HI HA HONDELUL!

First time I met Maarten van Oudshoorn was when my band and his new band De Kift (who'd just formed) first shared a stage around 1988. We'd just arrived; there was a crate of drinks standing on the bar. I looked around like a good boy scout to ask someone if I could take a drink from it. Maarten, who was sitting at the bar, quietly hissed "Just take it, it doesn't matter," while looking the other way as if we were doing something really illegal. Later I found out this was Maarten in a nutshell: nice guy with a bit of a street fighter persona. On stage that night, De Kift blew the roof off the place (figuratively speaking as this was the Bunker in Rotterdam which was underneath a road); the music was great but Maarten's energetic, er, declamating and bull-necked stage presence was just the finishing touch. We were amazed this was the same guy who'd sung for Pistache BV on their classic 1982 Koesette tape. Back then he still sounded like a 14-year-old schoolboy (probably was), although the menace with which he spat out his rolling R's was already there. I never saw Pistache BV play live, but on this page you can see a short clip of them playing the Oktopus club, Amsterdam. Like a lot of Dutch bands in the interbellum between old punk and hardcore, Pistache BV played a very fast 4/4 beat (I still have a lot of respect for their - and the Nitwitz' - drummer; done some drumming myself, but playing at this speed gave me acute RSI), but the songs on the tape, as well as their 3 contributions to the first Als Je Haar Maar Goed Zit LP, are a notch above most Nederpunk of the day; music as well as lyrics (mostly Maarten's) are really catchy, and most songs have a one- or two-line chorus you can shout along with ("Hi ha hondelul!"). Which is why this tape was a pretty big "hit" in punk terms. (First time De Kift played our home town, we'd written a bunch of old Pistache lyrics on the walls, at which Maarten laughed coyly...) Pistache BV were also one of the few bands that would work at getting gigs (a very un-punk thing to do for some, back then!) so they played a lot throughout the country. For some reason a lot of ex-Pistache/ Eton Crop-members later worked as music journalists (Pistache drummer Roy Mantel worked for music paper Oor); Maarten stayed true to his roots, contributing to Johan van Leeuwen's great Nieuwe Koekrand 'zine.
Anyway, I'd like to thank sonic-devil (if he's reading this) for providing me with the following rips...

Blind En Doof
Philips (from Als Je Haar Maar Goed Zit comp LP, 1982)
Hi Ha Hondelul
S.T.E.R.
Je Maintiendrai
T.V. Prive (from Koesette, split tape w/ Eton Crop, 1982)