Vic van der Reijt
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Just had another meeting with the publisher of the book about Dutch advertisement records, that Dolf Hell and I are writing. The deadline for us is September this year, but the book will not be out before summer 2009, due to the difficulties of the production and the way bookselling works nowadays: publishers have to announce their titles to the to bookstores a year in advance!
It will be a full colour book with two CD’s, that is for sure now. I am extremely happy with the publisher, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, because the man in charge there is Vic van der Reijt. He is both a writer and record collector himself, and he is one-of-us. That he is in such a position is a very good thing; I think that this is how the world change: some of the good guys infiltrate in the bad world and change it from within. I have no talent for that, but Vic sure has. These talks, with several people around the table having very different aims and sometimes very limited communication skills (sorry, I cannot tell you the stories that I heard yesterday), are a nightmare for me. For Vic it is his daily job. Although for me Vic is the man who is responsible for some great publications on my kind of music.
When I made a weekly radio column for VPRO radio with Albert Ballintijn, there was a period that Albert couldn’t work. In all the 17 years that we did this show, this was the only time that Albert wasn’t on the job: he had an operation on his throat and couldn’t produce any sound for weeks, which I accepted as a fair excuse for staying home. After all, Albert did the presentation of the show. I decided to do the presentation myself for that period. That was not a success: reading my own texts just didn’t work. I liked doing it, but when I heard it back, I didn’t feel comfortable, and neither did the listeners, I guess. And improvising, which I usually do, was not what the show was about. So I was very happy when Albert got his voice back.
The shows that I did during Albert’s absence where almost all about Albert. I have no recordings of all these shows, but here is one that I have on a cassette tape:
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One of the other columns that I did on my own, was about an article that Vic van der Reijt had written for a magazine about record collecting, Platenblad. Here it is:
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Sorry if you don’t understand Dutch, but this is the Soundtrack of my life, and a large part of that Soundtrack is Dutch.