HI THERE

For all you good people who just stumbled upon this here blog while a-Googling: I wrote these posts between 2006 and early 2008, when I quit because I didn't have the time anymore. The links to the mp3s don't work anymore, as there's been some IP address shuffling going on and I don't feel like changing a couple hundred links. Most of the mp3s are still online though, and by going straight to the directory (by doubleclicking the word "directory") (no, not that one, the first one) you can look for the song you wanna hear; some of the files don't have bands names, just titles.
Although I didn't come close to the great KBD Records, Good Bad Music or Last Days Of Man in terms of quantity (and sound quality), I hoped my "personal touch" would make up for that, and I was glad to see a bunch of people did enjoy my infrequent postings, among them some of the actual musicians the posts were about!
Although I haven't posted in over a year, I still check the comments from time to time (why? cuz I don't have a life, that's why); nice to see they're still coming. I won't bother with posting mp3s anymore, but I'll put up links to interesting stuff I come across. Like for instance...
INTERESTING STUFF PART 1: Mat Aerts has a great blog on his site www.limbabwe.com. He was the fourth member/ soundman/ producer/ mentor of Pandemonium (one of the two greatest Dutch HC bands ever, and no, the other one ain't Gepopel), and while totally wrapped up in the HC "scene" back then, he injected a healthy dose of scepticism at the same time, in person and through his zine Piss Off!! So it's no wonder to find out his involvement in music goes way, way back. (He was even present at the now-legendary Pistols gig in Maasbree, Limburg - look up his very amusing post on that subject!) Mat hasn't been sitting still in the meantime; he's done sound for loads and loads of bands; on his blog you'll find reminiscences on stuff both old and new. Check it out!

JUBILEE EDITION

As astute Eetusmakelijk readers will have noticed, postings became scarcer over the last few months, culminating in a record-breaking 7-week gap between the penultimate post and this one. Well, I'll just come clean about it: after 86 posts I've felt I've said about all I had to say within the narrow confines of this blog, plus posting mp3s is getting more and more useless since just about everything has already been posted/ is available on CD/ can be found at p2p programs like soulseek, etc. Add to that the fact that I've switched from a part-time job with access to a computer and lots of time on my hands, to a full-time job without access to a computer... But the last straw for me was when, inspired by Erich's posting of the first Bad Religion EP, I decided to post the first Offspring 45; after a bit of Googling it turned out that not only had KBDrecords already posted it 2 years ago, but I had commented on the post and totally forgotten about it! So, I'm sorry to say, Eetusmakelijk will be on er, eternal hiatus from now on. I'm thinking of starting another blog but it won't be (strictly) about punk (or even music), i.e. it won't automatically attract a niche of interested people like this blog did, in which case I wonder if it's any use... Anyway, thanks for checking me out, listening to the music and commenting!

I've posted something by my own (first) band, Gepopel, before, and am glad to announce there will be an LP out very soon of all of our old recordings (check it out here). But that LP won't feature the earliest (1982-83) recordings I did under that name. Those were tracks I recorded by myself in the attic, using old broken-down and borrowed equipment and "ping-ponging" onto a 2 track tapedeck. March 1983, exactly 25 years ago today, I released my very first tape called No One Can Stop Advance. It sold 30 copies; I still remember seeing the row of finished tapes and thinking: "Wow, I've just mass-produced something!"

Musically, it was a grab-bag of punk, proto-HC and more post-punky stuff, reflecting the records I'd been listening to just before it got all Hardcore. To me, it's part fun, part embarrassing hearing it back and thinking: "Oh, I copped this from a Siouxsie record...Stole that from The Ex..." Tracks 1 to 11 were on the actual tape; the other 11 are from the same time but were never released. I feel a little weird about posting this, sorta like showing someone baby pictures of yourself, but I hope there's sort of an early-80s charm to it (a writer's block-free era, as you could always write about The Bomb! Wish it was still as easy nowadays). I've also put up the booklet showing my first attempts at being John Heartfield.

Only one or two songs (like Eenheidsworst) made it to the later "actual band" Gepopel, although we recycled the chord structure of The Day After (sped up about 8 times!) for Two Days After. Not every song tackles nuclear war; the curiously-titled I Will Put Him is about much-reviled Dutch TV personality Henk van der Meyden and his bad English, while Cock Is Dead was about our (me & Henk Gepopel & Ruud Indirekt) Latin teacher, Mr. Cock (Nomen Est Omen). Come to think of it, I wonder why I never wrote a song about our German teacher, Mr. Goebbels?

