Simon van Gend

SIMON VAN GEND BANDDream I'm a Bird, live at the Alma Cafe - Saturday 14 November 2026Tickets R205pp (show only)18h30 for 19h00 (kitchen orders close at 19h00)*Live Music Starts AFTER Dinner Service is completed*Dinner, Dessert and Drinks availableFully Licensed, BYOB not permittedAny Food / Beverage Not permitted unless by prior arrangementCard / Cash (preferred) Payment15% Service Fee ChargedMore on the Artist:Simon van Gend has been writing songs in Cape Town for more than 25 years. Six albums in, he still works the way he started: a voice, an acoustic guitar, and lyrics that take a little longer to get where they're going than you expect, and arrive somewhere better. Someone once described the music as "folksie foot-tapping red wine fireside poetry". Richard Haslop, writing in Audio Video, put it more carefully: "It's the songs that take you by surprise. Persuasive without being preoccupied, full of words without being wordy, delivering life's lessons without being preachy, they never quite go where you expect."The Album:His most recent album, Dream I'm a Bird, came out in February 2025. Its fifteen songs started as a dare: in 2017 he set out to write a new song every week for a year, whether or not there was one in him that week. He had done it once before, in 2014, and the best of that batch became Suffer Well (2015). The 2017 songs were written fast and then lived with for a long time, arranged, rearranged and finally sequenced into a record whose running order was not an accident. River at the End of the Road and Another New Morning are the songs people tend to know - and River at the End of the Road has never once been played live. Why why why? opens the record, All the Way Home closes it, and the title track sits in the middle.The Band:On stage the songs are carried by a band of players who have each put in their decades. Ross Campbell has been playing drums in Cape Town since the 1980s, with Benguela, Urban Creep and a long list of other bands, and what he brings here is mostly restraint: he leaves the quiet alone until a song needs to lift, and then lifts it. Crick Lund plays bass, and spends the rest of his week as a professor of psychology at King's College London. Gustavo Fasani plays synth, adding colour and air around the acoustic guitar. Drew Burton plays trumpet, which in these songs arrives more like a second voice than a horn section. With van Gend on voice and acoustic guitar, they are a quiet band that knows when not to be.The Show:On Saturday 14 November 2026 the Simon van Gend Band plays Dream I'm a Bird at the Alma Cafe in Rosebank: all fifteen songs, in album order, in one night, for the first time. Two of the songs have never been played live anywhere. The show runs as two 45-minute sets with a break between them, following the record from Why why why? through to All the Way Home. The Alma, with fewer than 80 seats, is the right size for this music: small, quiet when a song needs quiet, and close enough that nobody has to shout.