"Where are the people promoting South African music?" he demands.

"Journalists should be helping to break artists in this country. With all respect to Barney Simon who I does some great things for rock music in South Africa, we’ve never really had a person with the talent like John Peel.

"I think the people are there but record companies, radio stations, and press aren't prepared to let them go out there and do what they want to do."

So, continues Lacey, warming to the subject, "there aren't enough people in the industry, particularly in the support industry to record makers, saying: 'You're right, that's good music'. They want to know what the marketing campaign is, how much money you're spending on TV ads. Who gives a shit?"

Especially since that concern for the bottom line sidesteps the artist.

"There’s a lot of people in the chain that are making a lot of money out of Garth Luke’s work in creating a song. There's a lot of people making money out of that guy. And you know who’s making no money out of that guy? The guy who wrote the song. And we need to change that."

But how?

"I can sign bands that I like. The big record companies can promote, talk to press about bands that are worth hearing. And journalists have the power to inform," he explains, saliently.

It's not that simple, though.

Money's tight for a small company focused on recording albums — "taking South African intellectual property to a world-wide market", as he puts it.

"There are four or five bands I'd sign tomorrow if I could. And I won't. And that's nothing to do with them — they're all good bands. Just because we don’t have Joe Soap support, it's so difficult, as a business, to make money out of bands in South Africa without being involved in management, in gigs and then making a record."

Then there's that not small matter of passion.

"If I don’t like a song, I can't get passionate about it, so I can't record it and sell it," explains the man who freely admits he'd have kicked Guns N' Roses and the Rolling Stones out of his office. ("I would not have signed those two bands. I’d be a very wealthy guy if I had, but they just never ever touched my soul. Never.")

"When something touches you," he figures, "you — whether you're a journalist, a marketer, or a record company owner — should go out and promote it.

"I'll keep plugging Fevertree because I believe in it and I'm passionate about it. I'm persistent and I'm patient."

He's also got a keen eye (or ear) for talent — something he attributes to his upbringing and life-long love of music.

"Certainly if you've worked with bands for a while you know which bands have a way better chance to make it and which bands haven’t," says the man who took Candice Hillebrand to (perhaps surprising) local and international success in 2003.

"So it's fairly easy to weed out the people who aren’t committed enough, the people who aren’t doing it for the right reasons."

That would be the music.

"The reason Shaun is a major rock star is he does it for the music."

We're back to the boy from Rooihuiskrans.

"Music is a release for him. He lets everything that's inside him, all that anger or pain that’s affected him over a period of time, out through his music. It's all about the music. It's about songs, songs, songs, songs and songs again."

"Because of the culture of the world we’re living in, people want that immediate gratification. So I would love a situation — and we’ve already got a system in place — where you can go to the merch stand after a gig, give them a memory stick or your phone, and walk away with the whole concert, or the original album versions of the songs you like.

"I don’t know if that’s the way music will be sold but I think it’s probably the way music should be sold."

Watch this space...