Hmmmm, Rotterdam seemed like a rather groovy place in 1980, and here's a robust selection of local punkers and loonies from Hollands' second city. As was the fashion in 79/80,every town and shithole in the UK released a self-financed local band compilation, and Rotterdam was no exception.
It inexplicably starts with the worst track on the record, by The Bodysnatchers, not that terrible Two Tone band from the UK, but another even worse Dutch Bodysnatchers.
That aside, the rest of the album is great...except some flaccid boogie by the Loomis Gang.
Anarcho punk legends (In Holland), The Rondos, and DIY Punk hangers-on, 'Tändstickorshocks' and the excellent 'Revo', who would have fitted quite nicely on some of those DIY Punk releases in the UK, Like the "Mell Square Music" ep.
Plenty more rough and ready, barely competent 2 minute dirges to delight the more dissonant side of your cerebral cortex can be found on here.So get your clogs out,put your finger in a dyke and enjoy the noise.
Tracklist:
A1 –Bodysnatchers-Do You Really Wanna Dance The Whole Night Trough 3:00
A2 –Tändstickorshocks- Religion Part 1 0:29
A3 –Tändstickorshocks- To Hell With Shell 2:04
A4 –Tändstickorshocks- Kill For Peace 0:48
A5 –Foreign Bodies- Blackout 3:10
A6 –Revo- Fuck The School 0:40
A7 –Revo- Geloof In God 0:25
A8 –Revo-Blah Blah Blah 0:40
A9 –Bunker-Zombies 3:01
A10 –Loomis Gang-Trouble Maker 2:27
A11 –M Sound-No Lust 2:35
B1 –Stealer-You Dont Say You Love Me 2:06
B2 –Chatterbox- Someone Talks 4:00
B3 –Pierre- I Wanna Be Killed By You 1:20
B4 –Pierre- Kockah 0:58
B5 –Rondos-Vivisection 1:14
B6 –Rondos- Peace Dilemma 2:50
B7 –Alibi Ike-Bedroom Agony 4:32
B8 –Black Slack- Telling Me LIes 4:10
B9 –Steve - Neon Theme 2:15
10 comments:
Owww Jonny.... Man... You know I have to write about this album right?
But where to even begin???
Well... Let me just begin with me buying this album when it came out. At the Haddock Record shop and Leo was the owner. Luc who was a member of Chatterbox was also working there and later took over the store.... The fifth picture at the top of the cover,that's Luc...
Leo got into a conflict with The Rondos because he was selling their album Red Attack for more than the price listed on the cover of that album and he released an anti Rondos flexi disc, wish I still had that flexi, it was pretty good music actually....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VrztTrG_Bw
Now... The last song, Neon Theme by Steve was the theme song for the weekly Neon tv show on VPRO TV, a show about (mostly Dutch) punk and I would watch it always, just like the TV show Greetings from Rotterdam which was all about Rotterdam punk....
Hard to describe how important the Rondos were back then, they lived in a huge building, had their own printing shop, their own underground recording studio and they released their Raket magazine monthly, Groeten uit Rotterdam, the TV show was mainly about them and the bands around them like the Tandstickorshocks.... The festival they organized, Rock Against Religion... They were hard-core communists, Maoists actually and well, they were VERY preachy, at times a bit too far, if you were smoking hash you were a fascist because smoking hash meant supporting fascist regimes....
A lot of punks got very tired of their constant preaching and a huge anti Rondos group formed in Rotterdam, mostly around the legendary punk band Kotx and also the band Bunker OESO and things got VERY violent at times and this is the time that I got into the Rotterdam scene and like so many others back then I ran away from home and started living in squat houses in Rotterdam, aged 15....
It was a great time, many super cool cafe's, loads of cool concerts but also lots of crazy violence and heroin started to play a huge role in the scene and in the end it was the violence and the heroin that destroyed the whole scene....
There's so many stories, so much was happening, too much for telling it all here and this album, this collection.... well, it really does capture the scene....