Gepopel - No One Can Stop Advance (1983)

The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan
The Day After
Eenheidsworst
NATO
Dallas
Toy Town
Smashed Up Slums
VWO
OSL
Mushrooms
Recession

Booklet cover
Booklet 1
Booklet 2
Booklet 3
Booklet 4
Booklet 5
Booklet 6

Bonus tracks

Why Spoiling Your Youth
Annual Ceremony
Cock Is Dead
Dull
I Will Put Him
Pride
Autarky
Living Death
The Govern Tower
God
Two Stamps

THEY WHO CANNOT BE NAMED

A pre-skin Skrewdriver in front of Blackpool Tower, 1977.

By now, everybody knows the Skrewdriver story: early punk band with no political inclinations adopt skinhead look, as a result attract violent skinhead following, are dropped from label and can't get gigs; band implodes. Years later, singer starts new band using old name, adding ultra-right wing "White Power" agenda, thereby forever tarnishing their name. If this was just any run-of-the-mill band it would be merely pathetic; what makes it sad is the fact that first-incarnation Skrewdriver were one of the best bands around. One of the very first punk records (spring '77) from the north of England, debut platter You're So Dumb is a sizzling scorcher with vocals that make your hairs stand on end. All Skrewed Up (the first 45 RPM LP ever?) from later that year was very good too, and shows they could do more than just bash it out; on the mostly acoustic "Where's It Gonna End" the singing is more melodic, in fact it reminds me of Scream's Peter Stahl (!) every time I hear it. For a while, Skrewdriver were loved and respected by music press and fellow musicians alike, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Damned, the Jam (whose notoriously fussy Paul Weller even lent them some of his gear after their van got stolen) and Motorhead. In fact, their equal parts 60's R&B/ heavy rock sound occupied a sort of middle ground between both aforementioned (and soon to become huge) bands. For a band always branded as godfathers of Oi!, the music has actually very little to do with it; there's no football-chant type chorus in sight, the playing is tight rather than sloppy (in that light, the Faces are far more proto-Oi) and Ian Stuart sounds more Transatlantic than Cockney. Alas, one ill-judged style change and it all went down the drain.

Those great early Skrewdriver sides were never reissued by Chiswick/Ace, who understandably didn't want anything to do with what they had become. Try to find an original copy on eBay and you won't find a thing: the very word "Skrewdriver" is forbidden on that oh-so humanitarian auction site! So you try Soulseek; next thing you know you get a deluge of Skrewdriver mp3s, both "old" and "new", thousands of them, from users with scary names like i-kill-commies and skullsplitter. Well, I guess that unavailibility really worked! It's like Mein Kampf: why not just make it freely available, so everyone can find out for themselves it's a load of crap? I remember in the 80's there were quite a few PC-baiting fanzine types who thought it was really smart to insist those later Skrewdriver records were really great, all in the spirit of "it's like Celine, ya know, judge it by art, not politics!" Well, I've listened to some of it, and I can tell you it sucks. But don't take my word for it, go find it out for yourselves. I guess that's one of the good things to come out of the mystique-busting mp3/P2P-era...

Anyway, I'll leave you with three blazing tracks from their 1977 Peel Session, so you can reminisce about what could have been.

Anti-Social
The Only One
Unbeliever

BELATED CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

No, you're not going to get any punk Christmas songs from me. But, just a couple of days after Christmas, I thought of something Christmassy to post anyway. It's a recording of the legendary Rock Against Religion festival held at punk club Kaasee, Rotterdam, on Boxing Day 1979, featuring the cream of Dutch punk like the Squats, Tandstickorshocks, Ketchup (of the prophetic song "Herman Brood Val Dood") and Jezus and the Gospelfuckers. Live recordings as well as on-the-spot interviews were broadcast by VPRO radio the week after; I was too young to hear it first-hand but luckily someone recorded this from his/her radio so we can plunge into the hissy depths of history now... (If someone has better recordings of this, please get in touch!)
The broadcast starts off with a sort of VPRO Theme Tune which I'm pretty sure is played by Dorpsstraat, the ramshackle neo-60s-without-knowing-it outfit whose "Lepeltje" was the second best track (after Ivy Green's "Pak 'm Beet") on the Uitholling Overdwars comp. Then it's over to VPRO's resident punk Marjoke Roorda, whose chewing-gum-in-mouth delivery sounds a bit studied to these ears now. She announces first act Jules Deelder; now this guy became very famous over here later on, and it's my guess that the TV showing of this very appearance, that showed him getting soaked in phlegm, might just have helped a tiny bit...! Now you can hear for yourself what it was all about; legend had it he never flinched under the Green Rain that poured down, but aural evidence shows he did lose his cool towards the end.
More than the music (great though it is, although I'm still looking for recordings by Tandstickorshocks; I have the part by Neh but didn't post it cuz it's boring), the interview bits are fascinating; some hippie VPRO guy walking around asking some random bystanders smart stuff like "Are you here for the music or for the anti-religion message?" What strikes me most is that back then, everyone still had their own regional accent; you can hear if someone's from Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Nijmegen (home of the Squats, who apparently took a bunch of fans with them). These days it seems like everyone in Holland has adopted the posh Gooi accent with the flat "R"...
When interviewing Jezus of the Gospelfuckers Himself (well, it was his birthday after all), the VPRO guy starts talking how some Youth for Christ guy he knew "felt just like his mother was raped" after reading their band name... It's the clash of the "We're sooo permissive (as long as...)" 70s and the "Fuck shit up!" 80s.
I've cut the broadcast (or the part that I've got) up in 4 parts; I haven't separated the music from the talking; a big apology goes out to my non-Dutch readers!

Theme Tune/ Jules Deelder
Ketchup/ Interviews
Squats/ Interviews
Gospelfuckers/ Interview

P.S.: These recordings were done by the RAR organisation themselves, straight from the mixing desk, and lent to the VPRO, who apparently were so slow in returning the tapes that a planned compilation LP never materialized! Too bad, as this would have been the first Dutch DIY punk comp.

D-A-M-P-S-Q-I-B!

Now what really kickstarted punk into being? The masses of untutored teenage hordes taking to the streets armed with guitars, or a bunch of journalists, pissed-off because the subjects of their writings were getting too rich and famous to hang around and do drugs with anymore? Fact is, the writing was there (on the wall, if you wish) before the music. As early as 1971-72, critics like Greg Shaw and Lester Bangs had a notion something new and exciting had to come along, dragging forgotten bands like the Sonics and Count Five from their graves as examples of how it should be done. Bangs' 1971 piece on the Count Five was set in a fictional distant future, in which he's telling his grandchildren:

"I recollect another mighty sad downer stretch long about the beginning of the seventies... 'xcept that one lasted so long we damn near dried up an' boycotted records entirely till Barky Dildo and the Bozo Huns showed up to save our souls..."

Barky Dildo and the Bozo Huns! Now if that ain't Punk Rock prophesized, I don't know what is! The truth is, of course, those Barky Dildos weren't illiterates; most early punk rockers grew up spelling every inch of their favourite music mags, so to many a teenage Creem reader this article might have been just as (subconsciously) influential as, say, a Stooges LP.

Some punk rockers actually were writers having a go at doing it themselves: some of them, like Lenny Kaye, Metal Mike Saunders and Jeffrey Lee Pierce did a pretty good job of it. For others like Charles Shaar Murray (Blast Furnace & the Heatwaves), it was just a lark. I'm not sure which category Giovanni Dadomo and his one-record-only Snivelling Shits belong to; fact is, their sole 45 is a stone cold classic.

Giovanni Dadomo's career as a rock journo goes back at least as far as 1971, when he did this interview with none other than Syd Barrett. (Just a side track: upon reading the interview I was surprised at how lucid Barrett sounds... Until I realized he's contradicting himself all the time; first he says he "learnt to work hard at art school", then later on he mentions his "art school laziness"...!) I don't know how much of a Harbinger of the Future Mr. Dadomo was in writing, but I know both Snivelling Shits tracks are right on the mark; he's razor sharp, wordy and incredibly funny at the same time, like a Cockney Cooper Clarke or Devoto. The music's as sharp as the singing, with weird effects thrown in (courtesy a young Steve Lillywhite, rumored to have been a temporary Snivelling Shit himself on bass guitar), and B-side I Can't Come goes on (without ever getting boring) for 6 minutes; must have taken balls in 1977!

Post-Shits, Dadomo co-wrote a couple of Damned tunes like I Just Can't Be Happy Today (typing this, I imagine hearing the classic lines "They're closing the schools/ They're burning the books/ The church is in ruins/ The priests hang on hooks" in his voice). Sadly, he passed away a couple of years ago.

Terminal Stupid
I Can't Come

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

I was talking to 433rpm about tapes I put out back in the Stone Age, when it turned out he owns a copy of the most "famous" of them all, the Alle 55 Kort sampler. Given the incredible quantity of music he manages to post I won't be surprised to see the entire tape up there soon; in the meantime I'll give you some hand picked tracks...

