GEPOPEL - Dutch punk as it best! (Interview)
by jhonny contencioso
From early to mid eighties Gepopel were doing noise for you amigo,much noise and very well done!.Now Noise and distortion records is going to release all their stuff so check it out. Anyway they will not include the first demo "No one can stop advance" that I consider also very great. In a different way the songs of the first demo were less hardcore and more lo-fi punk, similir to urinals, some chain gang...conga conga!! here you have the link to download it
http://eetusmakelijk.blogspot.com/
In this interview Niels talks about this demo, the recordings of the first songs, memories of the band ... and more things,, interesting, of course!
Here..s the link to download some songs of the "Paracide" 7".
http://www.kbdrecords.com/2006/04/08/gepopel-paracide-ep-7/
NIELS - GEPOPEL
I'm 40 years old now; I was born in the Summer (OK, autumn) of Love and had the typical 70's childhood of flared trousers, brown wallpaper and Mortadelo Y Filemon comics. I hated 70's music; preferred listening to old Beatles, Kinks and Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band records I'd poach from my hippie uncles. Even then, I already made noise with my little brother, banging on buckets and stuff, which gradually evolved into a 'band' by the time I was 12. We'd already record stuff onto an old tape recorder, using 'Sound-on-Sound' to stack multiple voices/ instruments, so when I got into punk I already knew a little about writing/ recording. Punk was the Big Bang I'd been waiting for, the music that made me feel 'YEAHHH! This is happening NOW and ANYTHING is possible!' That's when I (my brother never cared about punk) started recording a shitload of songs, often a song a day (after school), in the attic. My school buddies had started a band called Indirekt, and unlike me, they'd never ever played a note of music before. This didn't stop them from putting out a tape a couple of months after forming; I loved the tape (and designed its booklet) and immediately set about putting together my own tape, which came out a month later, March 1983. The tape was called 'No One Can Stop Advance' and the 'band' was Gepopel (Dutch for 'scum' or 'mob', very Punk!).....
ha ha ha sounds good that about 'Mortadelo y Filemon', just like my childhood ;)... I think they had a different name outside spain... in Germany they are called 'Clever and Smart'........
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Actually in Holland they were called Paling & Ko! Indirekt’s bespectacled soundman/ 5th member was nicknamed Ko, I’m not sure if it was after the comic, but most of my friends were fans. I once painted a big F. Ibanez-style crocodile head on my (Sack-o’-Woes) bandmate Joost’s bass, it’s on the cover of our 10 inch.. (too bad it wasn’t an Ibanez bass).....
- The stuff on your first demo is different to the kind of music you did later, but different to many bands you evolved more rough and less melodic… ....
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When I recorded those early Gepopel tracks, in 1982/ early '83, there was lots of different music around that I liked: anything from The Jam, Killing Joke or Joy Division to stuff like Crass, Discharge and great Dutch bands like The Ex, Nitwitz, Gotterfliez... So the Gepopel songs reflected that diversity. I had a very primitive setup: an old drum set with broken cymbals, a 5 Watt guitar amp, Eastern Bloc guitar, and my father's trusty reel-to-reel recorder. Often, I'd directly plug in my guitar into the tape deck, sometimes using a wah-wah pedal pushed all the way into treble; that would give an amazingly in-your-face shimmering sound, sorta like Husker Du or Geza X got. Or I'd put distortion on the bass, or play back the vocals over a tinny speaker, getting a megaphone-like sound. 25 years on, I'm still amazed at how some of that stuff sounds.......
Right at the time I put out that first tape, my musical taste shifted into more extreme punk; all the more 'New Wavey' acts had either broken up or gone disco by then, and (with a 2 year time lapse) American Hardcore landed on these shores, destroying everything in sight! I got totally into HC, which was also an easier kind of music to play with the 'real' band I was putting together. That that band included one of the fastest drummers of all time, Erik Jansen (RIP), also helped to obliterate Gepopel's eclectic beginnings...!....
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-I played one time with the Ex in valencia ,, and it is one of the better shows I have play in and one of the better live bands I have ever seen…. ....
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The Ex were the greatest! I’d been a fan from the start and although they were going in a different direction from Hardcore they were still one of the most intense, active (and noisy!) bands around. Our bass player Wil’s girlfriend lived in the famous “Villa” (stomping ground of the Ex and Svatsox) so we crashed there regularly, playing their old worn-out Ramones and Sham LPs. ....
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- you were first influenced by early punk-new wave but before it turns into crappy eighties disco rock or whatever you were more into hc punk... we were thinking to do an article for the zine about bad evolutions , like damned, ultravox,... good bands in the begining and later funny ;)....
When I first got into punk, every Dutch band sounded different; it was the attitude that was the common factor (ideas over technique, do it yourself, etc), so trying different things musically seemed just natural. Then a little later on, a big influence was when I bought the great Burning Ambitions (A History of Punk) 2LP, my introduction to old greats such as Buzzcocks, Wire, Swell Maps, ATV, Saints, etc. etc. Again, every band on it sounded totally original and different. I wasn’t aware of the more obscure “KBD” stuff (apart from some Dutch stuff of course), but playing in the attic on broken-down equipment it would automatically get to sound like that!....
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-about the demo again ;) … the sound is amazing,,, I use to record at home too with my 4 track and the sound is much particular than the sudio… what i like at most is the guitar sound, killer!....
But the guitar sound of the ..7”.. is also very good, what guitar and amp did you use?....
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When Gepopel was going on we were all 15-16 years old, having no money and hardly any equipment. Putting out a record became an obsession; we started saving every bit of money held over from gigs (which amounted to next to nothing; we ended up borrowing from generous friends in order to finance the EP – thanks Tos!) When we’d go into a studio I’d borrow a guitar and amp from Wilco who used to play in Amsterdamned; his gear played and sounded incredible. That and the cavernous spaces of the Emma warehouse where the EP was recorded made us sound so good I had the feeling it was a bit of a fraud, ha ha... Live, we always sounded really tinny......
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I think your first sound could be like urinals, homosexuals with a hc touch, and some Killed By death bands touch….no? …There are songs like Ahriman that sounds like Pagans....
“Ahriman” was actually stolen from the Business’ “Harry May”, our one token UK82 track!....
I found an archive on Internet with the upcoming record on Noise and Distortion records…. There are 3 versions of Eenheidsworst!!!....
Anyway I..m pretty indignant with the info Word document of the mp3 archive that says the demo will be not include because it..s shitty!!! Gññññ!! ;)....
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Ha ha, I put the record in my Soulseek folder a while ago and it took on a life of its own... Noise and Distortion (known for their Zmiv, Disgust and Pandemonium retrospectives) will put out a LP of the “HC period” (1983-85) Gepopel: the 'Paracide' EP, tracks from 'Holland HC III', 'Beware of the Wolf...' and other comps as well as some live stuff. Gepopel-the-band (as opposed to Gepopel-solo) never had a big set list so some songs will appear 2 or even 3 times! In early 1984, we recorded a demo in our bass player’s shed, but those tracks were never used on any “real” release or comp; it’s mostly inferior versions of “No One...” tracks and songs we did miles better months later for Holland HC III. The sound is really weak and boxy, the guitar is out of sync (Rene, our guitar player, wasn’t used to recording “Sound-on-Sound”) and the sole tape copy I had was on the cheapest tape we could find, with badly distorted treble. But then again, there’s talk of an expanded CD version so who knows, maybe we’ll unveil 1 or 2 of the least shitty tracks...!....
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Did you ever played with Gepopel in ....Spain....?....
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We did a short tour of the Basque Country together with our friends Funeral Oration in the summer of 1985; we’d hardly arranged anything when we arrived, but our Spanish friends put up some gigs on the spot, using empty houses, taking electricity from lamp posts, etc. Very punk rock! I was really impressed by the Spanish/ Basque scene, it seemed much more a “people’s thing” than over here in Holland; we’d go to the grocery store in some village where we were staying, and you’d hear punk rock coming out of the speakers. At gigs, all kinds of people from the neighbourhood would hang out, not just the “punk scene”. The Spanish folks we met were really passionate about music; after Gepopel split up I got a letter from our “contact” saying a couple of his friends wept after hearing the news! I haven’t played Spain since, but from what I hear it’s still a great place for music. My brother-in-law played in the garage band Nederbietels and toured Spain a couple of times. I’m really jealous! ....
Tell me a little about your other projects during your 40 years of making noise (well not the complete 40 years)... other bands …do you play now in sack-o-woes, are you live playing much? past release , upcoming one.......
I’ve been in loads of bands after Gepopel split (fall 1985), the best-known of which in punk terms might be the Vernon Walters (1986-1990), who did a lot of touring and put out 4 or 5 records. At the time everything was going metal/ crust, and we were 180 degrees removed from that, more inspired by 70s (post-)punk, 60s psych etc. After that I’ve been in different bands with Joost, the VW’s bass player: Mister Baby, The Hungry I and Tussen Haakjes De WC Zit Verstopt are some of them. I’ve also been in De Kift with some of my old (Ex/ Svatsox/ Rondos) heroes, they’re still around and are amazing, sort of a cross between punk, brass band and experimental film soundtracks. In the mid-90s I played in an indie band called Johan, who pretty suddenly became rather famous in Holland, so I’ve been a “rock star” for about 1 year, playing big festivals, touring the USA, signing autographs and shit like that. Nice to experience, but I felt more at home with smaller audiences, so for these last 7 years me & Joost have been punk losers again with our current band Sack-o’-Woes. We play a kind of old-guys-punk inspired by various punk eras from the 70s (Saints, Black Flag) via the early 80s (Descendents, Adolescents) to the 90s (New Bomb Turks, Devil Dogs) with some 60s (Pretty Things, Love) thrown in as well. We don’t play a lot, but we do put out nice old-fashioned vinyl records every now and then. Next record is going to be a one-sided transparent 12-inch, silkscreened on the other side (that’s because we’re too lazy to write a whole LP’s worth of songs!).....
O.K., I hope this blabbering is useful to you! Niels - -....