Pierre Kartner has passed away at the age of 87. BNDeStem reports this. According to the newspaper, Kartner, who became famous as Father Abraham, died on Tuesday.
With a bowler hat and a beard glued on, Pierre Kartner stormed the Dutch charts in 1971 to become one of the most successful artists in the Dutch Top 40 ever. And he owes this mainly to his creation as Father Abraham. He had come up with this for his carnival hit ‘Father Abraham had seven sons’. It became his trademark, he would never let go of the image of the Biblical figure.
But he gained even greater fame, also internationally, a few years later with his Smurf song. He wrote the song for a cartoon about the blue gnomes. The single immediately entered the Top 40 at number 1 and became a worldwide success. The Smurfs album that followed has sold 18 million copies worldwide. Pierre Kartner would forever be associated with the Smurf song. When a new Smurf film appeared in 2011, German television channels in particular were queuing up for the singer from Breda.
Kartner was extremely prolific and successful as a composer and producer. He wrote 1600 songs that earned him 127 gold records. This includes classics such as ‘Manuela’, which he wrote for Jacques Herb and ‘He was only a clown’, sung by Ben Cramers. For Corrie Konings, then still with the Rekels, he wrote the success song ‘Crying is too late for you’ in the 1960s. The song about a broken relationship was the most successful Dutch-language single for almost 43 years.
Political indictment
Much more social was the song he used in 1974 to denounce the oil boycott that was going on at the time: ‘Den Uyl is in den olie’. He sang it together with the politician Boer Koekoek. In 2002 he recorded the single ‘Wimmetje goes, Pimmetje comes’ with Pim Fortuyn. The party song for Liveable Netherlands went against the rule of then Prime Minister Wim Kok, but it was taken out of circulation after the murder of Pim Fortuyn.
His attempt to get a foot in the door at the Eurovision song contest ended in a fiasco. Singer Sieneke did not make the final in 2010 with the song ‘Sha-la-lie’, written by Pierre Kartner.
small cafe
In 1976, Pierre Kartner was waiting for a journalist in a small cafe in a harbor. He described this situation in a song that marked his international breakthrough: ‘The little café on the harbour’ has been covered no less than 180 times, according to Kartner, including by Nana Mouskouri and Demis Roussos. He himself sang the song in different languages, from German (‘Die kleine Kneipe’) to Japanese.
But not everything was a success. In 1996 he launches a new carnival issue: ‘As long as your panty liner is right’. The Dutch radio station Radio 2 finds it distasteful and ‘substandard’ and does not play it.
Although he himself often complained that he didn’t get the attention he deserved, especially ‘Hilversum’ failed to run it in his heyday as well, he has been honored several times. At the age of eighty, he finally received the recognition of his colleagues when he received the Buma Lifetime Achievement for his entire oeuvre.
Kartner more or less died in harness. Until the very end he was incredibly popular in the elderly circuit and students also regularly hired him. Modest as he was, he drove to those gigs in his own BMW. Although he has been out of the spotlight in recent years.
Pierre Kartner leaves behind a wife and son.