David Price talks to South Africa's singer/songwriter LOUIS BRITTZ.

Louis Brittz

Dave: How would you describe yourself?

Louis: I'm a Christian singer/songwriter and worship leader. I studied to become a lawyer but God decided to save the legal system and apply me elsewhere. I'm a perfectly ordinary South African who likes sunshine and meat done on the open fire and supports aggressive sports like Championship Darts. (Well, we're no good at rugby, are we?) Oh, and I'm extremely bad at describing myself.

Dave: I would say, the picture of a singing lawyer is not one that easily relates to you. How did the music thing happen for you?

Louis: When I was small they discovered I had a heart problem and I couldn't play rugby. My options were music, Championship Darts or to be put down like a dog. Yup, Africa is for real...anyway, so I went for music. I'm just fibbing to make this more interesting. Here's what really happened: Like most musical kids I was sent for classical training and got thrown out. Finally my parents decided to send me to a guitar teacher and hey, what do you know...? I discovered my gift for songwriting while at University and I just started performing and leading worship wherever churches and schools wanted me. About seven years ago I put a band together for the first time and it felt like I had gone to Heaven. I haven't been without a band since, for who would perform naked when there are other, louder options? Nothing really amazing happened to get me where I am. God just put me on a path, and he's always been guiding it. I've always understood my music to be a medium for ministry and I love how God uses it to touch and change people. I guess that's how I got into music: God decided to trust me with a medium for ministry.

Dave: Somewhere in the untapped mind, we Brits imagine South African music to have lots of tribal rhythm, goat skin drums and native Zulu dancers in full war paint. But that's not what you do.

Louis: South Africa will never have a distinguishable stream of music the way the UK has Britpop and British rock. Our country has 11 official languages, so you can imagine how many different cultures live in a small geographical space. Each culture has it's own folk music, but it's laced with influences from abroad due to that lovely thing called television. Most of the music made here is predictably African, lately with the unfortunate influence of Eminem and his mates. That particular fusion is called kwaito, and it is very big amongst African youth. The small Western music community in SA draw more influences from the UK and America than from Africa, because that's just what the Western palate likes most. So, most artists who originate from SA and take to the world will either sound slightly American or slightly British depending on their own preferred influences, but you should be able to hear the rawness of Africa as well. I think South African music is much like South African food - essentially it's a UK diet, with more meat and older wine. Translate that into majors and minors and you get where we are at musically.

Dave: Why choose 'Coming Home' as the name for the new album?

Louis: It's because my generation is a bunch of seekers. And when we find something that we know is real, it's like a homecoming. That makes the story of the prodigal son an important one, because we can really relate to it. To me personally it's very relevant, because 15 years after becoming a Christian, I still taste the goodness of coming home to Jesus and yet I also feel like I haven't arrived. The title should suggest to the listener that I wrote all the songs while on this road (spiritually speaking), talking to God, to myself and to the people around me. I write about the same things secular writers would, but the perspective is different because I know where home is and I'm on journey towards it. There's another meaning to me personally: As far as the style of the album goes, I feel like I'm coming home for the first time. I've put out seven albums so far, but the musical styles on them have always been diverse, so that there would be something for Afrikaans South Africans, English South Africans, worshippers, intelligent listeners and the young audiences at my live shows who just want things to thump. That's a really confusing mix, and it left me for a long time "homeless" in terms of a distinct writing style. I feel that with this album I'm saying to all my listeners around the world: This is distinctly me. I've written it over the past 18 months and the things I say on the album are honest, fresh, relevant, important to me now and stylistically bound together.