Oh Those Crazy Cloggies – Page 4

What Fun!

Published on November 30, 2012Leave a comment

The Reggea and ska revival was not just a British movement, in holland too a lot of reggea and ska influences started creeping up in Dutch language pop music as the punk movement with its d.i.y. ethos led to an explosion of new and interesting groups, most noticably Doe Maar, a band that at its peak was as popular in the Netherlands as the Beatles had been in Britain in the sixties. It was the music I grew with in the early eighties and which still influences a lot of what I listen to today But of course since most of that took place in a language few people outside of Holland and Belgium speak, so most of it remained world famous in Holland only.

But every now and again there were glimpses of bigger things. What Fun! was a mixed race band from Haarlem (and hence banned from being played in South Africa), with a sound that wasn’t all that far removed from proper 2-Tone who had their one and only real hit in 1983 with the catchy tune above, “the Right Side One”. Doing well over here, it started getting some real airplay on the BBC as well, until somebody finally noticed, hey, this might just be a song about the Falklands War and yanked it from the playlists…

Canto Ostinato

Published on November 26, 20121 Comment

I’m not sure whether it’s a personal failure or a more general Dutch failing that we don’t know our best musical talents, but it took the obituary of Simeon ten Holt to hear his most famous composition, the Canto Ostinato, written in 1976 – 1979. As you notice after a few minutes listening, it “consists of small, entirely tonal cells which are repeated“, with the duration of any performance left to the performers. Usually played on two or four pianos, it has also been adapted to other instruments, like the harp.

It’s a beautiful piece of music and while firmly in the classical musical tradition, you could almost describe it as a post-punk composition: experimental, minimalist and stripped down to the bare essence but grounded in traditional virtues of musical craft nonetheless…

Flat land

Published on October 26, 20121 Comment

Sometimes you have to look at a familiar landscape through foreign eyes to appreciate it:

But there’s no bridge from anyplace I’ve lived to the Dutch polder. This is nothing like anything I have ever known. If my love of California came through the front door and my love of Scotland through the side, this sudden, inarticulate love of the Netherlands is the unexpected guest who appears one day in the living room, ringing no bell and answering no invitation. And yet, here it is, and it draws me out of the house and away from the cities every bright day. I go out for half-hour rides and come back three hours later, windblown and bright-eyed.

And the Noord-Hollands polder through which I’ve been riding is the real deal, the unfiltered, unadulterated Dutch landscape, served neat. It’s undiluted by tulips and uncut by the tourist trail. It stretches out northward from the urbanized shore of the IJ to the Afsluitdijk, making up the land between the North Sea and the IJsselmeer. The fields are punctuated by towns and villages: Purmerend, Volendam, Alkmaar, Heerhugowaard, Den Helder, Edam, Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Schagen, Heiloo. Straight, elevated canals and swift roads cross them, taking the people and the freight to and fro. But the land between is filled only with a kind of vastness: long, straight lines of pasture under the endless, endless sky.

Abi Sutherland declares her love for the flat, Dutch landscape. I’ve always found Noord-Holland, that stretched out farmland north of Amsterdam, to be dull and depressing, the worst part of the Netherlands but Abi shows it can be beautiful too.

So did Jacques Brel decades ago, talking about Vlaanderen, but it could be Holland as well:

Tach-tig

Published on October 4, 2012Leave a comment

Dutch people counting to one hundred, in order of age, as filmed by Jeroen Wolf.

Quoted for Truth: Nicolas Freeling, Criminal Conversation

Published on June 26, 2012Leave a comment

Nicolas Freeling’s hero, inspector Van der Valk of the Amsterdam recherche, meets up with a woman who might have been blackmailed and gives a short description:

She was a solid, well-constructed woman, not fat at all but all curves, with the very fine-textured, pearly skin that goes so well with dark chestnut hair. Small good teeth, quite rare in Holland, where the women have excellent teeth looking like a well-polished row of marble gravestones.

From 1965, but as Sandra often noticed, Dutch women, especially young Dutch women, do tend to have huge perfect white teeth, though her comparison was more to do with horses than marble gravestones. A very Dutch mouth that.

I love Nicolas Freeling’s mysteries, another writer Sandra turned me on to, as he has a knack for getting Dutch people right: his Holland is one that’s still a ways behind the modern world, though getting there, a Holland gone some time I was born, but one I still recognised if only from period fiction.