About Me

Good day, and welcome to… The About Page, starring Luke Tagg – cricket tragic, musical raconteur and weird tall guy in the queue behind you.

What is with that guy? What is he?

To answer that question we must rewind time, all the way back to my childhood in 1980s Pretoria, South Africa. My mother, a huge fan of classical music, encouraged all six siblings to play musical instruments and in my early years I specialised in violin and piano.

In 1985 we left Pretoria and moved to Cape Town, just in time for me to start high school. My musical tastes diversified in my teens and I took up trumpet lessons, taught myself guitar and along the way picked up a number of other instruments including bass guitar, drums, trombone and kazoo.

The other thing I took to Cape Town was a love of cricket, developed at junior school under trying circumstances.

It’s actually a remarkable feat of fortitude in the face of extreme odds that I ended up loving cricket as I do – my first (and only) experience of professional cricket as a youngster was a day from hell.

That story (and my subsequent cricketing adventures) are best told here: Cricket and me: an unlikely love story.

So I had music and I had cricket, but the two were yet to collide. That would come later.

When I left school I went to UCT Drama School for two years, then became a starving actor (there is no other kind) for five years, mostly writing comedy songs for school tour productions, in which a small group of similarly starving desperados would pile into a van and take educational shows to schools around the Cape Peninsula. Payment covered our cigarettes and coffee; some folks called me Slim.

I also appeared in a number of musicals, including Return to the Forbidden Planet and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and wrote two of my own – one called Dillinger and the other Insane, about six serial killers living in an apartment together.

I busked, wrote music for shows and on occasion, but only if begged, I would haul out the guitar at random house parties and sing some of my early songs, most of which I’m very relieved came before the age of compulsive digital recording.

Titles such as “Billy No-Shoes”, “40 Human Heads in a Yellow Plastic Bag” and “My Dark-Haired, Six-Foot Arab Girl with Big Tits and a Gun” – although well-loved and oft-requested classics – would hasten my cancellation these days.

She was hot, though. But mad, dude. The ex-girlfriend from hell.

At some point I had to get a job, you bum, and embarked on a series of desperate ventures which included working as a credit clerk at a department store, pounding the streets as a door-to-door salesman (with the hard luck stories at 2am to prove it) and sharpening ice skates at the local rink.

Eventually I landed a job at the biggest online portal in South Africa at the time – iafrica.com – as an html designer and later writer and editor of a number of different communities, including Entertainment, Gaming, Technology, Sport, Motoring, Lifestyle and others.

I would review theatre shows, latest games and music, as the cricket played all day on the TVs in the office.

After three years there I took my newfound skills and joined my wife, business partner and best mate Tashi Lampropoulos Tagg, in creating South Africa’s first true community website in early 2003, called TashiTagg.com.

A huge community formed and thrived there for years – people met each other all over the country through the site, others met there and married, and we had hundreds and hundreds of bloggers, who helped us create vast amounts of content to go with our bustling forums and numerous other features.

During this time I wrote two daily columns, one of which was called The 12th Man. It was a sporting blog, focusing primarily on Cricket, Rugby and Formula 1 (my three favourite sports).

Unable to monetise the site in the way we needed to, we spun off Tashi’s TV column (in which she wrote about, recapped, reviewed and ripped off television shows) into a new website, which we run to this day (www.TVSA.co.za, which debuted in May 2006).

In 2009 – missing writing about cricket – I launched a new, independent blog called The Boundary Rider, which operated until 2011. Other commitments stalled its growth and I reluctantly had to close it down to focus on our burgeoning business TVSA, but not before I had come up with my first concept for a cricket song – The Eyes, inspired by the feats of Sri Lankan off-spin legend Muttiah Muralitharan.

You can find out more about it by visiting the Song Page for The Eyes (songs/the-eyes/).

After forgetting about it for several years, in 2017 I had the idea to write other cricket songs and put them on a website, so I got cracking. What should have taken a year or so took eight, as we battled a changing entertainment landscape after 2020.

I write and record all of my songs and lyrics, as well as the other musical parts in each song. The videos are filmed primarily in my dining room, courtesy of a giant green screen we bought four days before Lockdown in 2020. The last one from China, who had recalled all ships and shipping.

Tashi does the filming – everything else you see and hear is by me, unless otherwise indicated.

Although South African, I support numerous leagues, teams and players around the world – anyone part of the theatre of cricket who gives me reason to love the game.

If you would like to be informed of latest songs (which are published here before anywhere else), please subscribe to my mailing list or follow me on YouTube or Facebook (links at the top of the site).

If you’d like to send an old-fashioned Letter to the Editor (that’s me), drop me a mail and if applicable I’ll publish it on the Letters page. Nothing wrong with a little retro vinyl here and there, now and then.

Thank you for coming – enjoy the show.

Luke Tagg
Cape Town, South Africa