationship between Tillim and Geldenhuys, whose talent is prodigious. “Andre has his influences, like John Fruschiante,” says Tillim. “But his playing comes out of a place that’s quite original and wild, it doesn’t pay any obeyance to what’s expected, so the solos are like something else, always surprising, unusual.”

Tillim’s haunting voice on Sacred Ground has the timbre of the ocean that surges against Kommetjie’s rocks, insistent and evocative, more salt than honey.  He sings about passion and anger, and on the title track, about religious myth and being here now.

“There are a few love songs. It’s part of life, real life, real women,” he laughs. One of them is Desire, inspired by movies: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire.

“I think you can get away with a lot in songs that you can’t get away with in poetry,” Tillim says. “The most interesting writing is where a world describes itself through that writing. It’s descriptive, it can allude to the rhythm that runs through things that are sort of unseen.

“Song lyrics are incredibly dodgy on a certain level, in the sense that they’re sort of a stream of consciousness. But a stream of consciousness has to have some kind of a reference … One does ask oneself that,  ‘what do I actually mean by this?’”

Then there’s Watch You, which Tillim describes as “venting a little bit”.

“It’s our political song. I remember being in Kinshasha when it fell to Kabila’s troops and seeing Mobutu fleeing in his limousine, with the whole city being pillaged.  So it’s part of that, you know, they’ve got your number. It’s a very loose and wild swing around African politics, in a sort of doom-laden genre. It’s not all that positive. That quest for power, greed, it’s been a trademark of the last 50 years in Africa.”

The album is available on iTunes, but the release has been remarkably low key.  “I’ve been nagging Guy to work on an album launch, but he’s so shy,” says Pieters, who has also worked with Malan, Jim Neversink and the Kalahari Radio Orkes, among others.

Describing the recording sessions, she says: “Sometimes I almost felt like crying. I get so emotional because the songs are like so touching. They really are moving. It was such a nice space to work in – Roger and Andre and Guy, there wasn’t a single ounce of ego involved, ever -- never in my life have I experienced that. Just beautiful vibes all the way.”

Tillim, who is spending most of November and some of December in inner city Johannesburg to shoot pictures for a new exhibition,  says he already has a couple of songs ready for the next album. But he’s not hanging up his cameras.

“I’m interested in taking photos . . . I’ve been taking pictures for 25 years,  whereas music is very new. I’m trying to find my feet . . . Music, poetry, photography, are like just really pure images. I think photography is a musical language in a way. It relies on the same kind of rhythm.”