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CMU Approved
Approved: John Wizards
By Aly Barchi | Published on Thursday 12 June 2014
Hot weather time is high time to appreciate John Wizards, a band whose easy psych tropicalia shone diamond-bright against heat haze at this year’s Field Day festival.
JW is the pet creation of Cape Town scatterbrain John Withers, who in his pre-wizarding days was an advert jingle-writer. Withers and his kaleidoscopic crew released an LP last year, threading a vibrant print of snappish hip hop beats, R&B nuance, dazed disco and smiley highlife vibes with myriad tiers of a million African and international ‘dance’ genres, all laced as one in the most imaginative way.
In keeping with its own free-thinking terms and little else, ‘John Wizards’ floats in its own airspace like a daydream in which reality’s limits don’t apply, and any little whim is possible.
Switch off and drift away with JW singles ‘Muizenberg’ and ‘Lusaka By Night’, or in the band’s direct presence when they play all the festivals, and headline London’s Village Underground on 30 Oct.
