In the Dutch Mountains: Tintin, Suske & Wiske, Jo, Suus, Jokko & Nits

Even if “In the Dutch Mountains” was their most successful album, it has very often been taken for granted, with only three songs (the title song of course, “J.O.S. Days” and “Two Skaters”) getting a regular, appreciative mention. The rest of it silently slumbering away somewhere in the collective consciousness of the more knowledgeable members of the Nits-society. It has always remained one of my favourite albums, like the experience of first love, never forgotten for ever treasured – “J.O.S. Days” was the song of my first, – matinal – acquaintance with Nits.

Although the album clearly stands out in the pop scene of the eighties as one of a very special, unique kind, it has always felt to me like a crossing of melodious, innocent teenagers’ sixties pop with the images of childhood memories of reading comic books, strips, which was very popular in Belgium (we are a nation of chocolate and waffles, of mussels and beer, but also of reputed comic strips). I was an avid reader of the adventures of “Suske & Wiske” (internationally known as “Bob & Bobette” or “Willy and Wanda”), Tintin and the lesser known stories of “Jo & Suus and Jokko”, also by Hergé; the sequences of jolly images and short narratives went well with the fragmented, rhythmical bouts of daydreaming found in pop songs. But the latter often lacked in fantasy and imagination and told of a somewhat monotonous world of young love. Tintin, Suske and Wiske never cared about those things. They were always traveling, leaving their familiar homestead for a world of unlimited fantasy, imagination and adventure beyond everydayness, beyond known borders, but also ever returning to their place of birth, and staying true to their unmistakable, Belgian identity. They belonged to their native ground, but they longed to see what was lying beyond it, with open minds.

The album “In the Dutch Mountains” reminds me of this sturdy juvenescence and candour, both in form and content. In fact the music has the same adventurous, non-conformist, free, unregulated spirit and attitude one usually finds in comic strips. They both share an appetite for the romantics of adventure, rather than the romantics of love. And the little, sometimes bizarre universe that is shaped by these Dutch Mountains is populated with a very diverse and strange sort of characters, some kind of animated figures like you only find them in comic books or cartoons: an eating house, a Mädchen im Pelz, a panorama man and a mountain Jan, a nephew with peroxidized hair…The stories are of course based on very real experiences of a young man of flesh and blood, but these are recounted with a twist of fantasy. I picture the music as a cartoon figure of an ageless adolescent, setting out on an adventure, singing, whistling, with a knapsack over the shoulder, looking at and discovering the world that surrounds him. The knapsack holds memories that now intertwine with the rhythmic movements of the young character’s feet as he sets out looking for what lies beyond. The traveler has his more reflective, darker moments too, – as in the circular, sedated nightmare of the swimmer -, but he always packs up again for more. He remembers the safety of growing up in a sweet home in figurative lullabies whose only purpose could be to open our eyes for the beauty of the world; he needs to be comforted at times, he is afraid, needs to be soothed, but his adventurous spirit remains intact.

Especially with “J.O.S.Days” – the football song that seduced this not so sportive girl in her student bathroom -, I have the impression that Henk’s voice is one of the characters’ shouting out from a comic book, his voice really ”looks” like it is popping out of a speech balloon of a comic strip. There’s something about the timbre of Henk’s voice here, something that sounds like a clear, melancholic, young voice on a tape straight from the past, a past of pictures and images that are played out on a movie screen in our head. And even the opening of this song seems to picture the beginning of a comic cartoon on a big screen, as if it were zooming out from a monocular… looking towards the past.

Perhaps it is the way the album was recorded, so spontaneously, like they play live on stage, it makes for an unfussy, fresh, direct sound. And the limpid, fragmented panel-like structures of the songs with multiple variations in rhythm and tempos are like transparent slides, the see-through material on which our memories are projected. A house full of memories hiding in all sorts of nooks and crannies within this music construction they carefully assemble. It’s strange the way music can sometimes transfer us back to days gone by. I have this very strong feeling of the past coming back to me when I listen to “In the Dutch Mountains”. The whole album sounds like a graphic novel of a sweet, cherished past of younger days, but not filled with the usual clichés. It is a very idiosyncratic representation like the ones you find only in great novels or original and imaginative comic strips.

The record sounds like a young person’s adventure framed in music, or a photo album of memories stamped with the colours of a new fresh pop sound. A more complex pop sound; the fantasy in the lyrics is perfectly matched in the structure and forms of the songs on this album, which are as imaginative and varied as the rollercoaster of images making up animated cartoons. With European rhythms from all over the continent, like the ones in “Mountain Jan”, so different from the standard anglo-saxon pop rhythms. Lots of images from my childhood and adolescent reading days pop up while listening to these folkloric songs made in Dutch-Mountains country: the comic strips I already mentioned, but also images from well-known stories as “Le Petit Prince” in “Moon and Stars” for instance, the sweetness of youth personified in the celestial bodies of a rhythmically moving moon and tenderly twinkling stars, shining upon a home in open skies where anything is still possible. And in “The Magic of Lassie” I see Tom and Jerry tumbling and rolling down the screen chasing each other around (while Lassie is wisely looking on…) . “In a Play” is what all stories sound like, it starts off with the opening of the curtains on a small stage or the turning of the first page when reading a book; the music is like the story of all stories, how they all unfold, from the expectant suspense at the start to the inevitable “The End”. In a softly demure, almost non-theatrical way, it is an icon of the luscious theatre pop that Nits bring so spontaneously. The beauty and the scope of this song, focusing on the requisites, decors and costume details of a story that just might have been staged, are just unsurpassable in my eyes…The stories that wind their way through all of our childhoods, school days and through to adulthood. “Strangers of the Night” (a favourite of mine) is a vivid hallucination of a curious traveler who feels perhaps a bit unsure and uncomfortable, wandering through the dark, nightly landscapes. Listen to the labyrinth of thoughts and emotions hidden in the many compartments of darkness and light of the unknown.

Apart from all the concrete references to childhood memories it might hold or bring about in the listener, the album “In the Dutch Mountains” may as well offer an abstract feeling of what remembering one’s childhood and adolescence could be like. It is written as a sequence of colourful, moving images that take us back to the fantasy beginnings that were all of our lives… Unsurpassable too.

Joke Roelandt, August 2019