NOBLE SAVAGES FROM HAZERSWOUDE

Ivy Green, 1979. Far right: Tim Mullens.
I only had the vaguest notion of Ivy Green being the "first Dutch punk band" when sometime in 1984/85 my band opened for them. It was at a benefit for the English miners' strike, and upon finding out Ivy Green were actually, like, being paid to appear, that particular blend of Righteous Hardcore Outrage took hold of us. What were they thinking, those rock stars? Getting rich off those starving miners! We conveniently forgot about the fact that we didn't have any equipment, so no expenses either. I remember one of their moustache-wearing members came up to me after we played and told me he really liked what we were doing (which was a blur of out-of-tune out-of-sync hardcore thrash, as we liked to call it in those days). Thinking back I can't believe how stupid and jaded I was, at 17, but I didn't even leave the dressing room to see them play. Luckily I got old and wise very fast, as the following year I picked up a copy of their genius 1978 debut LP. Around the same time I made up for my lost opportunity by seeing them play a couple of times; they'd turned into a punk+horns-outfit not unlike Eternally Yours-era Saints, and while I didn't care much for their records of that period, they really punked out live.
When Ivy Green burst onto the national scene back in '77, they were the perfect embodiment of pure unspoiled punk naivety that the music press were looking for, noble savages from the tiny village of Hazerswoude that, isolated from the world, had to invent punk rock all by themselves. They looked the part: country bumpkins with moustaches, not a safety pin in sight. They weren't art school or careerist bandwagon-jumpers, they were The Real Thing! To top it off, they made a brilliant LP that's still one of the all-time classics, and sadly unavailable in any form right now.
Of course Ivy Green weren't as unsophisticated as everybody would have liked them to be; for instance, there's a big Jonathan Richman/ Modern Lovers-influence at work in their fast, droning, often 1- or 2-chord-songs like "Sex on the radio", "I'm your television" and of course "I'm sure we're gonna make it" (aka "Wap shoo wap"). But it's more Modern-Lovers-with-firecrackers-stuck-up-their-asses the way they do it, with relentless boom-thud-boom-thud drumming (courtesy 14 year old Artur van Dijke), two guitars (one pub-rockish sounding, the other a chainsaw of fuzz; a trick often used by early punk bands) and the undecipherable helium warble of leader Tim Mullens. Even though the LP was released on special Atlantic punk imprint Pogo records (whose only other act to my knowledge were the Suburban Studs), it totally bombed as punk failed to break in prog/MOR/Eagles-loving Holland.
Between 1978 and 1983, as punk was going DIY, then going hardcore, Ivy Green only released one song: the great "Pak 'm Beet" on seminal Dutch-language-only comp LP Uitholling Overdwars. Some of the acts on this record would become super famous in Holland in 3-4 years time, but Ivy Green's Chuck Berry-style ode to "playing with it" leaves them far behind, gasping in the dust clouds. The lyrics are hilarious; I'm not going to translate as that would spoil the effect; suffice to say this is a Dutch cousin of "Orgasm Addict".

Another Subculture Going Bad
Sex On The Radio
Mister, Mister (from first LP, 1978)
Pak 'm Beet (1979)