Meindert Talma and De Jonge Boschfazant breathe new life into the protest song. Relativizing, with inner and outer rhyme

It happens every month in the Kroeg van Klaas in Groningen. The Meindert & Teuin & The Young Bosch Pheasant & Kesanova Show. Trials, experiments, new things.

The Young Bosch Pheasant, Adriaan Bosch, invents stories with found photo albums, or even pictures that have nothing to do with each other, for example. And every month he sends a text to Meindert Talma, the gnarled bard of Noordhorn , who then turns it into a song. Sometimes slightly modified.

With inner and outer rhyme

“Adriaan’s choruses are often a bit long, I make them shorter. I change such small things, but it remains his text.” With inner and outer rhyme in every song, he would like to add.

“I haven’t heard about tomorrow’s one yet,” says De Jonge Boschfazant from Westeremden – he originally comes from Oldeholtpade. Because they still do it every second Thursday of the month in Klaas’ Pub. Of course that was not possible in corona time, in the pub, imagine. Then the whole thing was streamed from pop stage Vera, also in Groningen.

Das Audio Combo, with organ knight André Dodde, wanted to do the accompaniment, from Vera. And that’s how the songs ended up on the record. The title scandalous covers the load. That comes from a board that Kees de Vries, the Kesanova, once made – usable at all kinds of demonstrations. (The fourth permanent member of staff is Teun de Vries (22), comedian and drummer, and replacement for Igor Wijnker.)

The lyrics of De Jonge Boschfazant are usually quite outspoken. Protest songs, so to speak. “It is nice to make a claim,” says Bosch, who was once trained – but not quite – as a philosopher.

The protest song, in the spirit of Armand

At the time, around 2015, the men thought it would be good to breathe new life into the protest song. Armand, Bosch has interviewed him on occasion, had just died and the genre should not go down with him. “Adriaan is not a man of very personal texts.”

According to Bosch, we should not always take his texts seriously. “We do something about it sometimes.” But Talma sees it differently. “His general tenor is, I think: people, you have to look at each other in a reasonable way, we have the world and we have to deal with it in a good way, with each other.”

The protest song has since made a nice comeback, see Hang Youth and other young rebels. Compared to that generation, Talma thinks Bosch has a more relativistic view. “That he looks at things from a distance, in a reasonable way.” Bosch then mainly thinks of the number The future : ” Every vision or view has its own right / Make every story a bit global’. “Sometimes it’s a bit anthropological, isn’t it?”

The Young Bosch Pheasant as mayor, as chief

The years he spent in Africa (Zambia and Malawi), at the side of his wife, who is a doctor, also slightly adjusted that view, although Bosch is the first to put that effect into perspective. Talma and the whole club of friends have visited there once. “They wanted him there as mayor, if chief .”

On scandalous De Jonge Boschfazant makes himself angry about various matters in a reasonable and putting it into perspective, often in a duet with Talma. The power of populism , the opening statement, speaks for itself: ‘The power of populism / The popu, popu, popu populism’. Or take Poverty sower : ‘No Grolsch braces, but a can of Schültebrau / No Heinz, but Tomango Ketchup’.

But there is also room for more sober observations, such as A trip with the sailboat . Complete with a reference to conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader from Winschoten – who died exactly that way (somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, admittedly).

A little more Nietzsche

Bosch’s background in philosophy emerges in A little more Nietzsche . He has made many more songs about philosophers for their show, says Talma, but they may be on a next album. So that might leave room for observations like ‘Karl Popper is a top player’ or ‘Heidegger, things are not going very well’. “It can be done,” says Talma.

This is Talma’s nineteenth album. He has already sent his next record, in demo form, to his bandmates to record next summer. This also includes another book, the next part in his autobiographical novel cycle.

There are enough songs with De Jonge Boschfazant on the shelf for another album, and Talma also wants to do more with his stories. Bosch: ,,But then I have to have an extra life.”