Purmerend in the spell of the gabber
Yet the book is more than a personal document. It is also a portrait of the Purmerend of the nineties. Various locations that played an important role in the gabbers scene come by.
It shows that the gabber culture was omnipresent in ‘the town’, says Kinsbergen. “It all started in 1991 in Rotterdam. Then it blew over to Amsterdam and within a year you saw the first signs here. That soon took on a large form. First boys appeared at school in Australian. Then the music became more and more popular. Before you knew it, hundreds of teenagers called themselves Gabber.”
Disappeared but not forgotten
During a walk with Kinsbergen through the city it becomes clear that little of that gabbers scene is left. The buildings are still there, but the physical traces of youth culture have disappeared. Yet that doesn’t matter to him. When he walks past the old places, the memories automatically come to the surface again.
We walk into a narrow alley, behind his old high school – at the time the Prince Willem Alexander Mavo. It results in a fence with a hole, a passage with which he unseen the schoolyard unseen.
“It all started at this school,” he grins. “At first I was quite a maverick. At home we didn’t have it wide and I had a full bunch of red hair. But then I discovered the gabbers. I started dressing as much as them and noticed that I was better accepted. It was a nice flight for me. In a training suit I could occur if someone else than I was.”
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