Nescio: The Boy who Wanted to Create his own World

This is a strange song. Nescio. Even when you’re very familiar with it, the song remains somewhat of a unique specimen in Nits’ repertoire; it stands out. It is one of their best-known songs and – inadvertently – it holds the key to the being of Nits, the character of their music, the contents of their lyrics. But no-one ever seems to talk about that. Although Nescio – the writer – is quite a stellar persona in recent Dutch cultural history. Loved and more or less respected in the literary community.

I love it when the song opens with the little introduction which paraphrases the ending of Nescio’s story of “De Uitvreter”, though – as far as I know – Nits tend not to start off the song in this way anymore, which is a great pity.

“I jumped off a bridge and went swimming for hours and nobody’s looking”. Without this little prelude which then gives way to Robert Jan’s wondrous piano touches, the song loses some of its magic. The Urk version is of course legendary and when I listen to it I try to bring back the same sensations I felt when I first heard this song. I could immediately sense that something strange and unique was happening here. The featherlike piano that reflects sky, water and sunlight in the coolness of the Amsterdam landscape. The little anti-hero jumping off one of the many picturesque bridges on his way to a much longed-for freedom. A romantic escape that leads to a European romanticism of Italian make. Italian painters, lush landscapes, beautiful nature: “Questo quadro è bello”. A little allegorical line waking up the sensualists (in the philosophical meaning of the word) that Nits were to become…

A gorgeously stylised anarchy floats through the song, an anarchy of beauty and water, a stream of notes of longing for an “aristocratic” world where aesthetics rule, a bohemian, fantasy resistance to the drabness of a bourgeois existence. The simplicity of Nits is an opulent one. Nits use their eyes and then they shape this immaterial world through their music that glorifies the beauty of singularly ordinary moments slipping by irrevocably. A melancholy of lightness, of wanting to hold on to a sense of freedom – together with a playful pinch of mischief -, which is so obvious in the way Nits make music. The story of “De Uitvreter” is a fairly simple one, a bucolically idealist dream of living with the sun, the air and the water, of becoming one with nature, of living a life as it ought to be, peacefully, quietly, surrounded by beauty, far away from the norms and regulations of a bourgeois society. Much along the same lines, Nits made their own “rules” – somewhat aside from the general music establishment – of lightness and beauty. A world created in the image of youth, imagination and freedom, for ever beautiful…

Do you want me to tell you the story of Nits?

They jumped off a bridge and went swimming for hours and nobody’s looking. They ended up in the world of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Tintoretto, or Henry Moore and L.S. Lowry or of anyone who knows how to imagine beautifully. A paradise Japi never knew.

Joke Roelandt, April 2023