Marco Schuitmaker is incredibly criticized by Ben Cramer, who seems to be somewhat jealous of the singer of De Engelbewachter. “Then I’m scratching my head and thinking: huh?!”
83-year-old Ria Valk has tipped 77-year-old Ben Cramer as a coach for The Voice of Holland, if RTL really dares to return that program to television. And it seems like Ben is starting to believe in that a little bit now. “I would like that too and pay attention to things that others don’t even think about,” he says in the Weekend.
Ben wants to be in Voice
Ben thinks he would make a good Voice coach. “If you portray an older person like me, someone might say: ‘Why? It’s a program for young people!’ But if you look at England, for example, there is a Tom Jones in The Voice. That still makes jaws drop and I think people would have that with me too.”
“He is 83 but still sings like crazy. And luckily I still do that myself. He is still active, a real icon, that is wealth. Every now and then he spontaneously starts singing in that jury chair and then you see the other jury members thinking: ‘What is happening here? That guy sings everyone to Our Lord!’ I think that’s what Ria Valk meant to me.”
‘Wow!’
Actually, Ben is a bit like the Tom Jones of the Netherlands, he thinks. “I often hear it when I perform somewhere, that people say: ‘Wow, but we didn’t know this! There’s someone who knows what he’s talking about. I’m lucky that I still have that voice and haven’t had to sacrifice any height or charisma.”
Anyway: if he were in that chair, would he be playing for Marco Schuitmaker? Ben performed in his Gelredome concert. “No, I wouldn’t get excited about it. That boy can really sing. I heard him when I performed as a surprise act with Mieke and Jacques Herb in the Gelredome. We paid tribute to Father Abraham.”
Key signature
Marco sings ‘impeccably clean’, according to Ben, but according to him that is not enough. “It’s not just singing a song, there has to be something in that voice in terms of key, intonation, singing small, singing big, you name it. Guardian Angel is not a song that you need to be very good at singing. Anyone can sing that.”
Marco’s success seems to sting Ben anyway. “He was just standing in the GelreDome with 15 to 16,000 people. Yep, that’s how it goes these days. When someone like me – who has been at it for so long – sees that, I sometimes really scratch my head and think: huh?! But of course that is also due to social media. So much has changed.”
Performance
Ben’s performance at Marco: