Did you ever hear of Indorock? The Tielman Brothers?

[highplainsdem]

Last edited Tue Sep 27, 2022, 08:35 PM - Edit history (1)

Cross-post from the Lounge. See https://democraticunderground.com/10181711813 for replies with some more information and video.


I hadn't, till I ran across posts about them the other day on Steve Hoffman's music forum.

The Tielman Brothers, all actually brothers, were born in Indonesia in the 1930s and moved to the Netherlands, to The Hague, in the 1950s. They became very popular all over Europe, influencing other artists. The Beatles went to see them when they were playing in Germany, and their fans included Dutch artists, especially Jan Akkerman (Focus) and Golden Earring.

The Tielman Brothers were brilliant. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tielman_Brothers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Tielman and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indorock .

Four videos below. This first one is what may be their most famous TV appearance, in 1960.

This second video is their song that's generally considered the first Dutch rock and roll hit.

And two videos showing how great Andy Tielman continued to be as he got older. Don't have a date for that performance of "Blue Bayou." The second video below shows him talking about their first Dutch hit on the TV show DWDD (De Wereld Draait Door), and performing it live. Not sure of the date of the show, but it didn't start airing till 2005, so the 2008 date that video was uploaded to YouTube might be the date it was broadcast. Andy Tielman died in 2011.

[dameatball]

1. Cool. I just learned something. Thank you.

[highplainsdem]

2. Thank you!!! I'm just learning about them myself, but wanted to

share those videos right away.

I posted more about them in replies in the Lounge thread, so I'm going to link to that thread - https://democraticunderground.com/10181711813 - and I'll probably copy that additional info here later.

I'll be adding to those replies later today, too, since I found out Barry Hay, Golden Earring's lead singer, had mentioned them in his autobiography, and I found that via Google Books. It's in Dutch, though, so I'm going to have to type that section up and see what Google Translate can do with it. And maybe do some extra searching if it turns out Google Translate mangles some of the translation, especially slang, as I've seen it do before. And as I saw it do last night when I noticed Barry had written about his first impressions of Golden Earring (this was before he was invited to join the band) a page or two after he mentioned the Tielman Brothers, and the first few sentences of that section I tried ran into some translation obstacles. (I wish Barry's book, and a book George Kooymans did about his music and songwriting, had also been published in English, not just in Dutch.)

I added a two-hour concert Andy Tielman gave in 2004 to that thread in the Lounge. What I've heard of it so far sounds fantastic.

[TeamProg]

3. Wow, I'd never heard of them! Thanks for posting. Lot's of Bill Haley & Carl Perkins influence

it sounds like.

[highplainsdem]

4. You're welcome! And yes, there were obvously lots of different

influences.

I hear echoes of Elvis and Roy Orbison in Andy Tielman's vocals. Andy had a 5-octave range, btw.

The OP about them in the Lounge, which I linked to in reply 2 (and I just added a link to it to the OP here), has more info and video in the replies, and I've been trying to track down more, especially their influence on the Beatles. The Wikipedia article on Andy Tielman refers to a Rolling Stone article where George Harrison mentioned him, but doesn't cite the exact article. And I've also read that the Tielman Brothers had a Hofner violin bass before Paul McCartney did and that was part of the reason he wanted one, but I haven't been able to verify that. A lot of young musicians in Europe envied their guitars, and George Kooymans of Golden Earring bought the black Les Paul you see in the first video there and used it for "Radar Love" and a lot of concerts and videos (this is also in the replies in that Lounge thread).