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!