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Artist
Anton Goosen
12+ albums
afrikaansAllsouth africaneasy listeningclassic rock
about
(This is the English translation of the original Afrikaans Wiki below) Anton Goosen has come a long way since travelling by train as a student from Heidelberg, where he studied, to East London to deliver a 15-minute set at a local variety concert. The young Anton Goosen mainly played English covers and it is unknown whether anyone in the audience realised what impact Anton would have on the South African music industry in general and the Afrikaans music industry in particular. There were certainly skeptics. In standard 9 (11th grade), a school psychologist told him that there was no future for him in music. After school, with no immediate musical career in sight, he qualified as a teacher and taught at St Stithians, a private school in Johannesburg, while playing in pubs at night. Few people know that he qualified as a Southern Transvaal football referee during that period. While at St. Stithians he wrote a musical, “Jantjie”, which the students performed. Anton left teaching in 1976 and started working as a part-time reviewer at the newly founded Afrikaans-language newspaper, Beeld. He also taught guitar and pottery classes. His first interview as Beeld's music critic was with the relatively unknown Sonja Heroldt, whose “Ek Verlang Na Jou” had just started to gain popularity. During the interview, Anton mentioned to Sonja that he also wrote songs. She visited him at his house and, after browsing his song collection, chose to sing “Jantjie”. It became one of her biggest hit
