Kevin grew up surrounded by the music industry, his parents running a management company (Franklin House) that signed bands such as Bond, Zon, The Hunt, and Tom Cochrane and Red Rider in the 1970s.
As early as age two, Kevin’s favourite place to be was beside the record/tape player with a set of headphones on, incessantly listening to demos that had been sent to his folks.
Kevin learned his first three chords on guitar when he was 12 years old, from which he immediately started writing his own original songs.
Kevin has grown over the years as a singer/songwriter, taking inspiration from various musical genres and poetical styles. He was primarily an acoustic guitar player/songwriter until the late 1990s. He formed Shoemaker Levee in 1998 as an outlet to play a heavier style of music. Since then, the band has written over five albums worth of original material that is just now starting to see the light of day.
Cobus’ lyrics endeavour to encapsulate the various phases of the human condition, from joy, to pain, from sunshine to… snow. At the end of the day, if he’s made just one person happier through the music he has created, he’ll shuffle off this mortal coil a more fulfilled soul.
His musical influences include Pink Floyd, Renaissance, Amplifier, Phish, Led Zeppelin, Blind Melon and many others.