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Vervolg Dutch Rare Folk
Hieronder staat de volledige, Engelstalige, hoestekst van de CD, geschreven door Linnemann. "Picture yourself back in, say, 1978. Yes, I’m talking to you, you fortysomething music buff from the lowlands. What were you doing at the time? Perhaps you were spending an hour and a half each day modelling and blow-drying your hair ‘cause you had to take your girl to yet another trendy nightclub where you would groove to the likes of Chic or Sylvester. Or maybe you were busy hiding your Yes and Genesis LPs in order to protect the street credibility that the rock mags of the day (Ramones on the cover one week, Clash the next) had convinced you was essential to your existence. But wait a minute. Something else was stirring in the background. Something was happening in the long shadows of punk and disco that reigned supreme. Were you aware that in that very same year, Deirdre were forging their own special brand of electric folk? That Gerard van Maasakkers was setting a new standard for rural singer/songwriters? That Wolverlei were single-handedly redefining the songbook of Dutch traditional music? That Folkcorn were completing their brilliant sophomore record? I’ll tell you something, man. Some of the most incredible music ever was being created Right Under Our Noses. And we were all looking the other way. I guess to some extent folk always was a thing for the folkies. Except that in The Netherlands, its own little reservation was even smaller than elsewhere. Take the mid sixties. Whereas any town in Great Britain and Ireland had a folk club at every other street corner, in the whole of Holland there were just a handful. In Amsterdam, you had Folkclub ’65 in Thon and Loes Fikkerman’s living room; but perhaps the most renowned venue was run by folk singer Cobi Schreijer in Haarlem’s De Waag theatre. Along with the earliest Dutch representatives of the genre, people like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger came to play at her tavern. In 1967, Schreijer (who would later become a front woman of feminism) released an LP on which Dutch folk songs were presented in what could very cautiously be called a pop context. A year later, Delft’s Peter Koene followed her example. Trainspotters may point out that as early as the mid fifties, anthropologically oriented pioneers like Jantina Noorman and Jaap Kunst had released collections of Dutch folk songs on the US based Folkways label. Even so, Schreijer and Koene were early birds and a rare species at that. Meanwhile, in Britain folk rock exploded. Bands such as Pentangle, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span took the genre to unparalleled heights with a string of albums as challenging as they were unique. The songbook of old Albion never sounded more exciting. However, there was something unmistakeably alien in glorifying other folks’ traditions. When playing together with the Dutch forerunners at international folk festivals, foreign artists such as Martin Carthy and John Renbourn expressed their mystification and (just as Pete Seeger had done to Peter Koene in the sixties) insisted the Dutch folkies would turn to their own musical heritage for inspiration. Their plea did not remain unheard. And so by the mid seventies, about five years after the first British folk tsunami came crashing in, an authentically Dutch brand of folk rock emerged. Not bad for a country that German author Heinrich Heine once stated he would go to when the world ended “because everything happens fifty years later in The Netherlands”. One of the very first bands to adopt this new style based on specifically Dutch traditions were Vlaardingen’s Fungus, who scored a solid hit in 1974 with their second single Kaapren Varen. It put Dutch folk rock on the map with a wider audience, but would remain one of the few commercial successes of the genre. Another smash was Bots’ Zeven Dagen Lang from 1976; however, Bots was first and foremost a politically engaged rock band that only occasionally ventured into folk. Within the Dutch pop scene, folk had its own private corner. Musicians were playing in specialised folk clubs, hardly mixing with artists from other areas. They had their own magazine (Janviool, later to transform into New Folk Sounds), their own radio show (Onder De Groene Linde, produced for pubcaster NOS by music historian Ate Doorenbosch), their own festivals such as Rotterdam Folk or Tsjoch; and… their own record labels. Companies like Stoof (a daughter of Munich Records from Bennekom, managed by Job Zomer who sadly passed away in 2006) and Universe (run by Leeuwarden record shop owner Wobbe van Seijen) provided ample opportunity for rapidly emerging Dutch folk artists to release their work on record. In the slipstream of Stoof and Universe, there were smaller labels such as Pan (founded by King’s Galliard), Crossroad, Xilovox and Hakketoon. Curiously, Nederfolk was mostly an LP thing; Dutch folk singles were a rare phenomenon. Commercial potential hardly appeared to matter; everybody seemed to accept they were strictly preaching to the converted. In the heyday of Nederfolk, the genre was being practised in every part of the country. Even so, there were local and regional accents. Utrecht was arguably the number one folk town in The Netherlands; the legendary Folk Centrum Utrecht produced one of the very first sample albums of Dutch folk. Other areas with an above average folk activity were Friesland and Brabant. This can easily be explained by the cultural pride and the rich musical heritage of these regions (and in the case of the Frisians, the additional identity booster of a language of their own). Ultimately, Nederfolk could not continue to shut out the cruel world. Toward the end of the seventies, pop music was shaken up by the success of disco and punk. Although these (sub)cultures were not particularly hostile toward a marginal phenomenon like folk, it was obvious that their representatives were far removed from the hippie community that had regarded folk as a natural extension of their lifestyle. In the public eye, folkies were becoming old news. Folk clubs were having more and more trouble to stay afloat, while many of the bands themselves were going through identity crises. How long could they keep playing the same music for the same audience that just got smaller day by day? The question is rhetorical. By the mid eighties, Dutch folk had become virtually redundant, falling into a crisis that lasts until today. Of course, in the nineties and noughties you had Pigmeat, Watchman, Mizpah, Ygdrassil… tellingly, none of them ever household names. Some of the artists who started their careers in the golden age of Nederfolk are still making records today: Gerard van Maasakkers, Sido Martens, Folkcorn, Törf… But take for instance the flourishing Belgian scene (where folk bands such as Ambrozijn, Kadril and Laïs are among the nation’s top acts) and contemporary Dutch folk pales in comparison. Now that folk and folk rock are enjoying a worldwide revival as a result of the ‘neofolk’ movement started by the likes of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and CocoRosie, now that forgotten relics such as Vashti Bunyan and Gary Higgins are being championed as lost heroes, it is high time to set the record straight on Dutch folk. Hardly any Nederfolk record from the seventies and eighties has ever been available on cd. Moreover, names like Chimera, Sycamore, Jan Duindam, Wargaren and Anneke Konings are unfamiliar even to seasoned connaisseurs of Dutch pop music. That is a bloody disgrace. Dutch Rare Folk aims to open the door to a hidden treasure chamber within the palace of Dutch pop/rock. And to erect a posthumous monument for that wonderfully mysterious music that we all missed out on when it was first made. Matthijs Linnemann |
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Fonos, het Nederlands Muziekarchief. Gedigitaliseerde klassieke langspeelplaten op CD.