"A Clean Page" is the latest video from Fruits & Veggies' upcoming album. Here is an excerpt from Roger Young's feature story on Fruits & Veggies from the October 2012 issue of Rolling Stone South Africa:
"Are we getting the cover? I wanna do a rail off my own face," says Loopy, Fruits & Veggies' self-proclaimed "racist bassist" and co-songwriter of dubious sexual definition. Loopy is the frontline of the band's publicity-generating machine. Sure, it's not the Idols brand of PR that the Fruits generate, but even someone as bullshit-brained as Gareth Cliff would be able to spot their X, or XXX, factor. Stories of degradation follow the Fruits like the bad smell of Splashy Fen's shit-smeared backstage couch. "Yeah, that couch," says Purity Mkhize, the tiny bleached-headed, gold-toothed lead singer. "It's why we were banned from Splashy the first time." Less discussed is Fruits & Veggies' music, and how they've managed to survive so long causing so much mayhem, gaining such a reputation, while pretty much staying put in Durban, recording nothing beyond a single EP, Ndaa, just on two years ago.
The answer is as simple as the construction of their maskandi-gypsy ska songs: they have a unique on-stage chemistry and the confidence of a band that has discovered some kind of meaning from all this rooting around in the compost of rock'n'roll. "I'm living on Gay-reth's couch because of the band. My parents' place is far, down the coast. So I live here, because this is where my band is," says Loopy. "This is my life, I don't really have any other options. I'm not exactly employable." Gay-reth is part of the F&V extended family, a dangerously smart professor whose house functions as a relative safe zone when the kids are down and out; if hanging out with a sexually ambiguous anarchist is any definition of a safe zone.
To read the full feature story, pick up your October copy of Rolling Stone South Africa.