Mix Of Bricks & Valentines

G.W. Sok

Description

G.W. Sok co-founded the internationally acclaimed independent Dutch music group The Ex in 1979. He became the singer and lyricist more or less by coincidence, since he wrote the occasional poem and nobody else wanted to sing. At the same time, he turned himself into a graphic designer of record sleeves, posters and books. A Mix of Bricks and Valentines showcases the lyrics G.W. Sok wrote during his three-decade period with The Ex. More than 250 agitprop lyrics, poetry and rants are included, along with an introduction by English journalist, author and musician John Robb.

Sujets

• Punk

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 20 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781604866162
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Mix of Bricks & Valentines: Lyrics 1979–2009
G.W. Sok
©2011 G.W. Sok
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-499-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927949
Cover and interior design by G.W. Sok ( www.druxat.nl ).
Cover-photo back & front by Christina Hallström.
Artist-photo on back-cover by Nick Helderman.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
Foreword (by John Robb)
Introduction (by G.W. Sok)
Acknowledgements
Lyrics 1979–1983
Lyrics 1984–1989
Lyrics 1990–1995
Lyrics 1996–2002
Lyrics 2003–2009
Six Dutch Songs Translated into English
The Song Titles (in Chronological Order)
The Song Titles (in Alphabetical Order)
Discography & Other Stuff
The Ex around 1988: Terrie, Sok, Katherina, Luc
Foreword
Flashback to the mid-’80s.
We are in a damp and dusty squat somewhere in the heart of Amsterdam. There is an urgency in the air, a cut and paste culture spiked with political rhetoric is cranking up the electricity.
A stunning band are on stage. Non-stop kinetic energy from aural guerillas, their music is multi-rhythmic, fascinating, hypnotic, and intense. The drums are astonishing in their imagination and power. The guitarist and bassist are locked into this electric, shrapnel thing and the vocalist looks intense. His fierce intelligence burns from his eyes behind his totally wired specs as he delivers his fierce spittle prose.
The Ex are on stage right in their political heartland. The house band of the Dutch anarcho squat scene a fiercely ideological punk rock splinter that still flew the flag of the punk rock revolution when everyone else had got too old, too cynical, or too fucked on drugs.
The room was heaving, a blur of big, black army boots, stripy tops, billowing army pants, and rough-hewn, knife and fork hair. The mosh pit is kinetic limbs flailing and angular dancing to the musical dislocation a celebration of a lifestyle. A culture. Punk rock meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For some it was an excuse to get pissed and destroy, for some it was a brief soundtrack to a long-lost youthful moment of skinny madness, for some a springboard to stardom each route has its own positives. Meanwhile for others it had been a powerful, inspiring agenda.
From this platform The Ex moved forward, becoming a modern-day folk band, if folk was about clanking rhythms and mangled grooves. This is a folk band for the post-industrial age providing the commentary to a long-lost Holland of squat culture and post-apocalyptic idealism. A Holland still reeling from the fat years of hippies and dope into a bleaker post-punk world.
Over the next few decades The Ex would incorporate African rhythms, Ethiopian melodies, and musics from all over the world into their muse. It made them sound international and vibrant, but they always sounded like The Ex.
In the mid-’80s, inspired by punk, I was making a big discordant racket in the Membranes. At first we felt like outsiders, in a mid-’80s obsessed with polishing up this creative punk rumpus.
Gradually we found like-minded groups across the world. One of those was The Ex, who we made friends with in Amsterdam in 1985. Instantly we understood their post-Crass anger and intelligence. We were enthralled by their intelligence and their re-inventing of punk rock into this wonderful, clattering, highly original, rhythmic machine that all at once sounded really Dutch to a sensitive English ear.
The band were built into their culture in a way we never could be in the U.K. They were part and parcel of the Dutch squat way of life a vibrant and organised scene that they helped to soundtrack.
The Ex were right in the centre of this 24/7 3D scene. They lived in the squats and they sang the squat politic they were the clanking heartbeat of the idealism that is at the heart of all great rock music. They would move on from this, keeping the punk attitude, but were always inquisitive, looking for new sounds and new rhythms, new ways of playing till they ended up being stunningly original but with that same sharp focus.
All the time Ex frontman Sok always had the knack of boiling down the big issues into short, sharp shrapnel phrases. His direct words and direct delivery were one of the key cornerstones of the band’s sound. No matter how out there the band got musically with their free jazz and world music flavours, Sok still delivered in that direct style clear and incisive with his eyes burning with a directness matching his delivery.
