I would appreciate some of DU's good vibes or

[highplainsdem]

57. Another interview, this time for a radio station.

I was glad to find it this morning after not being able to get to the full interview in Gitarist magazine. (Though I did some checking late last night and discovered Readly.com does include Gitarist, so I'll sign up for that later today. Unfortunately, although Readly lets you read thousands of magazines, the other Dutch magazine I mentioned in a reply above, Oor, isn't one of them, and that's the magazine that requires a Dutch bank account number for subscriptions.)

This radio interview was with Radio West in the Netherlands, just last Friday. Link to the web page about the interview, where you can also click to get the translation:

https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4605583/ernstig-zieke-gitarist-golden-earring-mist-optreden-nog-iedere-dag-het-is-klote?_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

I also listened to the audio of the interview, which was several minutes long and wasn't fully summarized in the article. But I don't understand spoken Dutch nearly well enough to attempt to translate even a small part of it.

It was encouraging to hear George laughing at times.

The machine translation in the translated page above isn't very clear in places, either. When George talks about how the Netherlands responded early last year to the news that he has ALS and Golden Earring was disbanding -- it not only was a huge news story, but "Radar Love" was played by fans, radio stations, and even church bells across the Netherlands at the same time on his birthday last year, March 11 -- the translated article says, "The farewell did not leave him in the cold clothes." That's a literal translation, and I had to check some more sites to discover that the Dutch expression -- which we'd say as "really touched" -- refers to something very emotional that gets past the layers of "cold clothes" or outerwear for cold weather.

George said he still misses Golden Earring every day. They'd been performing almost every week for decades, and he said "it sucks" not to be able to do that any more, but "at some point you have to accept it, there's nothing else."

He mentioned again in this interview that he lost the ability to play guitar fairly early after the diagnosis (this still seems surprising to me, since he'd said in another recent interview that he was still able to drive -- unless that was a mistranslation).

He said he can still sing well enough to do some additional recording for the still-unreleased Vreemde Kostgangers album (encouraging to hear that, and it's also good news that the album apparently will be released eventually).

He said he hopes to be able to continue writing songs for a long time. "I'm going to try to find a mode. When you write, it's useful if you can play an instrument, but maybe it can also be done with a computer or something."

Re his songwriting -- I'm going to post a link here to an OP in Music Appreciation with a song that was one of GE's biggest early hits, since that thread contains info on another artist whose career he also launched, writing and producing songs for her when he was still a teenager: https://democraticunderground.com/103478690 . George also wrote the first hit for the Dutch group Earth and Fire, about the same time. He's written songs for other artists and produced albums for others, including Dutch rocker Herman Brood, whose career George salvaged in the1980s (producing Brood's most successful album in nearly 10 years). The response in the Netherlands last year to the news of his illness wasn't just because he'd founded Golden Earring and kept them together for 60 years.

The final paragraph about Friday's interview on that website:

Would the band have continued for a long time, if this had not happened to Kooymans? 'You know that at some point after such a long time there will be an end. Whether by death, bad luck or what happened to me, you can't predict that', says the musician. 'But of course we've always been one of those tough guys, we've always kept going.'

And as I mentioned above, lead singer Barry Hay has said George was the toughest/strongest guy in the band.