Around 1984 I'd make Hardcore mix tapes for friends that would sometimes contain 80-100 tracks (learnt to write really small back then!), and I figured it would be fun to put out a tape comp with as many Dutch/Belgian bands on it as humanly possible. As it turned out - because of some bands contributing 2- or even 3-minute (god forbid!) tracks - 55 bands filled up a C90 tape, still no mean feat. While hunting down bands I got a pretty good overview of the Dutch "scene", prompting me to write a Dutch scene report for MRR which you can find here and, in hindsight, is about as captivating as a page out of a phone directory.

I sold about 350 copies of Alle 55 Kort; I never dared say this in public, but I actually made a small profit from it. Shock! Horror! I'd found a small electronics store at the Sarphatistraat that sold C90 tapes of just-about-passable quality at 2,50 Guilders ($1,25) each. The tapes (including booklets) sold at 7,50 Guilders, retail; a nice addition to my scant pocket money! Of course, if I'd told this to anyone back then I would have been keelhauled or something; it wasn't merely unthinkable to make any profit, it was actually suspect if you were breaking even. People would specify in detail how many Guilders they'd lost on their latest zine/ record/ whatever, to show how punk they were. Of course, at the same time they were on the dole, ha ha; well, let's call it state money well spent...

Most of the tracks on Alle 55 Kort were pretty lo-fi; due to no quality control from my part, there were quite a few one-off/ spoof tracks, sometimes played by one person in their bedroom, which gives it a Bullshit Detector sort of vibe. Lots of "famous" bands like BGK, Pandemonium and Funeral Oration submitted tracks, but I'll give you some tracks by lesser-known bands.

Oigasm - Brutal Bugger: first track on the tape; I had a soft spot for this half-skin/ half-punk band that were living in a small village in the middle of the Bible Belt; heard they were getting shot at in the street, stuff like that...

Dasbreetels - Cowboy Henk: just a fun song by a little-known band from near Rotterdam.

Larm - Don't Want To Pay Their Debts: great lo-fi practice recording.

Black Vampire - Punker Parents Plan: from Limburg, like Pandemonium, but not as well-known. Drummer Han was later in Swampsurfers. I think this band is still around in some mutated form or another...

Chlorix - Suicide: these guys were from Hengelo in the east, played some rough but still melodic punk; I think one of the members was later in indie rock band Cords (or that's some other bloke called Marcel Morsink).

Kotsbrokken - Growing Older: band from the same area, same kind of sound, know nothing about them.

Sesamzaad - Ave Vis: these guys, also from the East, had some nice melodic HC songs on Holland HC 2, but I liked this slower track even more (even if it took up the space of 3 or 4 "regular" HC tracks!).

M.O.G. - Do, Bo and Al: didn't really realize it at the time because of the muddy sound, but these guys were already progressing away from their early HC sound towards the brilliant stuff on their classic Radio Rock EP.

Keine Fax - Masked Fascism: closes the tape. These guys handed me their tape in person at some gig, they were about 10 years old! Shit-Fi-aficionados, prick up your ears...!

A nice moment of glory came a few years ago when, while sleeping at this guy Clint's place in London (he runs Short Fuse records and is crazy about old HC), we were talking about obscure records; he'd show us one insanely rare record after another, then he opened some drawer in order to show us the piece de resistance, the Family Jewel...and out came a copy of Alle 55 Kort!

SOLID BARROOM SKRONK

As a little kid I already wondered why the music I liked most - be it wild 50s rock 'n roll or mid-60s Kinks/Who-type stuff - seemed to have bloomed for a very short period, to be quickly discarded and replaced by more boring stuff. In contrast, the boring stuff (disco, barroom boogie rock) never ever seemed to go away. Later I found out this holds true for just about any musical genre I like: ska, psych, garage, rockabilly, bebop, even early New Orleans jazz: all disappeared after 1 or 2 years in the limelight. Why? Maybe these were all particularly combustible musical forms that appeared at moments of big social change so the music had to change with it.

But invariably, after some 15-20 years, these styles would all get "revived". Is that good, or bad? You can blame the revivalists for living in the past, but does that mean any boogie rock band playing music that never went away is better? The problem is, of course, that you can imitate what's on the surface but you can never duplicate the feelings and times that caused the music to sound like it did.