The world may have got worse in the last few decades but The Ex got better and better. They stretched the fabric of creativity as far as it would go but never lost the message.
There is no duty of an artist to be political, but art demands the truth and when it’s done well, with a dark humour and incisive intellect, it can be powerfully affecting.
John Robb – Manchester, March 2011
Introduction
When I decided near the end of 2008 to leave The Ex the band I co-founded in 1979, and which I’d been a member of ever since my intention wasn’t to jump right back into music again. I wanted "to do something else for a change". As for the rest, time would tell. Or so I thought.
Because once I’d left, it occurred to me that this was as good a time as any to gather all my song lyrics from that period into one big heap. So I did and realized I was still quite happy with what I’d written over the years. The idea grew to collect them all into a book, as a kind of summary of my life as an Ex.
And then, during the course of 2009, I somehow got drawn back into music. Partly due to a couple of concerts where I joined the guitar duo Two Pin Din, and partly due to an invitation for a music project with the Toulouse-based trio Cannibales & Vahinés. There were also some internet projects, where I was asked to add vocals to instrumental tracks I was sent; and I was invited to play a role in La Divina Commedia , a theatre production of Noord Nederlands Toneel, in the second half of the year. It all made me realize that I still liked to perform and to work with words and music. That’s why I decided to include in this book, alongside all my Ex-texts since 1979, the lyrics I wrote during my first year as an ex-Ex. The full first 30 years, so to speak.
FROM SCRATCH AS SCRATCH CAN
Reading back through the stuff I wrote, I realize that much of it has a, let’s say, rather political context. And although that’s an easy way to annoy a specific kind of music lover, this was never really the plan at all. It was simply the way things went once we’d started the band. It happened in an almost natural way, due to the circumstances we found ourselves in.
The Ex started in 1979 as a punk band, meaning that we had never played instruments before and had to learn everything by starting completely from scratch. At first I tried to write personal stories, but I soon realized they were lacking any urgency, and I didn’t want to bother an audience with mindless blahblah. Instead it seemed a better idea to, one way or another, express the ideas and feelings that we as a group experienced in the Here & Now of those turbulent late-’70s. It would still be my point of view, but at the same time partly seen through the eyes of my fellow band members.
Inspiration wasn’t hard to find. All we had to do was look around the subjects lay bare everywhere, right in front of our feet. We lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and it was the Time of Punk, of Do-It-Yourself (which for us also meant: Do It Differently ), of anti-militarism and squatting. The youth unemployment rates were high, and there really was no future in sight. Our government wanted to allow the U.S. to put their cruise missiles on Dutch soil. In the big cities the demand for social housing was huge and the supply remained very poor, even when there were empty buildings everywhere. Had the country gone nuts, or what?
Abroad the situation didn’t seem to be any better, and so there were more than plenty of reasons to feel really pissed off. To make you wanna release some anger, to make you wanna do something about it. Not on your own, but together with like-minded people hence a perfect breeding ground for an alternative kind of society. Anti-militarist and anti-imperialist actions and events were organised, and empty houses, schools, and office spaces were occupied to give people a roof over their heads. The buildings got repaired and made suitable for people to live in. People started to set up their own independent shops and companies, idealistic and low-scale, often non-profit, where solidarity was more important than making money. Cool, handy, and cheap, for people with little cash to spare. They organised parties, demonstrations, benefits for good causes, and actions (against evictions of squatted houses, or in favour of volunteer teams to build schools in Central America).
Bands such as The Ex would pop up, burst out, and play at these events. We were angry about the many shapes of injustice everywhere in the world, and with our writing, singing, and making the occasional hell of a racket we supported the organisations and individuals who tried to right those wrongs.

1979, the first line-up: Geurt, Terrie, Sok, René
Playing in a band gave us the opportunity to express our opinion, to speak bluntly of the things that were ignored or twisted (either by accident or on purpose) by the official media. Even if the media did write about them, their stories were so often as far from the truth, and our own experiences, as one could imagine. We used our lyrics as a kind of antidote for all the massive stupidity that was forced upon us.
CLOG DANCING DAYS
The energy arising from the Punk Explosion was a hu