Music is perhaps the most prominent sculptor of youth culture, using its strange magic and enchantment to create and dictate subcultures, attitudes and fashions. Musicians and rock stars are praised and treated like demigods, speaking for generations while their posters - like shrines to these gods - adorn the walls of young alternative communities.

During 2010 I set out to capture this phenomenon as part of my BTech project at the Durban University of Technology. Not far into this year of discovery I decided to document the other side of the beast. I started to accept my own disenchantment with the industry – with my personal loss of the perception that musicians are demigods, the destruction of previous misconceptions of the glamour related with touring, and with music photography in general. I also wanted to communicate the disenchantment that a large collection of the musicians seemed to have.

The long drives, train rides, the exhaustion. The eight hours in the back of a bakkie just to be told that the band can’t play a festival they were booked for. The lives of music journalists and photographers in an industry suddenly saturated. These are images from an uncertain year in South Africa.