Big in Holland........wasn't there a band called that?
Whatever, either way The Executive Slacks were.......Big In Holland.
A fact this live in Europe Cassette demonstrates nicely as all of the Dates on this tour seemed to be in The Netherlands....except a couple,which were in Gay Paris,and the inevitable appearance in Belgium where every band sounded like this with all that Belgian New Beat stuff and EBM.
As listed in the insert notes,as if you're interested, here's the actual Tour Dates for you nerds out there:
Executive Slacks live in Europe '84: Amsterdam (NL) - Venray (NL) - Tilburg (NL) - Rotterdam (NL) - Vlissingen (NL) - Arnhem (NL) - Utrecht (NL) - Groningen (NL) - Wageningen (NL) - Paris (FR) - Brussels (B) - Sint-Niklaas (B)
Nearly every Dutch person I know comes from Groningen, except for long time commentator on this blog, Henk Madrotter, who has admitted liking The Executive Slacks a lot,so I'm guessing that Mr Madrotter was in the audience in Rotterdam?
New wave / industrial band mixing primitive electronics, harsh guitars and aggressive vocals. From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA...it says here.
And yes we did call this kind of stuff Industrial back in the mid-eighties, although I don't see why,same for Nine Inch Nails. Americans doing this kinda stuff was and is rare.Other examples are Front Line Assembly......or were they Canadian?..Skinny Puppy?.....they were Canadian too I wager? Crash Course in Science came from Philadelphia didn't they?.....as you see we don't google anything on Die or DIY. The Neo-Luddite movement starts HERE!
Well, being the closet Numan Fan fan boy,that I am, I'm hearing Numan here,so I have no right to complain.
Note the reference to "The Park"...as in,"Down In The Park",Tubeway Army.The same tune fucked over by that Trent Reznor knob,and if i'm hopefully mistaken, by that Marilyn Manson Twat.
Tracklist:
A1 The Park
A2 Sisyphus
A3 In & Out
A4 Cinema
A5 Man Of Christ
B1 Our Lady
B2 Ecce Homo
B3 Electric Blues
B4 I'm Coming
12 comments:
Ah, the link doesn't work, I'll just keep trying lah.... And yes, I was there, at that concert, in Parkzicht, which back then was a very cool place, loads of great concerts and every sunday afternoon they did a live show for radio there, if I'm not mistaken it was called "Oorkussen", I remember seeing violin player Blaine L. Reininger from Tuxedomoon doing a solo performance there, just tapes and him.... Later, in the 90's Parkzicht became a very, very wild place, they would mostly play gabber (a form of house) music there, insane amounts of drugs there, I only went there every now and then, the head bouncer was an old friend, we were in the same class in school, back in '78, '79, Maas, who became a skinhead when I got into the punk scene.... Some wild stories there :) Maas was a giant, easily 300 pounds, maybe more... I actually performed with the punk band I was in, Pleeboy (Plee is a Dutch word for toilet) at school and after 2 or 3 songs the school's director pulled the plug. Maas knocked him out, we kept playing and that's how I got thrown out of that school... Maas basically became the leader of the Dutch skinheads, he also acted as a bodyguard for Dutch extreme right wing politicians .... I, being with the anarchist and communist punks was always high on the hit list of the Rotterdam skinheads, my loud mouth didn't help much with that but they could never do anything to me because Maas wouldn't let them... I remember one guy, Fuhrer Frans, who really, really wanted to stab me to death but he never got permission :) One night, must've been 1981 I walked into the pub, the Twijfelaer which was next to the squat house I was living in, with all my hammer and sickles and shit and nobody was there. Not a punk in sight. The place was just full with Skinheads, mostly from Amsterdam and when they saw me they went crazy, all standing up, giving me the Hitler salute shouting Sieg Heil over and over and what did I do? I gave them a right fist in the air back, maybe the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life, they went insane and came at me and if it wasn't for Maas, who stepped right in front of them, grinning and saying, No, not Henkie, I probably wouldn't have gotten out of there alive. Would have ended much like that scene from Pasolini's Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom.... There's a story where he and a mate went to England, some big event for gay skinheads (with the pink shoe-laces) and he and his mate just tore up the place but I'm not 100% sure how much truth there is to that though... Wild times :) I saw some videos on youtube from the Executive Slacks where they look pretty rough, long hair, grungy types, but when I saw them they were very neat looking, you know, Ultravox style, excellent concert.... This is great!!! I still have their excellent first album, You Can't Hum When You're Dead....
Link leads to nothing.
BTW I am Dutch, I do not come from Groningen (and as you do not know me your statement is still correct) but from Brabant.
Cripes!....link now sorted, many apologies.
Really enjoying this and amazed by the sound quality, thanks Jonny! Surprised that song The Bus is not on it, that was kind of the "hit single" off their first album....
