Last Monday Henny Vrienten, frontman of the Dutch pop group Doe Maar, passed away and with him a little bit of my youth.
If you’re not Dutch, you’ll likely have never heard of him or Doe Maar, so it may be hard to understand how insanely popular the band was from 1981 to 1984. Every single was a hit, every album went paltinum and every concert had thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads of. Comparing it to Beatlemania would be an understatement. When the band announced they would stop it was the first item on the main television news broadcast that day. I was not even ten when they split up, but I had the buttons, the pink/green scarf and everything. Everybody in my primary school was a fan, not just the girls, the boys too. If you were a child in the early eighties, Doe Maar was the sound track to your youth.
In hindsight the popularity of Doe Maar is utterly bizarre. This wasn’t a manufactured hype, but something that sponteneously erupted at a time the band had almost decided to quit already. Doe Maar was founded in 1978 by a group of musicians in their late twenties, each with a history of playing in other bands; when Vrienten joined in 1980 he was already thirty. Their first hit with him as singer, sinds een Dag of Twee, was about him how strange it was to be falling in love again when you’re thirtytwo. Hardly the stuff that makes teenyboppers swoon. Furthermore their record company at the time had so little faith in them it had shelved their second album. It was only by accident that Dutch radio diskjockeys started playing the single and promoting the album, but it was enough to start the Doe Maar hype. From that point onwards they would become the most popular Dutch band of all times.
What made Doe Maar’s success even more improbable was that at the time, serious Dutch pop music was just not done. Sure, there were people singing in Dutch, but these tended to be either serious folk singer types, or people from the light entertainment world. But if you wanted to be taken seriously as a pop or rock musician, you had to sing in English. Doe Maar never did this. In fact, they’d made their debut on the legendary compilation album Uitholling Overdwars (1979), put out by the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland to promote Dutch language pop music, which also included several other groups that would make it big in the early eighties alongside Doe Maar. That may be Doe Maar’s biggest legacy, making Dutch language pop music respectable and relevant. What made Vrienten’s singing also important was the distinctive Brabant accent in his voice, rather than using the somewhat artificial standard Dutch of your usual light entertainment singer. ‘Provincial’ voices were rarely heard until then, unless in purely regional bands with little national appeal.
What made this small revolution possible was of course punk. The D.I.Y. aesthetic and attitude of punk rock meant there was space to break with the established traditions of ‘serious’ rock and all over Europe you saw bands move away from English towards their own language; most well known being the Neue Deutsche Welle movement of the same time. Nevertheless Doe Maar was never a punk rock group, even if some of the songs on their first eponymous were at least punk in style, like Wees Niet Bang Voor Mijn Lul. No, the secret sauce of Doe Maar’s success was something else entirely: ska and reggea. While on that first album it was all a bit Kinks’ Apeman style parody including dubious accents, from when Vrienten joined Doe Maar it was taken seriously. As a bass player Vrienten himself contributed a lot to the new Doe Maar sound. He even produced an actual dub version of their third album, Doe de Dub in 1982.
I can still remember the frustration and sadness of Doe Maar just deciding to stop at the height of their fame. It was the only thing we talked about on the playground next day: why did they have to stop, why now, why. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it was the best decision they could’ve made at the time. That popularity must’ve been incredibly scary, night after night seeing 13 and 14 year old girls screaming themselves hoarse at you to the point of fainting. Vrienten himself had said that he feared that one day it would all go horribly wrong and somebody would be killed in the crushes that happened during their concerts. The pressure of so much popularity didn’t help relationships within the band itself either and when Doe Maar realised they could just …stop, it must’ve come as a relief.
At the time Doe Maar quit, Vrienten had already brought out his first solo record. Post-Doe Maar he would not only record, but start a new career as a writer of movie music, having been one of the two composers within Doe Maar as well. Movies and musicals would be the main focus of his music, but he also featured in various side projects with other famous Dutch musicians over the years. Doe Maar itself would re-unite in 2000, just as the generation of teenyboppers that were their fans in the early eighties were now in their thirties themselves. It was never quite the same as before, but they did release a new studio album and held regular new tours ever since. In fact, Vrienten’s illness led to the cancellation of their last tour, which would’ve been held last year.
Dit was alles.
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