Martin Bril (1959 - 2009)
april 23, 2009.
A
little over eleven years ago, on saturday january 24th, 1998, together with
Pjotr van Moock, Tim Benjamin and Peter Mertens, I was in the - no rehearsals
- impromptu 'in-één-keer-goed' band that backed the performance
of Martin
Bril during Dirk van Weelden's Orville-weekend in Theater De
Balie in Amsterdam. The band was put together by Peter - on Martin's request
- from members of a number of 'obscure and legendary' 1970s/1980s Amsterdam
post-punk groups (Jan van de Grond Groep, The Young Lions, Rogier van der
Ploeg Experience). Most of us had not been playing together for at least
fifteen years, but as such things go, that evening - improvising a rocky
context for Martin's reading of a number of his columns and stories (in
dutch) - felt as if the last time had only been yesterday ... It was also
yesterday, while searching for papers that I needed for the yearly ordeal
that is the filling out of tax forms, that in a cupboard I came across a
file that I had forgotton about. On it there was written "Bril &
v/d Grond". And in it I found some print-outs of emails concerning
that long-ago-event and print-outs of the texts that Martin was going to
read.
There was also an audio-cassette.
Only few hours later I was reached by the sad news that in Amsterdam Martin had succumbed to the cancer that he had been fighting for so long ...
This
podcast, "Witte knieën, rok 'n' roll", is an extract from the cassette that I found in that forgotten file, on which there was a recording of our 1998 performance in De Balie.
We will not forget Martin.
tags: Martin Bril, Amsterdam
# .304.
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