Vampire WeekendsForty-Seven Years of Glorious ChaosFor those keeping score at home, that’s 47 years since the Rats first crawled out of Springs with their gloriously skewed take on rock and roll. The band that gave us “ZX Dan” (held off the number one spot by Michael Jackson, no less) has been persistently, stubbornly, magnificently refusing to go away ever since. The partnership between songwriter and guitarist Jonathan Handley and vocalist Dave Davies has survived longer than most marriages, most governments, and definitely most drummers. Speaking of which, the band’s revolving door of sticksmen has become the stuff of legend. If Spinal Tap’s drummers met untimely ends involving spontaneous combustion and bizarre gardening accidents, the Radio Rats simply wore theirs out through sheer persistence and Springs-flavoured stubbornness. A Tribute and a LossThis new album arrives in the shadow of loss. Herbie Parkin, the bassist who anchored the Rats’ sound from their earliest days (Dave Davies gave him the nickname “Herbie” because he didn’t want two Daves in the band), passed away in 2020. Herbie had been living and playing in Sweden for years, but his bass lines remain woven into the fabric of everything the Radio Rats created. The band’s discography tells the story of a group that simply cannot stop making music, logic and commercial concerns be damned. From “Into the Night We Slide” in 1978 through to “Vampire Weekends”, they’ve released album after album. It’s all archived at the Radio Rats Discography, a testament to what happens when a medical student born in Tanganyika and a vocalist from Springs decide that rock and roll matters more than sanity. Still Making NoiseJonathan Handley continues to juggle his day job as an anaesthetist in Pietermaritzburg with his relentless output of three-minute rock songs. Dave Davies is still in the same house in Springs where he’s always been. And together, they’re still making the kind of music that, as producer Patric van Bl