Somehow with Punk Rock there's a little twist in the tale. It never disappeared because it was never mainstream in the first place. Instead, it kept on mutating and branching off, all these little branches spawning their own little revivals every couple of years. One piece of bark off the punk tree didn't lend itself to reviving, though: those weird, squeaky, Beefheartian pieces of noise that labels like Rough Trade released around 1978-80. In New York they called it No Wave, though some critics preferred the word Skronk which I like too as it sounds like a blast from James Chance or Ted (Blurt) Milton's sax. These records, by bands like Essential Logic, Lemon Kittens, Slits, Blurt and many more, sounded like a bunch of kids were let loose in a toy shop; that's because these bands were kids let loose in a toy shop; DIY was in its infancy and for a while there were no rules. I guess that's why, after the little kids themselves grew up and learned to play properly, nobody could ever "revive" this kind of music.

The catchy named PragVEC, though very much part of that Rough Trade/Post Punk scene, were odd ducks in a way because on their EP you can hear they already knew how to play properly; the guitar squeaks and skronks with the best of them, but there's always this foundation of bluesy fluidity underneath. Susan Gogan's great vocals veer in all directions, from soft to loud to distorted, but always in control; guess that's why she got compared to Pauline Murray of Penetration a lot (Virgin passed them up using that as an excuse). Then there's the mock-French in "Existential", showing they knew their Beatnik roots. I don't know much more about PragVEC, except that their second 7 inch is pretty good too, though a bit more "poppy". Oh yeah, and the famous Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell played bass for them later on. An old NME piece on PragVEC says they rose from the ashes of "Trotskyite R&B combo the Derelicts". Trotskyite R&B? Now that explains it all!

Existential
Bits
Wolf
Cigarettes (1978)

(Actually, come to think of it, there actually was a revival of sorts of this type of music in the late 80s, with UK bands like Dog Faced Hermans, Badgewearer and Stretchheads, bands that I thought were much more exciting than their recycled-USHC peers of the time.)

ZILVERENBAGAGEDRAGER

In my earliest days as a punk rocker I had a pretty broad taste; I enjoyed bands like the Jam, Au Pairs, Comsat Angels as much as the more "hardknor" stuff. But then, around 1981 there wasn't a strict dividing line yet; in fact, some "new-wavey" records, like for instance the Jam's great Funeral Pyre, packed more punch than some of the standard-issue punk of the day. One year later, this had changed irreparably; while American Hardcore took over the fasterlouder camp, most of the cool bands on the other side either broke up (Jam), went disco (Gang of Four) or went Top 40 without really changing but were of course verboten from then on anyway (U2). The watershed moment for me was when I read about a new band some ex-Au Pairs members had formed, called Apple on the Drum. Apple on the Drum! You think I'm going to scribble that on my jacket? To make things worse, they said their music was "really funky". Really funky, eh? Well, have a nice life! It was this New Wimpiness that made my subsequent immersion into hardcore that more rewarding.

That said, in the middle of those hardcore days there were two bands around that I thought were brilliant even though they had nothing to do with HC: Morzelpronk and Zowiso. Morzelpronk was Dolf (of the famous Koeienverhuur studio) Planteydt's band, a strange mix of surf, exotica, Les Paul and Robert Fripp that couldn't have been more out of step with the times. I'll post their first EP as soon as I get that spare copy Mathijs (ex-Morzelpronk, now De Kift) promised me...!

Zowiso's 2 tracks on the Oorwormer LP showed a band that had great ideas, but not yet the chops to put them into practice. Two years later, they'd evolved into the thumping, throbbing, wailing monster you hear on the great Beat Per Minute EP. Singer John Hollander was one of the best around, throaty and soulful in that typical "right-on English socialist" way.

My band once played at some blockade in front of a judicial building; it was us, Frites Modern, Zowiso and Morzelpronk on top of a truck. It was a pretty grim situation; the riot squad was fending off the building while a bunch of local right-wing hooligans were rampaging left and right (excuse the pun). In the middle of this grimness and violence Morzelpronk started playing their first song, "Koeienwals" (Cow Waltz), the most beautiful melodic piece of twin-guitar exotica Calexico never made. Surely one of the most surrealistic moments in my life (on a par with the day I saw Steve Ignorant walking while holding 8 beer bottles between his fingers and one between his teeth!). I'd love to post that one, but it was only ever released on the super-obscure Support the Miners' Strike comp LP which I don't have (also featuring the Ex and some great tracks by Zowiso, by the way). Zowiso's drummer Aad lives in Zurich and is still playing in a rootsy band called Trio From Hell; John's an insurance agent these days.

Army
Nuclear Power Train (both from Oorwormer comp. LP, 1982)
Blacks Prison
Mailbox (both from Beats Per Minute EP, 1983)