As the front lady of bands including Clout, Zia and Alter Irving, her four-decade music career has been packaged with no fewer than 13 albums and has taken her to all corners of the globe including Germany, Holland, England and America.
Alter is also a published poet and spent 15 years living and working on the music scene in Los Angeles. She returned to South Africa after beating leukaemia.
Although based in Johannesburg, Alter frequently travels to America, Europe and England and is a full-time working musician who continues to write, perform and record and release new music.
Let’s up the game, try new things, embrace change, speak our truth.
Being just well-known enough to get great gigs, but not so well-known that you can’t shop at Woolies in your Uggs!
I can’t do what I do anymore – if my voice leaves me or perhaps when my desire to keep chasing the moon and following my dreams disappears.
Music is my first love and it will be my last – true story!
Making people feel something, getting a reaction to a song you’ve written, seeing the light turn on in someone’s head and the look on their face when they ‘get it’!
Too many to count, but one big one stays with me. Doing our last song in a huge concert hall in Germany, with Clout, I’m about to sing my final line – “fire … fire … fire” – and I grab the microphone stand, which has not been grounded and is touching a strobe light, and 500 volts surge through my body, I think I’m dying, and if I don’t let go of the stand, I may very well do that on stage. I managed to throw the stand away from me, run off the stage and collapse to everyone’s dismay. Afterwards, we laughed so hard ‘cause I was singing “fire, fire” and I was practically on fire!
I have many; mostly guitars!
Tequila and only tequila.
Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
I think my voice is unique, people hear it and say: “That is Cindy Alter.” I also believe my integrity in this business has kept me in it for the past 45 years with no serious run-ins with anyone. And I care not for fame and fortune, I care only to do what I love, make music, entertain people, write songs, and tell my stories. Hopefully, that is unique too!
I may be a psychologist, I love delving into the mind of the human, or a holistic healer, shaman, yoga teacher, living on the beach somewhere.
Tenacious, funny, fragile, brave, loving.
Lucky Dube – Prisoner
Hotline – Help
The Flames – Burning Soul
Zia – Woza Moya
Clout – Six of the Best
My fab ‘pleather’ stage pants.
‘Eish’ – love this word – says everything. What? Wow!
Surviving Leukaemia.
The depravity of human beings, how they can be so barbaric.
Cadbury’s Crème Eggs.
Be in my natural habitat, therefore, completely at ease with singing, performing and telling my stories.
To find peace in this life, write a worldwide hit song, love someone deeply before I die.
AfriGIS 1 day
