Henny Huisman does not lose sleep over Henk Westbroek’s ugly swipe at his address. He doesn’t think the singer is relevant enough to take seriously. “He’s a grumpy man.”
A few weeks ago, Henk Westbroek lashed out at Henny Huisman in the talk show Marcel & Gijs. The singer is not exactly warm to Henny’s participation in the television show Beter Laat Dan Nooit. “Henny Huisman is a man who mainly knows the word ‘I’ of the personal pronouns.”
Grumpy man
What does Henny think of such a sneer, as if he were a self-centered man? “I heard it, yes. Well, Henk Westbroek is of course always a bit of a grumpy man, but I don’t really care what he says,” says the former television star in the weekly magazine Party.
Henny thinks Henk is not relevant enough. “If someone like André van Duin had said something like that about me, it would have touched me. But Henk Westbroek… Well, he doesn’t know me at all for the rest.”
Lost vote
Long ago, the gentlemen sometimes met during the recording of a Best Singers-like program, says Henny. In it, artists sang each other’s songs. “Henk Westbroek did the song ‘Kronenbrug Park’ by Frank Boeijen, which contains this line of text: ‘And don’t ask for directions, because everyone has lost their way!’”
And then? “I had told Henk beforehand that it might be nice if he would sing ‘everyone has lost their voice’, as an allusion to the switching of the artists and their songs. But I shouldn’t interfere, I was told. He was a lyricist and he would be fine with it. But in the evening he did.”
Henry’s idea
Afterwards, everyone complimented Henk for singing it that way, says Henny. “He received the compliments warmly and gratefully, but he didn’t add that it was Henny’s idea. That was thirty years ago.”
He concludes: “It’s strange that he has that image of me, that I say so much ‘I, I, I’. I’m happy to admit that I like being in a magazine or newspaper, I dye my hair and I’m vain, that’s all right. But bragging about myself or always wanting to be at the front, I don’t recognize myself in that.”