Revo was a funny band too, their singer Aram... well, I'm not really sure if I can tell that story here (although it was in all the newspapers and lots of magazines), let's just say it ended REALLY bad with him, you can't imagine how bad, pure horror really....
Bunker Oeso still exists, still performing, they played last week in Rotterdam at a venue where Leen Steen was presenting his book about that whole era, Marja the bass player from Bunker Oeso was joined by Maarten, the old guitar player from the Rondos on stage....
Here's a video, picture from old Rotterdam punks at that time (I'm not in it)....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Kq9937uCo
There's plenty of good Rotterdam punk bands from that time that are not on this album, Debiele Eenheid comes to mind, they were probably the wildest band in the whole of Holland, mainly because of the stage antics of their frontman/singer Jorem, I remember them playing in the center of the city, Jorem naked dressed only in a bit of fishnet covered with shaving foam and chocolate pasta and a huge dildo attached, it was an open air concert and I remember people walking by white faced, totally shocked, holding papers in front of their kids so they wouldn't see the horror and be scarred for life... Maybe it was that concert where all of a sudden we were all surrounded by God knows how many skinhead, mainly from Amsterdam, coming for revenge for an incident where one of theirs was beating to a pulp (really, to a pulp)and it looked pretty bad for all of us, totally outnumbered but three English punks went bezerk and went in there like Asterix and Obelix and then the police showed up and everybody was suddenly fighting the police....
So many stories :)
What happened with Aram!? Should I google it? I'll write this first. Great stuff all around. Cheers!
Many thanks for your insightful contribution, as always Henk.
But...
I'll join in with the ghouls.....yeah, what happened to Aram?....you can write anything here.
Also, can't stand preachy groups, like Crass,Rondo's, and The Ex...musically dodgy,but the way they take this standard Political dogma to the 'n'th degree gives me a headache......how you can call yourself a 'maoist' and still be a 'Punk' I dunno!?
I did however have a similar stance on hash smoking,but not because it supports fascist regimes for F's sake!...I admit to being straight edge,still am.
Ps
I Think we should revive the 'Rock Against Religion' festival, and hold it in Texas.
Well.... Pfff... Ok then... I knew Aram, he was a sweet kid when the songs were recorded on this album, I think he was like 13 years old then.... It's the old story, heroin addiction but for him it came much later.... I forget how many years ago, maybe 10 years or so, he first stabbed his girlfriend to death, then another girl came to his house, I knew her very well back in the old punk days, he tortured her for two days, I don't know all the details but I know he nailed her to a drawing board, most of her nails were missing from when she was trying to escape scraping the walls while being done with a baseball bat and much more shit, there was blood all over the place, satanic symbols were written on the floor... He then was there for a few days more with those bodies and overdosed, hope I'm not harming anybody by writing all this, as you can imagine this is still a very touchy subject and I feel terribly sorry for his sister who is also from the old scene and who is really super sweet... The girl who was murdered, the one I knew well back in the days, her mum was great, her house was always open to all of us, she was selling sandwiches in a very cool discotheque and later had a very cool cafe/art gallery, her other daughter got hooked too and is, from what I've heard, insane.... I've seen a lot of misery back then, in the squat house where I was living, in the end almost everybody was shooting up, I was there for almost a year and I left, went back to live with my parents for 4 fantastic years and happy to say that I NEVER touched H, hate the stuff....
