Something is very wrong here. The band is freaking out on stage, their bass loud enough to rupture eardrums, but the crowd stands almost comatose, listening with their eyes. Suddenly this couple of hundred people, they all raise both their arms in the air and perform, what can only be termed as, ‘royal’ waves. P.H. Fat are playing perhaps their weirdest gig yet: a show for deaf people; and this is how this crowd applauds. The concept is as bizarre as the atmosphere, but the band don’t care, rapping in rabid frenzy, throwing themselves against the silence so hard that an ‘un-named mainstream’ band – oh the politics – who are playing the main stage of this affair next door, complain mid-set. We can’t figure out how the afro-pop collective have the balls to – they have butt-kickers under the audience floor so their crowd can feel their rhythms. P.H. Fat play with no butt-kickers and we whistle and shout for them to crank the bass even more – ‘how else is a tent-load of deaf people gonna hear this shit?’… [Or at least we would have, if we were there, which we weren’t, but we did catch them burning down the Arcade party at Mercury Live the night before we meet them.]

The crowd is stupidly thin for an Arcade night, but still heavily armed with Black Labels and neon trims. Mike steps on stage – “Candy or carrots?” he asks. The beat goes and the bootay drops. The bass hits it us and our bodies effortlessly go into overdrive. The band dish out sweets to the crowd and tell us they love us, we believe them. Narch spins the tune and Mike starts spitting smooth rhymes into our minds and for a brief moment we believe in world peace – or at least something like it. Disco amazes us – his stage presence is mystical. He lurks like a rare manatee and when he rhymes his voice cuts like a blade. The lyrics are clever and refreshing, like giving your cat a bath – pure chaos that sinks its claws into your skin and leaves you with that tingly, do-it-again feeling. The fun doesn’t stop here; P.H. Fat give the stage away to the beautifully talented Dunty from JABU’S DANCE TEAM. She bumps her ass to the sound and looses her shit in a mechanically flowing dance. It’s like a wicked acid trip – hearing the music through seeing her move. We imagine we’re alone and dance like nobody is watching… nobody IS watching, all absorbed into their own interpretations of ‘dinosaur love, and hugs and flowers’.

Being sneaky journalists, we schedule to meet the band the Sunday morning after their gig, but they see straight through our trickery – ‘you wanted to get us here all hung-over and broken, drop our guard with some friendly banter and then suck out our souls’ they say. Perceptive bastards. P.H. Fat look as rough as we feel and throw us grim looks when we order burritos bigger than our faces. They sit in front of us: a pro downhill skater, a pro chef and a man with the charisma of a bitter Benicio Del Toro; responsible for some of the best party music we’ve heard in South Africa. Their sound fits somewhere between dub-step, glitch- and hip-hop but they like to think of it as psychedelic-bass-rap, a description that holds so true when the dance-floor mutates into a single bass-driven orgasm of arms and bodies. A P.H. Fat gig is a grizzly affair, the band being one of the few SA acts that back their music up with a real cock n balls live show. There is a dirty punk attitude that shines through the beats, a raw no-bullshit-all-about-the-music attack on your senses. Perhaps that’s why the band are breaking traditional genre boundaries – we see hip-hop kids, electro-fiends, metalheads, scene hipsters and indie kids all getting down like no difference between the castes exists, we hear rhymes about lions, geckos and superheroes blaring out of cars driven by stately middle-class individuals, the Fat seems to be everywhere. The guys themselves take a very anti-scene stance, refusing to take sides in Cape Town’s pigeon-hole-ridden crowds.

“Getting associated with a particular scene is very dangerous, I’d be very happy if I never get coupled with any sub-group. Scenes are fickle, the roof is only so high and there’s just no real longevity,” says Mike as we bankrupt the beachside restaurant on water and ice alone [Burrito – 50% down; Vice – 80% too fucked to digest]. Maybe there is hope and an antidote to the pretentious beast wrecking the SA music scene after all. We get onto the subject of musical processes and the band score more punk rock points when tell us they don’t believe in conventional band practices and music writing.

“Narch makes an infinite amount of music – then we work together on a song concept and cannibalize it from various beats and loops,” they say, “Don’t think we’ve had a single official band practice. Sometimes the first time a track gets performed from beginning to end is with all three of us present, on stage.”

The passion translates well enough for P.H. Fat to destroy stages without really jamming together, but the band remain low-key and humble about their achievements, dawning success and the full length album that is almost ready for release. They’re not too cool to tell us about their failures – “We once cleared a whole field at Primz Rezonance, there were people there at the start of the set but they all left, even our friends fucked off.” Call us old fashioned, but this kind of admittance strikes a chord and shows soul; and you can’t make good music without soul, be it jazz, rock n roll or spazzed-out party-rap. Like junkies, we want more of this – so we accept the burritos’ superiority over our stomachs and move the festivities to the Milnerton open-air market.

The anthropological experiment was simple – each band member is given twenty bucks and ordered to buy us something non-perishable. Disco looks at the brown note, looks at us, lowers his shades and asks: “Can’t I just use this towards rent?” before disappearing into the market crowd. We can’t help but think of Darby Crash of the Germs, he has the same hostile mystique, the same intelligence under a punk rock veneer, the same stripped down honesty. Earlier, when we ask him how he ended up in Cape Town, all he says is ‘the music, the music brought me down from Pretoria’ and from the way he says it, we don’t need to hear more.

We follow Mike and Narch on their laboured stroll until Mike jolts from excitement, points to a stall and exclaims: “Power adapters!” From there, he is lost in a maze of cables, plugs and electricity converters. The tech-addict image fits him perfectly as he rushes from place to place, almost cumming over old tape recorders. “I got a real reel-to-reel problem, man,” he says, “I always buy this shit even if I don’t need it.” He tries on gasmasks, handles power-tools and, in the end, buys peculiar shades shaped like rolling dice. Looking most content, Mike drags us to where Narch, keeping true to the DJ credo, is wading through boxes of old vinyl. He pulls out records that we would never thought he’d care about, but his prize loot of the day is an LP titled ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Hear On The Moog’. We stand around, waiting for Disco, who shows up with a Coke, shrugs his shoulders and buys an LSD-flavoured leopard toy.

Not that these boys will give a shit about what we make of them and their purchases, but to our hung-over minds it seems that we’ve come upon a real no-bullshit band, honest and raw, and we can’t wait to break our faces open to them on Friday the 5th at the Assembly.

www.myspace.com/phfatband