As far as Groningen goes..... They had a great place there called Simplon. First time there we performed there with Pleeboy and a bunch of punk bands from the city of Utrecht, I think around the end of '79, maybe early '80.... Terrible, the drum kit kept falling apart, our absolute worst performance.... On the way back to Rotterdam in the back of a van we dropped off some of the Utrecht punks and a girl singer from one of their bands vomited all over the place, the stench was unbearable....
Second time I was supposed to fill in for the drummer of The Prove (with the beautiful German singer Anke who was a good friend of mine).... Bunker Oeso played, Kotx played and girl group The Kroepoeks were lying totally drunk on stage giggling in their microphones.... It all went to hell. Some of the Rotterdam punks went on a rampage, stabbing people, beating them half to death with chains, it was a total slaughterhouse, pandemonium... We all had to flee into the huge bus that was rented and it was pelted with stones on the way out by the newly arrived Groninger re-enforcements... I remember a huge bald guy coming up to me with huge axes in both hands, "you're from Rotterdam too right??" Ehrrrr, yes but I have no part of this! I'm sure if any old punks from there see this they will remember that night, it was talked about for many years after.... Rotterdam had a very, very bad reputation for violence, quite a few bands refused to play there and I'm still happy I didn't go to the Skrewdriver gig, in '81 if I'm not mistaken, a total bloodbath between skins and punks.... Years later in the 90's we had the same reputation with the newly arrived hip hop scene but that was nothing compared to the late 70's early 80's punk scene....
On a side note by the way, Peter Graute, who had the fantastic record store Backstreet in the late 70's/early 80's (I met the Gang of Four there, briefly) and who played guitar in band MU and other bands, and who produced that great Rotterdam Collection album (1980) and was a very, very important figure in the Rotterdam underground scene passed away last week.....
You should really write a novel based on all this....with a companion usb stick full of the relevant music/soundtrack for the film. Could be the Dutch Trainspotting.
I agree!
THANKS!!
THANKS!!!
This is a great find! Looking forward to listening to it. Many thanks!
Brian
:) I've been told that many times :) And not just the punk era but the rest of my insane life too... Just for fun... One more... It's Queens Day, 1981, where the whole country parties, where you can sell anything you want on the street, flea-market type of stuff, bands playing on the street everywhere, and we have a punk festival in the center of Rotterdam on Beurs Trappen (in front of the stock exchange building). The Debiele Eenheid is playing with singer Jorum stark naked with an enormous strap-on dildo covered in shaving foam and chocolate paste.... "Normal" people walking past with faces gone white, trying to hold papers, anything, in front of their children's faces (many stories about the Debiele Eenheid those guys were wild and an excellent band)... All of a sudden we are surrounded by huge numbers of mostly Amsterdam skinheads looking for revenge for one of them who was beaten to within an inch of his life the year before and we are hugely outnumbered.... Well... There were three punks from England who were living in a squat house in Rotterdam. There were many English crazies living in Rotterdam at the time, most of them on the run, wanted back home for murder etc., quite a few Hell's Angel types too... Anyway, those three just stormed all those skins, it was like Asterix and Obelix, they just went through them like it was nothing, mayhem.... Then the police showed up, all in riot gear and it ended with punk AND skins fighting those cops, pelting them with stones and that was the end of that festival :) Oh, another weird thing I remember about those 3 English punks... They always had an empty jar in their kitchen, they would fill it up with raw liver and then fuck that jar, weirdest thing, always supposed it was an "English thing" :) Nothing more rough then The English though... In the 90's when I was working in Cafe The Rhythm where all the weirdos went, if there was an English - Dutch soccer game in town all the cafes would close for the duration but we would stay open, All the Rotterdam hooligans and all the English hooligans showing up, never a fight, all of 'em singing and drinking together, quite a sight to behold :)
@Henk Madrotter, I always enjoy reading the little snippets of your autobio. If you ever collect them all under one title, I'd certainly be a reader. Frankly, Jonny's proposal is a dream come true if it ever came to be.
Hehehe :) The great Indonesia born Dutch writer E. Du Perron wrote in his masterpiece autobiography Country of Origin that the unwritten rule is that you shouldn't write your autobiography before you're 60.... He wrote his in 1935 when he was 36 (and he died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 40, the day the Germans invaded Holland) .... Well... If I make it I will turn 60 next January, something to think about.... Been thinking about it for years actually, still debating (in my head, where else) in what format... In book form? On a blog or substack? On video? Also, quite a few stories that just can't be told, certain ehrrr... dark family secrets so to say, certain ehrrr stories about certain criminal activities in the past and just for example, the story of my arrest in Indonesia, the subsequent torture and buying myself out of jail, not very wise to write about that while still living in Indonesia, even though it was some 15 years ago doesn't seem very wise :) Haven't touched the stuff I was arrested for since btw, it might be free in Thailand now but here they still go absolutely bonkers over it....
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