It’s always sad when a band that has become a huge part of the SA music scene announces that they are calling it quits. This morning Cape Town based Classic Indie Finger Pop Al Bairre updated their Facebook status with this message to their fans:

Dear everyone. We have some very sad news for you this Tuesday morning. We weren’t sure where to begin, but our Jeremy tells us that ‘the beginning’ is usually a good place to start. 

The year was 2012 and the 4 of us decided we were gonna start a band. We wanted to have as much fun as we could while we were still young and a band seemed like an obvious choice. All having seen the movie The Secret – We sat around the twins’ dinner table on 14 March 2012 and wrote down all our goals. Our first ever goals read like so: 

Goals
THE GOAL:
*Play an overseas festival
Short Term Goal:
*Play Assembly, Zula Bar and Oppikoppi”
*Open for Beach Party, Holiday Murray, December Streets and Hot Water”.

What a time! You’ll be happy to know that opening for Holiday Murray was divine. Anyway. Since that day, we started a tradition. Every 4 months, we would get together, check up on our goals, tick off the ones we had achieved and create new ones.

With that being said, around December last year, we had our twentieth tri-annual meeting and came to the following conclusion: Over the last 5 years of ALventures (Al Bairre adventures), Al Bairre has introduced us to so many other things that we’re also passionate about and now curious to explore. Having achieved all the goals we set for ourselves over the last 5 years – we all feel like it’s the right time to try something new.

So, it’s with a heavy, but happy heart that we wanna tell you that we will be ending the Al Bairre chapter of our lives, come mid April. You’re probably wondering why we don’t just do both? Well you see – Al Bairre has been the love of our lives for the last 5 years and we don’t feel right not giving her all the attention she deserves.

We have all always agreed that when the time comes, we would rather want to give her a big final celebration and go out with a bang than leave her at home every day while we go off on our new adventures. She would eventually go pale, wrinkle up, start to stink and then die. And that’s not how we wanna see her go 🙂

We just wanna say that you guys have been unreal! Writing us letters, inboxes, emails! Starting fan accounts! Coming to chat to us after shows! Wanting us to sign your stuff! Giving our music to literally everyone who would take it and of course coming to every single show we played and dancing with us. You made these past 5 years more magical than we could ever have expected. Like really.
So we just wanna say thank you for being so nice to us. You have always been our absolute favourite part of Al Bairre and we’re gonna miss you all a lot. Like a lot a lot. Now about that big final celebration!!! We wanna see you all one last time, so we can blow you one last kiss.

Here are our final shows! JHB – 26 March – Large on the Lawn – http://bit.ly/2kGMFQy STELLIES – 04 March – Woordfees CAPE TOWN – 02 April – Kirstenbosch – http://bit.ly/2fL98FN

We’re also not gonna leave you empty handed. In the next week or so, we’re gonna give you not 1, not 3, but 2 new songs for old time sake. We wanted to say like a really deep “so-long and goodbye” thing here. But we’re gonna see you all in a few weeks so we’ll just do it then in person.

If we don’t get to see you before April, then thank you for everything and please keep listening to the music. (We need the money). We’ll see you in 10 years for the reunion tour (winky face).

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of their musical genre, but I’ve always enjoyed their live performances, especially because they know how to get a crowd going at a festival. Their performances at Oppikoppi (while the sun was setting in the background), their performances at Park Acoustics and Parklife will go down in the memory banks as two of the best live sets I’ve seen by a SA band.

Watch this space for regular updates in the Music category on Running Wolf’s Rant.