There are few villages in the North (and beyond) where Gimme Shelter hasn’t played. The popular Rolling Stone cover band with frontman and Mick Jager impersonator Robert van der Lippe has been winning the public’s attention for forty years. In addition to a Stone repertoire of 160 songs, they sometimes write their own songs for fun.
Today Gimme Shelter and Friends play three songs. Two own songs and one Stone cover. With Olf Meijering on guitar, Remko Wind on bass and keys and Jorris Klaassen on drums. “Over the years, the band composition has changed quite a bit,” says Robert. “If we all showed up, we would be on stage with sixty people.” That is not very surprising, because the band was founded forty years ago. Even before Robert became active as a singer. Former Skik guitarist Marco Geerdink was at the cradle of Gimme Shelter together with Theo Djanovic. “Ten years later I ended up in Drenthe as an asylum seeker from The Hague and I joined them and never left,” explains Robert.
Robert van der Lippe and Gimme Shelter are also known as creators of the famous Monday Night Music Club sessions in Emmen, where hundreds of musicians lined up to jam with each other. The stage offered Gimme Shelter the opportunity to try out some of their own songs in addition to the Stones repertoire for a modest audience.
“As a musician you also have to work a bit,” explains the singer. The band sometimes also plays occasional songs. For example, the one written by James Hunter Jacqueline. Robert borrowed the melody and wrote a Dutch text on it, especially for Jaquelien’s birthday that day. “Jacqelien had turned sixty,” he says. “Who gets his own song? Tonight we also have a party. We play for André and André also gets his own song. Arriba arriba, André André. And then some craziness around it.”