From the Hip with Benjy Mudie cover art

From the Hip with Benjy Mudie

From the Hip with Benjy Mudie

By: Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard
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Music industry veteran Benjy Mudie does a deep dive into what makes the music world tick. From interviews with leading artists, songwriters, publishers, radio DJs, label insiders, and producers, to stories from nearly 50 years in music. Sometimes funny, and often irreverent and controversial. He'll take you inside the backrooms and the back stages of the South African music industry. The concerts, the parties, the politics, the hedonism, the highs and lows of a headlong career. Along the way, Benjy passes along advice on how to chart the stormy and ever-changing landscape of the modern music business. It's from the hip podcasting brought to you exclusively by Solid Gold Podcasts.Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard Music Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Greek girls ! Post Punk energy! Tearaway songs! | The Peach Story

    Greek girls ! Post Punk energy! Tearaway songs! | The Peach Story
    Jun 20 2026
    Durban`s almost all-girl teen band spill the beans!

    Allan Rosenberg (Guitarist, Songwriter and Band Founder), Angie Becker (Lead Singer), and Graham Boynton (Band Manager) look back...

    Take four Greek teenage girls, add in a Jewish guitarist with rock pedigree, mix in a handful of power, attitude drenched tunes and adrenalin fueled live performances, and you have Durban`s Eighties raunchy rockers, Peach. In this episode siren Angi Peach, guitarist Alan Rosenberg and manager Graham Boynton reunite in a raucous, unscripted ramble through the band's meteoric rise to fame- the highs, the lows, success and disappointment and the inevitable breakup...
    all set to a soundtrack of fierce post punk songs. Peach on Retrofresh · Vinyl Junkie Website · Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard · Connect with Benjy on LinkedIn · Music Rights Clearances
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Otis Waygood Untold | Rob Zipper

    Otis Waygood Untold | Rob Zipper
    Jun 16 2026
    Rob Zipper (Otis Waygood Blues Band | Lead Singer and Saxophonist) tells the wild, full story

    This episode is for Gen X music lovers who grew up hearing the name Otis Waygood and wondering what really happened. Benjy Mudie sits down with Rob Zipper, lead singer and saxophonist of the Otis Waygood Blues Band, for the first time in decades to relive the extraordinary story of the band that Rian Malan called "our Led Zeppelin, our Free, maybe even our Rolling Stones."

    Rob takes you back to Rhodesia in the early 1960s, the teen band scene in Salisbury, and the moment Morris Trigger sang "Rock Around the Clock" in standard one and changed everything. He traces the blues education that began with Benny Millar, the maverick guitarist who introduced the band to Eric Clapton, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and Bob Dylan years before anyone else knew who they were.

    The episode goes deep on the band's explosive arrival in South Africa in 1969: the Battle of the Bands at Green Point Stadium, the Electric Circus in Linksfield, and the night a sharply dressed young man named Clive Calder walked up the stairs and offered them a ten percent royalty deal at EMI, an unheard-of figure that made headlines and launched a phenomenon. Rob explains the chemistry behind the Calder-Otis Waygood partnership, why it never quite worked the same way for Freedom's Children, Suck or Abstract Truth, and how Clive Calder and Ralph Simon went on to build Zomba Records, sign Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys.

    You will hear about the three albums recorded in 1970, including the classics "Late Miss Kate," "Fever" and "Watchin' Chain"; the communal house in Parkhurst where Abstract Truth and jamming musicians from the townships were regular guests; and the tragic, quietly heartbreaking story of flute player Martin Jackson.

    Rob then traces the band's journey through Amsterdam's Paradiso club, a medieval commune near Tubingen, the near-miss with Richard Branson at the Virgin Manor, a late-night encounter with Del Newman (Cat Stevens and Shirley Bassey's producer), and seeing Bob Marley and the original Wailers at the Speakeasy in Oxford Circus when there were barely five tables in the room. The story ends with a white Rhodesian reggae band playing Black clubs in Stoke Newington and Handsworth, a tour supporting Tavares, and a night at the London Palladium. Otis Waygood Blues Band discography on Discogs · Zomba Records history and Clive Calder · Rian Malan - My Traitor's Heart · Vinyl Junkie Website · Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard · Connect with Benjy on LinkedIn · Music Rights Clearances
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • Stoking the star-making machine with a music legend | Patric van Blerk

    Stoking the star-making machine with a music legend | Patric van Blerk
    Feb 5 2026
    This podcast captures something rare: the unguarded voice of a true music alchemist reflecting on five decades of creative risk-taking. What emerges isn't just industry history. It's a meditation on passion as sustainable fuel.

    Van Blerk's story begins with a 13-year-old epiphany: "I could also be in music. There's nothing stopping me."

    That certainty becomes the through-line of his entire career, from warehouse floor picker at Gallo to the architect of Joburg Records, South Africa's most significant independent label. His path reveals a fundamental truth: the music industry's gatekeepers are often those who started by genuinely loving the gate.

    The Rabbitt saga stands as the podcast's emotional centerpiece, a Beatlemania-scale phenomenon that came terrifyingly close to global breakthrough before imploding. Van Blerk's willingness to discuss failure ("I know what mistakes I made") shows rare vulnerability. The detail about bullets flying in Hillbrow clubs while they rehearsed "Boys Will Be Boys" crystallises the raw, dangerous energy of that era's South African rock scene.

    But it's his work with Margaret Singana that reveals van Blerk's true ANR instinct. Hearing her voice and feeling "shivers down my spine", then navigating apartheid's grotesque bureaucracy (the separate entrance for "black records" at the SABC) shows someone who let talent trump every institutional barrier. The arc from "I Never Loved a Man" to the wheelchair-bound recording of "We Are Growing" is heartbreaking and triumphant simultaneously.

    Van Blerk's philosophy emerges clearly: "If you don't really, really love music and you're willing to lay down your life for it... get up now." His legacy isn't hits or wealth, it's sustained enthusiasm across fifty years of dark valleys. In an era of playlist algorithms and viral moments, his story reminds us that great music careers are built on one irreplaceable foundation: genuine, irrational, life-consuming love of the art itself.

    As he says: "It's the music."

    Everything else is commentary. Patric van Blerk · Vinyl Junkie Website · Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard · Connect with Benjy on LinkedIn · Music Rights Clearances
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    1 hr and 31 mins
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