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| The Hollow Body at Arcade Empire PHOTO: Hendro van der Merwe |
There’s a biting chill in the air at Arcade Empire’s acoustic
evening. As is starts raining, the few people who were sitting at tables
outside flee indoors for cover. Those who were lucky enough to avoid
the downpour are talking noisily over cheap beer.
The chatter becomes an irritating buzz that competes with Jonathan
Velthuysen’s soothing drone as he takes to the small, sparsely lit stage
in the corner. The indifferent audience doesn’t seem to bother him as
he moves his broad shoulders this way and that, tilting his head back
slightly, feeling every note that he effortlessly strums on his guitar.
Velthuysen has been having a fiery love affair with the instrument
strapped around his shoulder for many years. Flickers of it may have
started when he picked up his mom’s old Hofner guitar at the age of 13,
but this relationship permanently changed after he came across one
guitar in particular while living in Scotland.
“It was just a phenomenal guitar,” says a slightly reserved
Velthuysen, his admiration for the string instrument still evident. “It
made me realise how average I actually was at playing instrumental music
and it also inspired me to start singing.”
When he returned to South Africa in 2009, Velthuysen did just that.
He formed a folk rock band called Stepdog, which released an EP called Amy After Dark in
2010. The band enjoyed a pinch of success but eventually broke up.
Velthuysen wanted to go it alone, so he dubbed himself “The Hollow Body”
and steered his sound in the bare, unfussy direction of folk music.
“I’m not very comfortable with pretending and I find that [folk] is
one genre that I can write in, sort of as an idiom,” he says. “I can
just be who I am and sing what I want. It’s just easier.”
At the same time, Velthuysen also began learning how to build guitars
under master luthier JA Tredoux, founder of the Stellenbosch Guitar
Company. It’s an incredibly long process to build a guitar, says
Velthuysen. He has spent the last two years learning how to craft the
instrument and will more than likely still be an apprentice for the next
five years, depending on how quickly he can perfect his skills.
“There are a lot of finer things that take a lot of time to get a
feel for. When it comes down to it, a lot of it is problem solving
because things don’t always turn out the way you want and then you have
to improvise. That takes a long time to learn,” explains Velthuysen.
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| PHOTO: Hendro van der Merwe |
The very guitar that he performs with is the first one that he made.
Velthuysen had an idea of what he wanted to do but being a novice, he
didn’t quite know what he was going to come out with. He says: “It took
me a couple of months to come to terms with what I had created. It’s
like anything, you gotta get used to it. It’s a very unique guitar and
it sounds good.”
Velthuysen also used his self-made guitar to record his debut album as The Hollow Body. Johannine is
an album which allows his rough, scratchy voice to explore how he has
come to terms with several events that have drastically shaped his life.
“It’s just a collection of moments of inspiration. And also, some of
it is just a painful reflection on it,” he says of the intensely
personal nature of his lyrics. The painful reflection Velthuysen is
referring to is the death of his father in 2005 and the ending of a
serious relationship not long afterwards.
Is songwriting a cathartic process for Velthuysen, then? “It’s
essential, absolutely essential. That’s why I do it,” he says. “My
motivation isn’t that people are going to like it, really. I’m always
happy if people do but I just find that I need to do it. I’m not
comfortable with not doing it. I tried it.”
Velthuysen is speaking of a
time when he thought that he would get another job and just play music
on the side as a hobby. “I just found it very, very hard to stay
balanced. I need to sing songs to remind me, to remind me of
everything.”
Read my review of The Hollow Body's debut album, Johannine, here.
