Look, you have to see the music business a bit like a tree. Sometimes there is hardly any movement: then you work on songs in silence. And sometimes you just have to shake it. Then leaves fall, twigs, then something happens. commotion. Ben Cramer (74) likes that. He’s been shaking a lot lately and this week ran from hot (interviews) to her (tv shows). He had released a song with his daughter Shanna, she is 36, Ben emphasizes ‘pás’, because Shanna has ms. And so it is that his daughter finds it more difficult to get out of bed, has more difficulty walking (with a walking stick) and has more pain in her body than her father, who was born two years after the war (insert some swear words here). Her pain comes in waves, Ben’s sorrow comes in waves too – like everything in life. “Things come and go.”
Whatever came recently: a script, in his mail, for the telefilm Herman kills people about a man in a nursing home who kills bad people. Ben opened the text on the oversized iMac in his study and thought, Nice, another movie. He was seen in series years ago. Like Baantjer, fortunately not when the corpse: ‘That’s so dead.’ Now he plays someone in the vestibule of death: an elderly man. Or well, play, play… ‘You can just be yourself’, they had said.
Or does that mean he’s an old fashioned by nature? Nah. Only yesterday he felt the same age when he raked the leaves from his garden in Baarn. Three hours of work, then he had to sit down, have coffee with his wife Carla and the Spanish stray dog Pommetje on his back on the couch. ‘But I can still get all the notes’ and he emphatically strikes a yellowed key on his piano. Low. A B. Ben sings after him. And then a lilting ‘aaah’ three more times, each time higher. Hoppa, four octaves, straight out of his lungs. Enough for even more excitement.