18 August 2023

Before there was Zane Adams. Before a Taliep Petersen. Even before there was a Leslie Kleinsmith, Richard Jon Smith and the other big-name performers we have produced . . . there was Gobi Martin.

You have to be of a 1960s vintage or move in the Born Again religious circles to be familiar with the name Gobi Martin. But he can claim to be one of the first pop stars to come out of Cape Town.

As Gobi Martin puts it: “Back then, early in the 1960s, people were stopping me in the street and saying, ‘hey Gobi, you’re a legend, my parents talk a lot about you at our house’. It wasn’t me saying it, those words came from other people.”

A search in the archives of The Post newspaper shows he was one of the most popular and written about entertainers on the local circuit. He was always one of the star turns on all the variety shows.

This week Gobi turned 84. His career has been a long journey that has seen him hit the highs and lows of an entertainer and everything in between.

Born (in 1939) and raised in District 6, he grew up in a home where music was ever present. People may know him as Gobi Martin but the name that appears on his birth certificate is Achmat Matarra.

He relishes telling the story of the name change: “My mother’s father was of German stock – he was a master confectioner at Buchanan’s Bakery – and she had an interest in his background. She nicknamed me ‘Gobbie’ after a German singer named Gorbert.  She said I was going to be an entertainer because I liked to sing. Mataara is from my father’s family who came from one of the islands in Indonesia.

“I attended school at Saleh Dollie and George Golding and when I got there, the English-speaking kids from Walmer Estate started pronouncing it ‘Gobi’. I thought it sounded nice, better than ‘Gobbie’. When I started performing in my teens, I figured the Matarra wasn’t exactly a stage name.  So, I changed it to Martin which is what my father had changed it to when he went into the army.”

His mother’s view of his future was not far off the mark. From the get-go, Gobi showed where his talents lay.  “She used to sing as she did the washing and I just picked up on it. When I went to see the film, The Al Jolson Story, at the Star Bioscope, I was just a kid but I could sing all the songs.”

While at George Golding Primary, he auditioned for the school pantomime. “I sang – on my knee – Mame, and they liked it. I ended up singing I’ll Take You Home Kathleen and Ramona in the City Hall.”

Gobi was in his late teens when he started singing at the local variety shows put on in the old town halls of Woodstock, Mowbray, Rondebosch and Wynberg.

“I don’t want to boast or anything, but I was very popular. Strangers stopped me to compliment me.”

His popularity brought him to the attention of the people in the Golden City Dixies.

“I got into the Dixies because of [Dixies singer] Al Hendricks. He told me they were having auditions in the Labia Theatre and he invited me along. He convinced me, saying I was just doing variety shows all over. With the Dixies, I would have permanent work.

“I wasn’t sure whether I would get a spot with the Dixies. You couldn’t just walk in there. I didn’t want to be told, ‘sorry we never heard of you, try next time’. What swayed me was his comment that he was very close to [Dixies boss] Fred Langford.

“I had heard about Langford. He was the driver for the original Dixies. When the main group went overseas and the rest disbanded, Langford got it together again as the boss. All Al wanted was for Langford to hear me.”

“On the day I went to the Labia, in walked this handsome young boy also looking for a spot.  His name was Zane Adams.  He was also making a name for himself in Cape Town back then. As it happened, Zane and I turned out to be the top singers of the time. In my gut, I knew I was better than him.

“A few weeks later, we hit the road from [pianist] Sammy Hartman’s house in Bo Kaap in the Dixies bus.”

Gobi toured all over the country with the Dixies in the early to mid-Sixties, learning the ropes at the feet of Al Hendricks, Roy Peterson and Dave Bestman. They made him do “moppies” while behind him a young Sammy Hartman was part of the chorus line.

“Not many people know it, but Sammy, brilliant pianist that he was, did not start out like that. He was in the chorus line. But then already you could see his brilliance. He was a genius. The Dixies got him right out of music school. He was a kid but he was smart way beyond his years, he knew his music in and out.  He would listen to a song at rehearsal, just listen to it, and without playing it or trying it himself on the piano, he goes straight to our pianist Sylvia Flores and he’ll tell her, ‘Auntie Sylvie, it’s simple, it’s B flat and E flat and C minor.”

Like so many other Dixies performers, Gobi said life on the road was tough.

“That bus took us everywhere . . . Natal, Free State, Transvaal. It wasn’t always nice and easy on the road. We were creative when it came to accommodation.  Wherever we performed, we took over the joint. We always found a place to sleep, whether it was backstage, under the stage or between the seats. Wherever there was a spot, you just take your stretcher and your suitcase and you plant it down.”

Gobi says the top performers on the Dixies when he joined the troupe were Dave and Roy.

“Roy was a revelation. He was a great musician, a fabulous musician. He could play any instrument. And what a stand-up comedian.  Nobody really knew that side of him. But he was great.”

While Gobi was happy to be with the Dixies, he wasn’t exactly thrilled with what they wanted him to do.

