(1989, Columbia Records)

THE PREFACE

Some nitpickers would proclaim that Urk doesn’t fully qualify as a CD boxset, since it consists of only two CDs. However, I would point out that a) it was originally issued as a three-LP boxset; b) the CD version comes in one of those double-wide plastic CD cases popular at the time that could be made to hold up to four discs; and finally c) at the very least it truly qualifies as a bargain, since I paid only €3 for it (approximately US$3.25).

This particular copy (not my first of this album) was acquired on a recent trip to Amsterdam, and purchased at the 58th Mega Record & CD Fair in Brabanthallen. This image (captured by the promoters) does not really show the scale of this event, because there was a second adjoining “room” of the size seen here, with a sitting area, food vendors and a performance stage in the connecting area.

My friend The Post-Punk Monk (who’s blog is a must-read for postpunk/new wave music enthusiasts) and I spent the better part of the daylight hours going to, traversing, and crawling from this gargantuan show, sadly with surprisingly little for either of us (but a few treasures, Urk among them). The show overall had a higher representation of prog music enjoyed by the generation before us, as well as metal, neither of which are of much interest to the likes of we.

That said, we covered well over 90 percent of the event’s dealers, which was a real challenge. While we regret there wasn’t more for us to buy, our wallets thanked us — and what we did get, we were mighty pleased to have gotten.

This journey was prompted by an opportunity to see Nits in concert for the first time, after (cough) decades of following the band. That too was accomplished, and was the highlight of the Netherlands portion of the trip.

Readers may not be familiar with the band, since they are best-known in Europe. My go-to metaphor for the band’s sound is “imagine if The Beatles had started in 1974 instead of a decade earlier, influenced by the music of the 60s and 70s rather than the music of the 50s, and wrote relatively few outright love songs.”

Please do sample them on Spotify or Apple Music if that explanation intrigued you — by the late 70s you might say they were a full-on New Wave band, but really their sound has always been reflective of intelligent, artful pop songs influenced by culture, infused with truly incredible poetry, and living near the border of Western and Eastern Europe. If China Crisis and Nits ever toured together, I might die of sheer delight.

THE OVERVIEW

Urk consists of 29 songs spread out over two CDs, recorded live in various cities, from Amsterdam to Utrecht to Moscow, during the winter of 1988-89. Many if not all of the songs on Urk were popular or fan-favourite songs from across their most popular albums.

It would be fair to call it a live version of their “greatest hits” to that point, and the album itself ended up in the top 10 charts for The Netherlands. It was, for many years, their all-time best-selling album. Urk was originally released in the summer of ‘89.

By the time of this recording, Henk Hofstede (the lead singer, writer, and guitarist) and Rob Kloet (the drummer/percussionist), the two original members, had been joined by Robert Jan Stips (sometimes producer and full-time keyboard maestro, still with the group to this day) and bassist Joke Geraets. Geraets, shortly after these live recordings, had to quit the band due to her ongoing medical issues.

Nits (who had recently dropped the “The” from their name) were supplemented on the 1988-89 tour by the Amsterdam Saxophone Quartet on the Amsterdam portion of this tour. Seeing the band in Amsterdam this year, their only accompaniment was a trio of excellent background singers. For the bulk of the performances here, it is just the four-piece version of the band, with the members themselves handling backgroud vocals.

In addition to the spacious CD storage case, the package includes a full-colour booklet including tour photographs, credits, and track listings.

THE ALBUM

After a short bit of welcomingly warm audience applause, there is a cross-fade to a lovely classic from the band, “The Train,” which originally debuted on their 1988 album Hat. It’s a gorgeously melancholic song (and yet rather jaunty in tempo) about a lost love and the sadness, vulnerability, and self-examination that often follows such separations.

In the original version, the first set of verses is followed by a longish instrumental break, where the sound of a train arriving in the station comes to dominate all but the never-stopping sound of Kloet’s sharp tapping rhythm. The song then picks up again, repeating the lyrics in full until it ends with the narrator reflecting on himself in the mirror-like windows of the train, asking himself “Hey, whatcha doing with your life?”

The next song segues right in with no audience noise. “Adieu Sweet Bahnhof,” the title track of their 1984 album, starts off with a carnival-like organ opening, Henk describing riding for what seems like hours in a train (making this a clever lyrical transition from the previous song), presumably leaving from Amsterdam and passing through Brussells on his way to Paris.

Listening to this version for this review, the song struck an even deeper note with me, as I took this very same journey on my return from Amsterdam to see the Nits perform — reflecting on this trip, and time spent in Europe from my own past.

In the concert I attended, this song was the final encore of the evening, and as it began the Dutch audience, familiar with the song, again applauded it warmly. “My train of thoughts is leaving … tonight!” is such a great little lyric.

It is very Nits to have a song title that uses words in English, French, and German interchangeably — “bahnhof” meaning “station” in German. Who the heck writes a song wishing a train station a fond farewell?

It should be mentioned for those not familiar with Nits that the band themselves are Dutch but sing almost exclusively in English apart from the occasional non-English word or phrase.

The overall effect of the song is again centered around a person who is sorting out his thoughts around the changes in his life, again making for a fine pairing with the first song. The last verse is another fabulous construction of vivid imagery:

Now like an arrow we’re aimed at Gare du Nord
Between backs of the houses streets like fjords
And the night falls over Paris
So I’ve come back to the Hotel d’Angleterre
I lay down on a double bed and stare
At the ceiling – what a feeling (to be back)

Gare du Nord is the destination train station for Eurostar in Paris, and I also arrived there on my own journey back. As the song ended, the audience applause returned before a final flourish from Stips to enthusiastic applause.

