Carby

Wednesday, 23 May 2007

My friend Milan Hulsing lives in Cairo for a few years. Last month he was in Amsterdam, mainly to sort out his record collection and to move the biggest part to a depot. I was among the people that he invited to help moving all the boxes with records. With five people it took us six hours.
At the end of the day the house was empty, except for some garbage, some furniture that he didn’t want to see again, and a cassette tape that was found behind a computer desk. On the cassette was written Asia strange. Before I could ask, Milan said: “Of course you can have it”.
While cleaning up his stuff, Milan also rediscovered another tape. He had told me that it existed many years ago, but he said that he had no idea where the tape was. I didn’t believe that, because of the importance of the content. It were studio recordings of a band that Milan was in when he was eleven. At least, that was what he told me. “Come on!! You were in a band when you were eleven?! And you were in a recording studio?!” Milan told me that they were in television program ( Stuif es in ) and a producer was so impressed by this kids that he invited them to his studio, where they recorded several of their own songs. “Your own songs?! You mean that you wrote your own songs when you were eleven?!”
Every now and then the tape was mentioned in our conversations, but the longer I didn’t hear it, the less I believed it existed. But to cut a long story short: I have the tape here in front of me now. And I have listened to it. And it is all true!
The name of the band was Garby and the tape is from 1983. Hisko, Milan´s brother plays guitar and sings the lead vocals, Martijn played guitar too, and a guy named Djawal was the drummer. Milan plays the flute. It is not music I would buy on a CD, but since this is a friend of me, at the age of eleven, and also because I have been believing that it was just a joke for years, I wanted to share this with you today.
Here is Carby with a song about drugs. There are no names on the cassette, but I called it Broken line. And, for the die hards, here is the complete demo.

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