Standing on stage in District Six, dressed in a green and gold Springbok jersey, Casey Lowry looks like he could have lived in Cape Town his whole life. With long blond hair under a baseball cap and a beer in hand, one would be forgiven for thinking the Indie musician was brought up on the beach and not in the British midland town of Chesterfield.

His accent, naturally, gives him away, but the crowd in Harrington’s Cocktail Bar is delighted as he throws around South African colloquialisms and a few Afrikaans words (k*k is a firm favourite.) 

As the show starts, Lowry has everyone on their feet, tables and chairs pushed aside as he encourages the audience to press closer. In December of 2022, it feels like a joyous return to live music after the pandemic years. 

Singer and songwriter Lowry has just embarked on his first world tour which kicked off in Johannesburg on 4 December. After his Cape Town show, he heads to Langebaan, Hermanus, Stilbaai and Plettenberg Bay before moving on to Europe. 

Read in Daily Maverick: “The year in music 2022 — wrapping up or mopping up?”

Above the streets of Cape Town, in a new venue after the show had to be upgraded to host a larger capacity than Lowry and his team anticipated, the musician certainly delivers. Lowry’s indie guitar pop sound is free and joyful and calls on the listener to sing along. Nothing about his songs is too complicated, but in that lies the appeal; music is meant to be enjoyed, sung along to, moved to. It’s naughty and light-hearted, and his lyrics are even more so. “I write fun things,” Lowry tells Maverick Life.

“I want to write music that is in my own taste, that I would listen to and get really excited about if I heard it on the radio, otherwise what’s the point?” 

One of these fun songs Lowry plays in Cape Town is Trampoline, which he wrote at the age of 14. 

“I was forced to play the clarinet when I was a kid growing up, and I didn’t like it at all. So when I was 13 I managed to move over, so I learnt guitar on YouTube,” he says. 

“Some people like trimming the gardens and become gardeners. I like to play music. It feels really good… I’m waking up every day, travelling to new countries and playing music to people that enjoy it with me… and it doesn’t feel like a job.”

About a decade later (Lowry laughingly says his age is “ambiguous”) the song is still on the set list. 

For Trampoline, he tells the crowd to put their phones away and stop recording; he wants everyone to jump and dance without feeling judged or watched, he explains. 

For Lowry, writing and recording music is secondary, he says, and the performance of Trampoline emphasises this: playing live music is his first love. Crafting an experience for the audience, one that is joyous, carefree and memorable, is what it is all about. 

“I have really good memories growing up going to gigs, and I want to recreate that feeling. I want people to leave just a tiny bit happier than when they entered, a little bit giddier, and that kickstarted my motivation to start a music career,” says Lowry.

“For me, being on stage is a bit like a drug. I can’t explain it. You can’t recreate the feeling of having everyone dancing to songs that you wrote, to have them singing them back. There’s no feeling like it. That’s what I’m chasing. I’m chasing any means to get the biggest crowds possible, that’s why I’m doing a world tour before I’ve even done an album – and it doesn’t make sense, but I want to tour, that’s where I get my kicks from.”

This passion for playing to audiences is tangible; when Lowry is on stage, he comes alive. He holds the crowd in the palm of his hand, bringing them along on a journey, through energised highs and quieter moments. He forges a connection with them immediately, from the moment he steps on stage to the moment he closes the show, interacting particularly with those who know his lyrics and sing them the loudest. 

At his Cape Town show, he plucks one audience member to sing a few lines from we had everything…, and when he takes a break halfway to tune up his guitar, he calls up his videographer to entertain the crowd. 

Towards the end of his performance, beer long finished, he asks if anyone at the bar would buy him a shot also. A few minutes later, people are pushing through the crowd, shot glasses held precariously in their hands as they squeeze through to the stage. A springbokkie (part Amarula, part crème de menthe) makes it to him. Crew members share the others. 

And as the show wraps up, everyone is laughing along with him as he cracks jokes and plays mash-ups of covers, and even the man with his hands in his pockets standing on the edge of the crowd is tapping his foot to the beat.

“You have to find the people who are tweaking a little bit. Shows always start with no enthusiasm in the crowd, because I haven’t released that much music so most people don’t know me, they just see me on the internet and think, ‘oh, I’ll go to a gig’. So you have to find the ones that spark… and then you build the energy,” says Lowry. “You just want people to feel like they’ve had an experience, just get people in a room just dancing together again. Covid-19 sucked,” he says. 

While the pandemic put a stop to live music, Lowry admits that his own career boomed during lockdown. So much so that he is perhaps more recognisable to some for his content on TikTok and Instagram Reels, where he sits cross-legged on his bed with a guitar on his lap, singing his reactions to other videos on the app. 

“I started a year and a half ago on TikTok, near the end of Covid-19. My music career had just hit a bump, I was making no money, I didn’t really know what to do. I didn’t have any other job opportunities… And I realised I was watching TikToks for three, four hours every day. So I thought, ‘why don’t I try and do this for a living?’, to make some money out of that. And it just worked,” Lowry remembers. 

@caseylowrymusic being a creator is weird but Jason Derulo is lovely. @instagramcreators tune in to creator week from nov 1st. link in my bio x #ad ♬ original sound – Casey Lowry

At the time of writing, Lowry has 3.2 million followers on TikTok and 829,000 on Instagram. On the day Maverick Life met him, he explained that he was walking down a Cape Town street when three people recognised him and asked if he was “that guy from TikTok”. 

“It’s annoying that they say TikTok and not ‘musician’, but it’s still on the right track,” he says. 

“I was a musician for four years before I even set foot on TikTok. And I toured, but as a support act, I never had my own fans… but it’s different when people know who you are. TikTok worked for me, it helped me build an audience… this was my curveball opportunity, I just accidentally started making cool videos that did really well, and then for some reason it just grew… And now I don’t know what’s going on. I’m on a world tour. I’m very confused,” he laughs. 

Despite acknowledging the role social media has played in his own career, Lowry emphasises that he does not feel any pressure to produce, nor is he convinced that musicians need apps like Instagram or TikTok to be successful. 

“I’m pro-TikTok, but you don’t have to do it that way. People still like long-form content. People still want to listen and they get fed up seeing the same six-second video on the timeline every day,” he explains. 

As 2022 comes to a close, Lowry is still without a record label, saying he does not want a “creative rope” around his music. Instead, he plans to continue doing what he loves – making music and touring and getting as many people to dance and sing along with him as possible. 

“Music is fun and everyone should be able to enjoy it,” he says. DM/ML