“They insisted I sing moppies,” he says, “but I always felt that it was beneath me. It wasn’t something I was comfortable with. I was told if I wanted a spot, I had to sing it. Then one Saturday night, we were in Welkom and the ‘big boys’ – Dave, Al and Roy – were in charge while Langford had taken time off to go to Durban. After the Saturday night show we’re all sitting around bored, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. We couldn’t walk around in Welkom. That was Boere territory.

“Somebody suggested we pretend we are in a nightclub. We arranged the seating around pretend tables with glasses but no liquor. And then Roy turns to me and says, ‘Gobi, you are the nightclub entertainer Do your spot’. I’ll never forget it, I sang She Wears my Ring.

“They were stunned – this moppie singer can sing a sentimental song like that! Right there they decide I could have a solo spot in the show. When Langford came back, he told us he was reading the Sunday Times and saw a review of the show and the writer said ‘Gobi Martin brings tears to your eyes with his version of She Wears My Ring. Langford insisted I go on that night and do it again. And that was it. Goodbye to moppies and funny songs and all that. I was now a solo artist.”

“I didn’t go straight to being the headline act, they just moved things around. I must have done alright because Langford came to me after a couple of shows and said I should try doing the John Gary songs which were so popular back then. I went out and bought all his records.

“Sammy worked out the chords for those difficult Irish tunes and gave it to Sylvia who was the leader of the band along with Gilbert Matthews. Did you know Gilly was playing banjo at that time?”

Gobi’s success with the Dixies on tour saw Cape Town promoters use him more as the headline act when he was back in town.

“When I started with the Dixies, people never really knew about my abilities. I was just one of the guys singing in halls around town. It wasn’t like they would come and fill up a hall if I was on my own. Not those days. But things changed,” he recalls.

“Al took the opportunity to put on a show in the Luxurama that he called the Gobi Martin Show. The thing that I remember about it, was that Jonathan Butler was brought to the show by his mother who wanted him to sing. She told Al, who was reluctant to let him sing, that he was better than his brother Danny who was on the show. Well, he didn’t bring the house down but that was, I think, the beginning of his illustrious career.”

And then came The Post shows in 1965 when Gobi cemented his name as Cape Town’s best.

“I was killing it at variety shows with a song called The Bell Rings  and when I won the Post thing, I became ‘Gobi Martin, Mr Entertainer’.

“I knew I must have had something going for me when I won because I beat people like Vernon Saunders, Victor Sampson, Ebrahim Isaacs, Ismail Parker. They were all great singers.”

The Post ran two more contests. Zane won the second, and the third one Gobi again brought the house down. “I came up with pure magic – Ebb Tide,” Gobi recalls. “I rocked the Lux that night.  They were in the aisles. I sang in the low ranges and the high ranges.  But I heard John Gary doing it on the radio and I thought it was stunningly beautiful, the falsetto.  I said to myself straight away, I can do that.

“They didn’t clap and stand still. They jumped up out of their seats and into the aisles.”

Gobi was a media darling in Cape Town but there wasn’t regular work. Dave Bestman came to his rescue by offering him nightly work at the Red Lantern Club in Durban. It turned out to be a good move in some respects because he had a young daughter, Natasha, and he was getting a steady wage.

But it didn’t last.  The monotony of steady nightly work saw a downturn in his ability to keep his performance fresh and his life lost a little bit of focus and direction. He took a break from performing and was in the wilderness for a few years, before a chance encounter in the late 1980s with Born Again stars Lionel Peterson and Molly Baron of The Rockets brought him on the straight and narrow.

“I met Lionel in Joburg while visiting a friend and he was talking about Jesus. I wasn’t religious but I had married a Christian woman.  What Lionel was talking about got me thinking. I was a bit confused.”

It was wife Imelda who sharpened his mind about where his life was going. “She said: ‘What are you? Are you a Muslim? Or are you a Christian? I won’t know how to bury you when you die’.

“Then I met Molly and he stirred my curiosity even further. He took me to Rhema Bible Church where I met preachers Ray McCauley and Trevor Sampson. I wanted to get back into performing but I had to be with the right people. I heard Trevor singing and I was blown away.

“I told myself, ‘I can do that’. Both my wife and I became converts.

It heralded a new chapter in Gobi’s life which saw him become a gospel sensation that led to shows all over South Africa and tours overseas. He and his wife had graduated from Rhema in 1993, and, instead of becoming pastors, concentrated on singing in the worship team, writing songs and recording them.

Gobi and Imelda set about spreading the Word through singing and recording gospel songs.  They have also started a documentary that is in part being put on YouTube.  He has released five CDs which, strangely enough, took off in the US but hardly made a dent in South Africa.

Gobi has had a major heart attack which he describes as “one of the nicest heart attacks . . . I spent 7 hours upstairs” and “communicated” with God.

Even in his 80s Gobi is still working on spreading the Word. Find faith, he says is the best thing that happened to him.

“What you put in life,” he says, “is what you take out.

Happy belated birthday Mr Entertainment!