Goldband brings the Scheveningen pier to Amsterdam

“Welcome to the pier here in Amsterdam”, it sounds when Goldband has just played the synthesizer ballad ‘Everything broken’ in harmony vocals. Behind the three singers from The Hague, Scheveningen can be seen to scale, a model with the characteristic buildings on stilts next to the Ferris wheel, in which the band takes a seat. The three friends themselves walk the catwalk that leads a few meters into the audience of the Afas Live.

Soon, when the eighties make way for the nineties, when the upper bodies are bare and the invented dance steps are replaced by hooligan-house, the brakes will really be released at Goldband. But before that quarter of an hour arrives, the trio has a trio of hits on Friday evening that are passionately sung along by fans dressed in band shirts and ADO scarves.

With songs full of hints to forty-year-old Dutch pop, Goldband has conquered the Netherlands in no time. They were the crowd favorite of the festival season, with a much-discussed show at Lowlands. 2023 started with the pop prize at Noorderslag, three Edisons, a riot around a line of coke on stage and the knowledge that they will sell out the Afas three times and the Antwerp Lotto Arena twice.

Huggable daredevils

But how do you keep the huggable daredevil charm intact in such large, distant rooms? The band mainly thrives on audience interaction and a bit of chaos. That is clearly not the approach of the first part of the evening, which mainly relies on album Affordable Romance. The dance steps and disco claps are nice and clumsy, but the exclamation ‘we are the makers of the night!’ sounds mainly like a promise, not practice.

The men now have a varied repertoire, enough to keep the bow stretched. How irresistibly sweet sounds ‘Children’s wish’, performed on a bench by the sea, when Milo Driessen (who with mat and moustache) sings: ‘Ecological diapers / The best for you and nature / Sweaters knitted by grandma / Nice and warm and not too expensive’. And ‘Emergency’ has long been a Nederpop classic, culminating in the backing choir that sweetly cries out for help. ‘Where’s the fucking ambulance?sings.

During the performance of the new single ‘Rommel’, remarkably enough about drug addiction, the buzz starts and Goldband threatens to lose contact for a while. Boaz Kok (the one with the red hair) himself concludes that they may have sung that ‘cunt song’ too high.

‘The promised party will only come when the sun sinks into the sea and new friends appear on the pier’

The Promised Feast

After an hour there is dancing, but the promised party only comes when the sun sinks into the sea and new friends appear on the pier. Starting with Sophie Straat calling for a woman to vote in ska hit ‘Tweede Kamer’. She has to say that she meant “of course not Caroline”. Then Maan follows for ‘Secretly’, ending in a kiss with band member Karel Gerlach (the one with a panther tattoo on the chest).

Read also: Goldband big winner of the Edison pop prizes, Antoon and Froukje also win prizes

Then the shirts are taken off and the Hague quarter hour begins, which is stretched to an hour. The introduction is the somewhat corny ‘Hotel Scheveningen’, a translation of ‘Hotel California’ for which Spike van Di-Rect and members of Son Mieux from The Hague have come along. The urban ode subtly continues in ‘Requiem’ with the exclamation “Everyone dies and so do you, and you too‘, winking to ‘About 100 years’ by Klein Orkest.

On the hooligan house of ‘Mijn stad’, supported by large Scheveningen flags, the circle pits begin and the Dutch pop synths are definitively replaced by touches of gabber and trance in Goldband style. The disco has become the club. Where in the first hour the sea was still projected behind the band, the audience now splashes against the pier in waves on ‘Witte Was’ and ‘Psycho’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB4OzAEgfD0