As someone else once said, Hofstede and his bandmates have an unrivaled ability to write songs as “little emotional postcards.” Next, they went straight into one of their biggest hits, “J.O.S. Days,” from the autobiographical 1987 album In the Dutch Mountains, about Henk’s early days of school and athletics. The driving guitar line and some “wailing” synth sounds keeps the “train” motif going a bit longer, though the song has nothing to do with trains.

J.O.S. stands for “Jeugd Organisatie Sportclub,” with “Jeugd” meaning “Youth.” Henk’s grandfather Jakob helped found the group, and it was a “family tradition” for boys in the family to play. Henk’s nephews, “dumb but tall” starting “kicking the ball” in the womb. Henk, however, was cursed with flat feet and “weak knees,” and got booted from the team after his first practice game.

The song also touches on the dark after-effects of the Second World War on young Henk and the club. There was a memorial erected after the war between the football fields, with the names of team members who had died. He notes that “they thought they would win, like in their J.O.S. days.”

This leads to a song about war, 1983’s “Sketches of Spain,” from the Kilo EP. Again, the marriage of the sad lyrics and the superb musicianship makes for a compelling listen about a subject nobody wants to talk about. Accompanying Henk on vocals is an uncredited female vocalist, presumably Joke, adding a nice effect not present in the original version. Stips backs Hofstede on vocals in what passes for the chorus.

And we next swing round to the biggest hit the band ever had, practically a national anthem — “In the Dutch Mountains,” from the album of the same name. Remarkably, the arrangements of the live songs follow the record versions as closely as possible — a feat managed thanks to the band’s frequent habit of recording the songs live-in-studio as much as possible.

At the concert I attended, the audience “filled in” with the band on the spoken-word repetition of “Mountains” — clearly a long-time audience favourite.

The song is mostly joyous in nature, and funny — there are very few if any actual mountains in The Netherlands. There is one part, however, that suddenly turns quiet and still, right in the middle of the song:

I lost a button on my shirt today
It fell on the ground and it was rolling away
Like a trail leading me back
To the Dutch mountains

Poetry and visual imagery on this level is rare in pop music, but Nits are the masters of it.

From here we go to “The Dream,” a song very similar in style to “The Train,” and like the former, it’s from Hat — and similarly, it’s a described painting barely within a traditional pop song structure. The main lyrics are contemplative, while the chorus is joyous, and gives the musicians room to play. Stip’s flute-like synth touches are just … (chef’s kiss).

“The Swimmer” comes from In the Dutch Mountains. This one literally describes some other dreams, in shorter bursts and once again with sections where the musicians can throw different motifs in the mix, this time a bit of tango that goes awry before settling back down. Henk is again backed up on vocals by Joke.

Rob Kloet’s understated percussion thus far comes to the fore in the introduction to “The House,” again from Hat, hitting glasses to create the band’s now-trademark “ting” sound. Organ sounds come in as the tinging recedes. The slower, haunting vocal in a lower register (from Stips) is so effective against Henk’s haunting mantra: “Time’s slipping away.”

We revisit the Dutch Mountains album for “Two Skaters,” one of the band’s more surreal dream-inspired songs. A very understated number with shimmering guitars, but it would never in a million years be played on a soft-rock station.

I am always much bemused by the stanza: “Your sister in Canada/She’s sending an LP of the Velvet Underground/We’re steaming the walls of your brother’s old room/Peel slowly and listen.” Gee, I wonder which VU album that was? 🙂

Another big favourite of mine, “Cabins” comes from the 1986 Henk EP, and is a great song to sing from the bow of a boat. The synth-heavy original arrangement is altered and the pace quickened on this version, but the enthusiastic audience claps along, because it’s a happy little number and one of my all-time favourites.

Another hit, “Nescio,” starts off with a barely-accompanied piano and spoken-sung second verse before starting proper. Once the music kicks in, the audience applauds in recognition. Oddly, the song list printe on the CD and booklet list “Nescio,” but the last on the back card of the box mistakenly skips it.

Parts of the song are in Italian, with the title meaning “I don’t know.” So the first verse (pardon my weak grasp of Italian) runs like so:
I don’t know
This paradise
I don’t know
In the wolf’s mouth
I don’t know
The stranger is dead
I don’t know
This paradise

The furious acoustic guitar by Henk alongside the snares of Kloet and madcap piano of Stips is the band at its best. The last line in Italian, by the way, translates to “The painting is beautiful (Questo quadro e bello).”

“Pelican & Penguin,” from Dutch Mountains, features cocks’ crows, accordion, and a horn section, making for a very different sound. Lots of odd sounds and vocalized noises on this one.

The penultimate number on this disc is “Telephone Song,” a real rarity from the earliest days of the band, before even their first album. It’s a very quirky number (Joke is on lead vocal, for starters), and hasn’t appeared on any of their official releases apart from this one, to the best of my knowledge.

Similarly, “Dapperstreet” has only ever appeared on this album. It’s a slow, thoughtful number that wouldn’t have been out of place on Hat that shows off more sophisticated songwriting than “Telephone Song.”

Next time: Disc 2!