Next year it will be 40 years since Doe Maar decided to stop. It was the spring of 1984 and the members of the band were increasingly burdened by the overwhelming success. The dissolution felt like a liberation. Certainly also for Ernst Jansz from Neerkant. The man with whom every teenage boy was in love at the time turned 75 this year. He just finished recording a new album that will probably be released sometime in the spring. He talks about it on Wednesday in the TV program ‘KRAAK. asks further’ from Omroep Brabant.
On his new album he sings about his parents’ love story. How his mother, a poverty-stricken girl from East Amsterdam, met his father during a dance evening on Rembrandtplein. The boy she was with that evening could not waltz and then a young student from the Dutch East Indies took his chance. And while waltzing she knew: this is it.
This time Ernst Jansz is again making an album with a book, as he previously did about his youth in Amsterdam and about the 1970s in the hippie commune in Neerkant. “I wanted to make happy songs,” he says. “A bit like the early Beatles. That fits well with my parents’ love story.” They also went through difficult times after their meeting. Especially during the war when they were both in the resistance.
Ernst Jansz was born shortly after that war. A neat childhood in which he played a lot of Chopin on the piano to the pleasure of his father and he studied biology after high school. But that didn’t interest him and when his father died, he felt free to change tack. He joined the band CCC inc. to play. The members of that band and supporters moved to a farm in Neerkant in 1970. To the horror of the local population, who didn’t like that group of long-haired hippies at all.
Although Ernst’s mother must have been disappointed with the path Ernst chose, she never showed it. “I then decided: I want to be like that for my children.”
Ernst was the only one from the then commune to continue living in Neerkant. Here he founded Doe Maar in 1978. “I wanted to sing about the things in my life, in an understandable language. Not in English anymore like with CCC.” They had little success in the first years. “People turned their backs on us, pop music was only possible in English. “
That changed drastically when Henny Vrienten, who died last year, joined Doe Maar. “At first he didn’t want to. He said: nice music, but you can’t earn a living with Dutch speaking. Later he called back: I’ll do it anyway. He came in with three great songs.” These all appeared on the album ‘Skunk’ in 1981, which started Doe Maar’s triumphant march.
Ernst Jansz sometimes thinks back to the overwhelming fame that he received at that time. “It’s actually impossible. Everyone makes you very big, and that is difficult to reconcile with the small person behind it.”
Ernst Jansz’s new album will probably be released this spring. It was recorded at the Trypoul Recording Studios in Neerkant within walking distance of his former hippie farm. The album only needs to be mixed. But the book is not finished yet. “I really have to start working on that now,” he says, “but then all those songs came at once, so that had to be done first.”
‘CREAK. asks further’ is broadcast every Wednesday at 5.15 pm and then repeated. The program can also be viewed online and via Brabant+. There is also the podcast ‘KRAAK. asks further’.