It's 1am on a Monday morning. Seether have just played to an audience of 19 000, supporting Audioslave at Madison Square Garden. Peter Lacey is sitting in the passenger seat of a Ferrari, as Seether's Shaun Morgan guns the car down the streets of New York.

It’s not even theirs.

A stockbroker type, spotting the band's frontman walking down the street post-gig, had recognised and stopped Morgan. As they exchanged niceties, the singer-guitarist admired his car. "Want to take it for a spin?" asked the suit, handing over the keys, left standing on the pavement as Morgan and Lacey go for a high-speed joyride in a complete stranger's Ferrari.

As he tells the story, sipping on a glass of Spiced Gold and Coke, Lacey's obviously proud of Morgan, the musician he discovered as Shaun Welgemoed from Rooihuiskrans — a little dorpie somewhere between Johannesburg and Pretoria.

He signed the kid's band — then called Saron Gas — to his Musketeer Records and watched as they took off: relocation (USA), new name (Seether), big hit ('Broken' with Evanescence's Amy Lee). So he's understandably a bit protective of his boy.

"As soon as he went overseas people said: 'He’s turned his back on South Africa, he doesn’t talk about us, he doesn’t like South Africa, he’s been taken by the American dream'.

"Bullshit!

"He's got a tattoo on his arm of the South African flag that stretches from his elbow to his wrist. Now tell me that’s somebody who’s not passionate about South Africa. And all those journos telling me that he’s given up on South Africa and he’s moved on — fuck them."

Instead, reckons Lacey, it's South Africans who have given up on Welgemoed.

"Shaun can walk down the streets of New York and somebody who’s 40 years old will recognise him and know who Seether are. But here — after the concert at Green Point where they supported Metallica I took them to one of those trendy bars in Camps Bay. The club was playing a Seether song on their sound system and people were talking about the song, but nobody realised they were in the bar. Nobody recognised them," he says incredulously.

That apathy, believes the 42-year-old, has a lot to do with perceptions and attitudes.

"We as a nation are too conservative. We don’t believe we’re good enough — and we are. We are world leaders in many things we do. We’ve got all the talent, we’ve got the ability we just for some reason consistently want to kick ourselves in the teeth," explains the man who made his first fortune developing the games 'Toxic Bunny' and 'Tainted' in the '90s and flogging them to the rest of the world.

LET THE MUSIC TALK
We asked Lacey how a band could make it:

"It's all about the music. Give yourself the best opportunity by writing and recording the best possible song you can at this point in time, even if you're in a garage with all the instruments and vocals going through one microphone into one stereo channel. There will be A&R people in this country who can see through that.

"Secondly don’t think that getting a record deal is the be all and end all of your business. For any artist anywhere in the world it is about self promotion. You could have the best song in the world but people have got to hear it. People don’t know what they like, they like what they know.

"So play as often as you can, get yourself in front of as many people as you can and give it your all — if there's one person in front of you or if there's 3000 people in front of you, give it the same amount of effort. Because if you believe in your music and you're writing from the heart, people will see that and you'll draw them towards yourself."

"The guys like the Shauns of this world are just enjoying their lives. And having a good time. And it just so happens that people like to see them having a good time. And they make money out of it.

"I think that's actually one of the sad things about the SA industry: we don’t get enough support from your Joe Soap consumer.

"Who says: 'I've never heard of Fevertree, let me go and see them'?".

Fevertree are the latest signing to Lacey's independent record company — in his eyes the next Seether, with frontman Garth Luke the next Welgemoed.

"If Fevertree were in the USA, people would be saying: 'Hey these guys could be the next U2'. That's how good they are. They just haven’t been allowed to just immerse themselves in music — I mean Garth has to do websites to make money on the side.

"That's not the way it should be. He should be able to immerse himself in the music and create. And we should be supporting that. Because he's another Bono. If we don’t support him he'll always be Garth Luke until we stand up and say I'm paying R150 for his album.

"He needs to be given the freedom and the time to become all that he can be. And he can only be given that freedom and time by the consumer out there supporting him and supporting his album."

But it's not just Fevertree — ahead of the Fall Out Boy concert in Johannesburg he heard fans slagging off the South African musicians on the bill: J, Harris Tweed, and Love Jones.

"Why do they say that? Because they don’t know the bands. Those are great bands and they all deserve our support.

"If you’re a music lover, listen with your ears. Don’t make any judgments about who they’re signed to, who’s touring them, what's playing on radio. Sit down, download it from the net for all I care, and listen to one of their songs. If you don’t like it, delete it and throw it away. But if you like what you hear, go and buy it.

"Because you, by making that simple choice, of outlaying a little bit of cash for something you like anyway, you'll put immeasurable support into the hands of the artists who can then pull more creativity, more bands, more stuff that you'll appreciate."

But it’s not just the fans.


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