De Brassers, Live at De Sponz, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands, 14 november 1980

http://www.zshare.net/audio/60329299744b73fe/

Tracklist:
1. Rise & Fall
2. Pijn
3. De Grote Vergissing
4. Shadowplay
5. En toen was er niets meer
6. Eruit
7. Kontrole
8. Neo II

Well, this is rare and weird stuff. For those of you in Belgium and the Netherlands, armed with enough sense of history (or just old enough), this is an interesting tape. I found the tape at my brother’s house and decided to throw it on the web. De Brassers, from Hamont in Belgium, were an incredible intense, popular and rebellious post-punk band, hated by anyone who was not into punk-rock or post-punk. They scared the shit out of the local catholic community of Hamont and were embraced by many as the heroes of the punk movement around 1980. They played all possible small clubs and I have seen them perform many times. I even wrote about them in an essay I produced at school, causing turmoil among some teachers who were shocked by the anti-clerical and pornographic content of the Brassers cartoons that lightened up the text. De Brassers were a local mixture of the Sex Pistols (in the lowest gear) and Joy Division (they always performed a cover version of Joy Division’s Shadowplay), combining a criticism of bureaucracy and politics with experiences of psychological and existential tensions. Within my Jukebox Shuffle Series I hardly included Dutch or Belgian bands, but De Brassers were in there with two songs. The doomed sound they produced tells a lot about the dark atmosphere of the late seventies and early eighties: the fear of atomic bombs, cold war pessimism, police violence against squatters, the first cases of AIDS, and the grim years of Reagan & Thatcher. On their website I found out they are performing again. Anyway, in 1980 I hosted a small club called De Sponz at Oisterwijk (The Netherlands) and we booked De Brassers on the 14th of November 1980. I taped the show with my own cassette player. Another Belgian band, Struggler, supported them. The tape sounds remarkably well after all those years and I think they did a great show. My original tape contained nine songs – the encore was another version of En toen was er niets meer. I skipped that last track. If you have ever experienced De Brassers, I’m sure this will cause nostalgia.

Website: http://www.debrassers.be/
More stuff about De Sponz: http://www.siebethissen.net/Muziek_en_Popcultuur/2005_Zijkanaal_F.htm