WHEN he was 16, Robin Brink received a Beatles box set as a gift from his dad. He fell in love.
"I knew that my dad had a drum set lying around in the garage," recalls Brink, drummer for South African pop band Beatenberg. "They were dusty and falling apart and I just felt an instinct to play them. So, I set them up. I was hooked from the get-go."
While at Cape Town’s Westerford High School, Brink met Matthew Field (vocals and guitar). When Field began studying music at the University of Cape Town, he met Ross Dorkin (bass).
"The three of us just clicked," says Brink. "We played around Cape Town for some time in the small, underground acoustic circles. That was about 2008."
When they were brainstorming for a name, Field remembered coming across a book of lectures by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee. In the book was a sketch of a mountain village — Beatenberg.
"It had a cool sound to it," Brink says. "And something distinct. We liked the ‘beat’, as in rhythm, and the ‘berg’, which we have a lot of in SA. It just had positive connotations for us."
The trio took some time off when Field got a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, the largest independent college of contemporary music in the world. When he returned in 2011, they got back to work. But it was only at the beginning of last year that things started to happen for the band.
They released their second album, The Hanging Gardens of Beatenberg, in August. The song Pluto, a collaboration with DJ Clock, spent 19 weeks at the top of the charts. This was the longest time a song had held the number one position in South African radio-tracking history. Their follow-up hit, Rafael, spent 14 weeks as the most played song on South African radio.
Pluto also got four Channel O Music Awards nominations in November, as well as a nomination at the MTV Africa Music Awards for song of the year. In January, Beatenberg scored five Metro Music Awards nominations: song of the year, best hit single, best African pop album, best collaboration and best group.
They’ve also just received five South African Music Awards nominations.
"When we first started out, we felt like we couldn’t fit in anywhere," Brink says. "We weren’t a folk band but we got booked to play at folk gigs. And we weren’t a rock band, so if we got booked to play at gigs with rock bands, we were just too soft. So, we never thought we would be successful here at home. But I guess the stars aligned and things worked out well."
• The South African Music Awards XXI takes place at Sun City on April 19.
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