Thursday 12 September 2013

Just To Please You - My Best Attempt

at trying to translate the interspersed utterings



Number One, everybody on Jan:

Renaud: Jan, everybody regards him like Chris Martin from Coldplay.
Bert: A multi-instrumentalist, very talented genre player. If obstacles have to be cleared/ the knot has  to be cut, if Jan says  'Yes', then it will be 'Yes'.
Renaud: Enormously powerful!




Number Two, everybody on Jakob:

Bert: Jakob was the last to join us, he is the youngest member of the band. Nevertheless he has been with us for a long time now, so this does not really matter. It was not easy for him because in the beginning we were just a group of four, we performed without drums, for years we had been doing this and at a certain moment he has joined us. Yet, we felt that this is what we would be doing from then on. He is a drummer who understands this, songs and their structure. How you have to deal with this.
 Jan: That's not bad.


Number Three, everybody on Sergej:

Bert: And Sergej is also a multi-talented instrumentalist bass, contrabass, keyboard, vocals, beats sometimes, though not really for Absynthe Minded yet, but 'You never know'. Autodidact!
Jan: The techie of the band. All the time busy looking for better material, looking for a solution, the link between the crew and the band (True, in Krefeld he also was, though he was a little bit sulky, telling the crew to leave it, Daniela). He is the bridge between these two.
Bert: The software and the hardware he knows everything about it, interface, also recording. After all our first demo was recorded at his house in Ghent at the Dampoort (not so sure about "Dampoort", but that's what I've understood ;) ).


Number Four, everybody on Renaud:

Bert: Golden boy - I've founded the band with him. Together in an apartement we too the decision to form a band and he said that he knew a fairly good bassist, Sergej, and then I said that I knew a fairly good pianist, Jan, and then we formed the band. He believed one of my demos to be very good and so we got to know each other.
Renaud: I had a  taste to do something old-style, "Club de France" (probably he is referring to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Club_de_France ), something jazzy, pop jazz, including strings, some swing.
Bert: In the meantime the violin has been heavily oversteered, you won't recognize it as a violin. He is somebody who is experimenting with sound. Just like all of us. And yes...
Renaud: Merci!


Number Five, everybody on Bert:

Renaud: Bert is our mate, he is our mate, the band's songwriter. He writes more and more beautiful songs, he has always done it. When I got his first demo about ten years ago, I thought it unbelievable what he was doing. This was very original pop music. That's what intrigues me about Bert, his struggle to make wonderful pop music.
Sergej: Businesswise, he does whatever a frontman has to do, he sometimes 'sells his own grandmother' (the original Dutch expression, the same as in German btw, would translate: 'walks over corpses'), that's alright, in some situations it is good. He simply does what a bandleader has to do, making decisions.
Jan: He is the great power driving us ahead, he does not like to stand still, he wants things to get ahead. This is good for us as a band. And a good singer.
Renaud: You cannot look past us any more, we are a fixed mark in Belgian pop music - Voilà, he has done it: Bert Ostyn.
Voice from the off: Bad driver though.



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