They got a call from Miggy’s angry daughter. Miggy had had a big pop hit in 1981 with ‘Annie’. In it she talked about a disappointing evening at the disco: “Annie, can you hold my hand for a moment/ Because that guy wants to dance with me.” More than forty years after that one-off success, John Schoorl and Paul Onkenhout unveiled de Volkskrant that Miggy had not sung the song herself. Those were two studio singers. However, the two had young children, preferred to work in the shadows, and did not want to tour. So Miggy was put forward.
Journalist John Schoorl: “And her daughter now had to read in the Volkskrant that her mother had not sung it at all. So that was sad actually.”
Journalist Paul Onkenhout: “But it was true, three or four people confirmed it. ‘Annie’ was our biggest scoop.”
For years, Schoorl and Onkenhout had a column in the Volkskrant in which they discussed name songs: pop songs with a first name as a title. They bundled them earlier in the book And Venus was her name. Now the successor has appeared: Her name was Lola.
According to the book, Miggy’s Annie success came with shortcomings anyway: “Suddenly found in the world of tinsel and hungry men who wanted to ride on the success, the student nurse almost died. She sometimes worked four performances a day on weekends and was assaulted during a concert in Zeeland.”
Willempie
Her name was Lola is full of heartbreaking, startling, witty stories like this. ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Rosanna’, ‘Willempie’, ‘Sunny’ – 110 sung women and men are given a place in this rich overview, which, according to the makers, immediately offers the history of seventy years of pop music.
It started during the corona period, when the walls were closing in on them. They figured it out de Volkskrant the section The Fifth Beatlein which they weekly portrayed a wide range of people who had more or less something to do with The Beatles – from producer George Martin to the Dutch real estate king Maup Caransa. The form of the section sounded strict, but in fact gave the duo great freedom to take endless side roads. This also applies to the two name books that followed.
Schoorl: “We walked through the Grote Markt in Haarlem at night. I think we had been drinking.”
Onkenhout: “Certainly yes.”
Schoorl: “And then we thought: our next project should be about songs with names. Songs that only have a first name as a title. No additions, so not ‘Belle Helene’ or ‘Lovely Rita’ or ‘Hey Jude’.”
Onkenhout: “At first we only wanted name songs about women. But a female editor said that we should also do men’s names. We initially thought that was too woke, but we are modern men so we quickly moved along.”
Schoorl: “It also turned out to be interesting to broaden it in this way. Otherwise we would only have had odes from strong men to weak girls.”
Jet
Sometimes the songs are about a real person, sometimes about someone made up, sometimes about a rat. For example, ‘Ben’ by Michael Jackson is about the friendship between a leader of a violent rat gang and a boy with a weak heart.
Schoorl: “Paul McCartney has a song about his dog Jet. But it could also be about his pony. Although the pony was also called Jet, but according to ‘Macca’ expert Yorick van Norden, it only came to the family later. In the 1970s, Paul lived on a farm with his wife Linda. When they had to go to the recording studio, Linda missed the animals. So they once took the pony to the studio.”
Onkenhout: “In some cases it is clear who it is about. For example, ‘Julia’ by the Beatles is about John’s mother. But there are also plenty of examples where no one knows who it is about. Then we keep searching until we find a story.”
Onkenhout: “Sometimes we started from the artist. We felt that we couldn’t make two of those books without Bowie being in them. But it was difficult to find a song by name of him.”
Schoorl: “Eventually we came up with ‘Lazarus’, his swan song, with the story about the palliative doctor who applauded the fact that Bowie was so open about his own chosen death. I didn’t even know that Lazarus was a first name, I thought it was drunk, but Paul knew it was someone from the Bible.”
Paul: “We wanted the important artists in it, but also all genres. So after Johnny Jordaan comes John Coltrane. And all eras. So not only the sixties and seventies, which we ourselves are quite focused on, but also new artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, to show that we are not completely backward.”
Marja
Miggy’s daughter was not the only one to respond to the newspaper column. Schoorl: “We received hundreds of responses from readers, mostly older men with record cabinets who pointed out an error to us, or who themselves came up with fifty suggestions of name songs.”
Onkenhout and Schoorl were brought before the Journalism Council last year. That was the song ‘Marja’ by Chiel Montagne from 1972. Schoorl: “Montagne performed in Willem Duys’ goldfish program. But then he suddenly had to sing that song live and he couldn’t do that at all. It became a disaster.”
According to the then orchestra leader of the TV program, there was no truth in that story, so he went to the Journalism Council. According to him, Montagne knew very well that he had to sing live, he had even rehearsed, and the performance went well. The journalists’ defense was that they based themselves on an interview by Montagne himself and that they had clearly attributed the anecdote to him. The Council declared the orchestra leader’s complaint unfounded.
Kaya
Onkenhout: „The great thing about the two books is that we have unknowingly written the history of pop music. A kind of encyclopedia, actually.”
Schoorl: The first book was chronological, this one is alphabetical. History is never chronological.”
Not all major pop artists are included. John: “You know who we don’t have? Bob Marley. Well, not everyone had a name song. Bob Marley does have a song called ‘Kaya’. But that turned out to be about marijuana.”
Paul Onkenhout and John Schoorl.
Photo Bonnita Postma
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