After almost half a century of de Nits, this is the best thing: the band is always looking for adventure

‘It is difficult to just make music in these barbaric times’, says singer Henk Hofstede (70) van de Nits to the audience sitting in front of him in the Great Hall of TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht. Since a few weeks, the Nits have also been allowed to enter the halls again. But getting up every morning with the thought: tonight we are going to play nice is not easy in this time. But you have to play, maybe right now.

War was never far away in the repertoire that Hofstede has built up over the past 47 years with his Nits. It plays a role in many songs, he says earlier in the evening as the band plays the song Hawelka† Bearing in mind the situation in Ukraine, the song from 2009 (‘too many soldiers are dead’) takes on a current meaning, especially in the powerful version in which it is performed. Together with Nits drummer from the very beginning Rob Kloet and keyboardist Robert-Jan Stips, who has also been playing along occasionally for about forty years, Hofstede has completed their tour on the occasion of the album Knot that appeared at the end of 1999 arrested again. The pandemic meant that the adventurous, somewhat experimental new work was rarely performed live. And no sooner had the tour repacked than the war in Ukraine began. That actuality makes that Hawelka isn’t the only song you’ll listen to differently. But Hofstede takes the audience just as convincingly to the remarkable encounters that take place in his recent songs. This is how come in Ultramarine Bob Dylan and Claude Monet meet in the London Savoy hotel and classify the Belgian rock singer Arno Hintjens Dead Rat Ball on the beach of Ostend, under the watchful eye of James Ensor, shrimp croquettes out to Marvin Gaye.

‘That is only possible in a song,’ says Hofstede when he Ultramarine introduces. The beautiful fact works so well here because these new songs are given an equally surrealistic decoration. And that is perhaps the best thing after almost half a century of Nits live: the band is always looking for adventure. Also in the new songs that will be released on a new album after the summer.

Hofstede, Stips and Kloet are also just the three of them in Utrecht, but they put down a great, but never bombastic sound. A joy to watch too. Stips constantly fidgeting with his sometimes baroque, usually unpredictable chords from his keyboard, Hofstede himself taking center stage on acoustic guitar that occasionally, as in Machine Machine , adds electronic accents to Stips’ playing. Kloet is surrounded by an arsenal of drums and other sound generators that has grown over the years, and is much more than a solid drummer. He is the kind of percussionist who makes other rhythm musicians redundant and forms a band in his own right. Pop music has few trios that have sworn by the triumvirate for so long, but here it is impossible to think of a fourth musician.

The sound is impeccable. Gradually the concert, as in the new The Ghost Ranch Joni Mitchell has been introduced to artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and you notice that Hofstede lets many of his musical heroes (Dylan, Mitchell, Leonard Cohen) pass by, you realize that David Bowie and The Beatles should be included. We have known Hofstede’s John Lennon-like shrill vocals for decades. But especially in the songs of Knot (that really come to life live) it’s the voice of David Bowie on Blackstar who also shows up on Saturday.