And The Rondos.... I think they meant well... I would go there with my friends, we were playing in a band called "Pleeboy" (plee is a dutch word for toilet) and they were always really friendly, they let us print our own magazine there for free (two magazines were put out, still have 'em but ashamed when I look at 'em, specially when I read the "political pieces" but hey, we were like 14, 15 at the time!), it was especially in their Raket magazine that they did all their preaching (still have a few of those too)and you know how it is... it was PUNK for Christsakes, people didn't wanna hear what you can or can't do! I know that when that anti-Rondos flexi came out they were really hurt... One of the things that people criticized them about was that all the stuff they had, the printing shop, the recording studio etc., it was all with government subsidy (while being so anti-government), and when they quit, just disappeared, other groups tried to organize stuff, concerts, a new place for punks to go (after Kaasee burned down and the old Exit closed down), especially Bunker Oeso was very active, the government would say, well, you guys (the punks) already had all the money you're going to get.... I remember walking in a demonstration through the inner city, we were demonstrating for a new punk club with concerts by Kotx,. Bunker Oeso, J. Dops Band and the Debiele Eenheid... In the end people organized stuff them self which is how we got a place called The Vlerk.... And a huge place called Arena but that was more commercial, cool place though, saw I don't know how many great concerts there, it later became Nightown, still cool but much more rave parties and such, I was there like 4, 5 nights a week, working in cafe's bouncing, dj-ing, wild, very wild years :)
Rock Against Religion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D78ztnO6ouo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCxnyDTvCS4&t=15s
Revo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INcJTgDKte0
Rondos live in Kaasee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giGmziHeTn8
Debiele Eenheid (but this is much later without the great Morio Stror (RIP) and Frankzinnig.....)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr3PgfLNPR8
I bet you feel better for that?
I assume he was arrested for that murder etc?
DON'T TOUCH DRUGS KIDS, is probably the basic moral of this grisly story.
No wonder you fucked off to Indonesia?
The Rondo's are next if you have anymore recollections you'd like to share.
Well, like I said, he sat with those two dead girls for 1 or 2 days, then went out to buy smack and gave himself an overdose.... They found 'em like that....
Personally, I don't really mind drugs, used to love the e's and the mushrooms and I was selling, growing, smoking weed for ... pfff.... 20+ years or so... Stopped 10 years ago, living in Indonesia, they will torture you to death for the smallest amounts or blackmail you for as much as they can take, plenty of friends here who were murdered by cops completely crazy on meth themselves, so yeah...
If you're in Indonesia DON'T DO DRUGS!!!
Duh!...I missed the overdose bit!...bloody smackheads!
There's this:
https://books.google.co.id/books?id=LTFb-dQHdB8C&pg=PT172&lpg=PT172&dq=aram+Slappendel&source=bl&ots=Iz7A8zrrm2&sig=iy-35oB1OWa64XqcCCIIzMuNVoo&hl=id&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCj8PkkI_XAhXEpI8KHfXNAtkQ6AEIOTAC#v=onepage&q=aram%20Slappendel&f=false
And this:
http://krant.telegraaf.nl/krant/vandaag/teksten/bin.rotterdamse.muriel.linschoten.html
But it's all in Dutch......
Holy shit in a handbag from hell! Hollywood can't write tragedy as deep. Well they do but the other less formidable kind. I am still for the drugs though the H is still beyond my palette. Likely always will thanks to doses like these but the cold truth is everyone is better off on the high road. Not high on the elevated pathways I mean. Though painful I hope any survivors stumbling here know this will at least serve some justice as heart strings go out to them and theirs. Lessons are ever missing from details unknown but I take away from this mostly... don't be an evil cunt psychotic! Take away yourself if you must but condense the pain in yourself only. Leave the others to get along in their own decided miseries. You can have a shred of nobility still and won't have piss soaked ashes anyways. Jesus christ I'm going to give everyone I can grab a hug today. At least a smile. We are soft underbellies today I know but perhaps that is not all too bad when laid next to some other grim. I'm not sorry I asked but I will wear a raincoat and double up on socks if I see the dark clouds rising next time. Oi. Amazon fire kindle wood ain't got shit on this happy place. Here take all my love. I will grow some more. ♥ Aghast but appreciative. Never a doubter by me.
It's crazy how much diversity in sound is on this. Power pop to experimental noise but it works. The Dutch definitely knew their shit. Thanks again Jonny and thanks for the behind the scenes tidbits Madrotter! Juicy stuff!
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