NM026a
gone bald
live at de hoeve 2000

released may 28 2007
video

info

This video was recorded at De Hoeve in Hoofddorp in March 2000.

I got in touch with Gone Bald through SGP, the band in which Stijn used to play bass. Narrominded released a two song 7" by SGP and therefore I attended their gigs regularly and so I think my first Gone Bald experience was in De Blauwe Aanslag in Den Haag. After that SGP and Gone Bald played some more at different occasions and the first time Gone Bald really slapped me in the face was at a show they did in Hoofddorp, in a squatted farm called De Hoeve. This place - it's gone now - used to be a kind of home for all the alternative music and musicians in Hoofddorp, but at the time when Gone Bald played there (2000), the music was mainly Dutch hiphop, hardcore and crossover funkrock - a style that in retrospect seemed to be particularly attractive to musicians in Hoofddorp. As a result, the Gone Bald gig in De Hoeve was a small disaster for the band and for most of the audience. Ivica got hit by a flying beercan during the second song and became very angry at the thrower. After that ninety percent of the crowd left the room and Gone Bald played a furious set. Somewhere along the line Ivica grunted a birthdaysong for somebody in what was left of the audience (incidentally also called Coen/Koen), but Bitz started noodling through it on his guitar and Ivica got pissed of at him too. Quite soon after that Igor and Bitz left the stage because they had enough of this negative concert (and their time was up), but Ivica stayed and unleashed a torrent of guitar noise on the remaining crowd.

At that point I was behind the turntables at the other side of the room, looking for a record to play when Gone Bald was through, but when Ivica started this noise I was transfixed. There was a lot of dry ice smoke on stage, strobes where flashing and this maniac was punishing his guitar while wearing a kind of Venetian opera mask. When the whole room was saturated with noise he crawled under the drumstage and stayed there for quite a while. Eventually Igor and Bitz joined in again and everything came to a rocking ending. From this moment on I knew that this was band was something very different and Ivica - he scared the hell out of me - was a very special musician. This is a recording of that strange show.

Coen Polack

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