The Bayswater revolutionary

Tom Fox played a strong part in the anti-apartheid movement. Photo / Richard Robinson

In the last years of apartheid, an unlikely group of young middle class white men sang a protest song. It became the anthem of a generation of young whites conscripted into the South African Army and ordered to fight for a regime they found they didn't believe in.

The song was called Weeping and was about then-President PW Botha, whose response to the dying days of apartheid was to become more brutal.

Political and subversive, Weeping went to number one on state radio.

The surprise is that it ever got past the censors, says the man who sang the song.

Tom Fox, member of the iconic South African band Bright Blue, now lives in New Zealand, working as a musician for The Sound Room, a company he started up with Kiwi musician Marshall Smith.

Weeping was released during the most violent period of apartheid. The end was around the corner, but in 1987 the country was in the midst of civil war.

Nelson Mandela was still in jail, uprisings in the black townships were brutally suppressed, people were imprisoned and tortured and the country was in massive debt caused by so much spending on the army.

Bright Blue were part of an anti-apartheid movement known as the End Conscription Campaign which encouraged conscientious objection and campaigned against conscription.

Political gatherings were banned but the band were able to speak through music to young, sheltered whites like themselves, many of whom were only awakened to the true horror of apartheid through conscription into the army.

In fact, Fox says he started his life in Cape Town living in a middle-class bubble. He remembers Rosa, his family's cleaning lady, one of the many black women who left their own families to care for white families.

Though he always sensed something was not right in his homeland, he and his siblings were carefully protected from the poverty and brutality, which were never far away, as they grew up in their musical family.

"You don't at an early age know anything because it's just something you're brought up in. The only black people we saw initially as kids were people doing the garden or working for you, menial jobs.

"I think you develop quite a strong relationship, but it's obviously always that master/servant thing, which is terrible."

Fox says his own awakening came from his two years in the army straight out of school, followed by the formation of Bright Blue and mixing with activists.