The Rhu-Barb story

Groningen – The Netherlands 1983 – 1988

This is the story of the Rhu-Barb trio. An obscure eighties band creating songs in an old operating room of a squatted hospital in the north of the Netherlands.

«Too bad nobody knew we existed!”
Dick Boshoff – drummer

Tjook: ‘I think it must have been in 1982 I left my very first real band Qua Dance(1981- 84) as a guitar player and songwriter. To be honest, this was not entirely voluntary, but I wanted to move on and soon afterward started playing with Dick Boshoff, a fellow art student, who quickly became my best friend. We started jamming together and recorded a few rudimentary mostly instrumental song ideas.’

Early beginnings

Dick: “Around 1983 we started recording instrumental in my room on the Marktstraat in Groningen, with a drum kit, a guitar and violin strum. We bought a big old tape recorder from the concierge of the Minerva art academy. The academy had just moved into a brand new building on the Zuiderdiep. We used sound on sound reverb coil recording that changed the acoustics of my attic room into a cathedral with Tjook’s typical guitar flanger sound and my drums as a grand drunken sound two-man orchestra.’

‘Tjooks guitar sound is unique. It was a sound that distinguishes itself from every other guitarist. It had something ominous, something brooding and barren. A feeling inside and that had to get out.’

‘I remember I visited Tjook one day and he had painted his entire room and furniture grey and black. His shaving brush, the pepper and salt set, and even the teacups got the same treatment.’

Tjook “The first thing that comes to mind is Dick’s room, where we first played together. Especially because he had this large hare in a big spacey cage under his bed. It was a lovely fine and furry almost velvet like animal. But ‘Bulldozer’, as Dick named him, did not really liked me or for that matter people in general. Bulldozer used to spray darts of urine on me by throwing his behind in the air. BD also chewed on all the speaker cable and other electric wire lying around. Alas, it did not end well: at a lonely Christmas night he tried to ‘bulldozer’ himself out of his bed cage, probably to chew some more wire… the cage proved too strong and BD did not survive the process of trying to set himself free.”

Towards operating rooms

Dick: ‘In 1985 we moved to ORKZ operating rooms: it was on the second floor of an old squatted catholic hospital in Groningen. The room we played in, was in fact an old operating room with oxygen outlets still in the walls. Tjook soon got an affair (of course) with the most beautiful girl living on the same floor. She played records of David Sylvian. I remember songs like Brilliant trees; ..there you stand making my life possible and Red guitar.‘ Tjook: ‘At the time a lot of our friends and also my younger sister were squatting in the ORKZ building: it was still a kind of ‘Godless’ free society and a perfect spot to stay off the grid.’

Finding a bass player

Tjook: ‘We kept looking for additional band members and put up posters under the working band name Mimicry. We tried Loods for a day or two, but later I changed the band name to Rhu-Barb.’

Dick: ‘A few times, a very modest boy with a trumpet, played with us, and although, at the time, there were just the two of us, there seemed not a millimeter of space available to add something into it. I still see his desperate look on his face. Peter, who was a close friend of Roel(drummer from Qua Dance), was the first one trying to play bass with us. Later Frank, who was living in the ORKZ building, tried for a while, and finally, Titus Smid came to play with us.’

‘In the beginning, Titus was playing a violin bass like Paul McCartney and he was also the proud owner of a Duracell rabbit. He had experience from playing in 2 punk bands before, Damage and Leukoplasters. He also was a great Motown lover at the time, maybe still is?! Anyway, he kept loads of Motown records under his bed in the place where he was living with his mother. At one point, Titus exchanged his violin bass for a vintage Burns bass guitar. His violin base was definitely a playful instrument with its very own, somewhat blocky sound. But the Burns made the songs more solid and made a stronger connection with the low bass sounds and the rhythm of the drums.’

‘Titus rocksteady carved out his space in our soundscape in style. Besides the more traditional supportive role of a bass player, Titus captured and extended the atmosphere of the Rhu-Barb sound. From a very fine, soft, and melodic bass that he could turn into a terrible pounding rag. That worked very well with Tjook’s vocals and guitar sound.’

Recordings

Tjook: ‘The first recording we made was in the countryside at my oldest brother’s place; it has not survived. A second recording, we did in our old operating rehearsal room with a local sound engineer Alex Hazelaar that lived in the old ORKZ .’

Dick: ‘With Alex, we did not really know the sound we were looking for. We recorded a tape with among other things Four Quartets.’

‘I think we had put the snare drum on top of the floor tom, to realize an even fiercer thump sound. We were quite pleased with the result and we even did a local radio interview that played Four Quartets. I recall that a befriended girl that worked in a coffee shop played our tape while we drank a beer or some coffee maybe. That actually felt pretty cool at the time. The last recordings were made at the Pop Bureau, a local public institution. We recorded several song ideas in a one-day session. I have searched for the master tape of the recordings that we made at the Pop Bureau. At the time part of the Simplon Youth Center in Groningen that no longer exists. A lot of these types of archives are nowadays housed at the GAVA (Groningen Audio Visual Archive). In any case, I remember that our band recorded at the Pop Bureau. Do you remember that? But Rhu-Barb is unknown to the Groningen pop archive. Too bad nobody knew we existed! But afterward, it also has something obscure again.’

Concerts

‘We played at several venues but mostly underground scenes. I remember concerts at De Oude Keukens in the ORKZ where we played 2 sets of 90 minutes and people looked pretty exhausted from where I was standing, even though they were quite used to heavy doom music from before. We also played at a protest event in the old city police station that was occupied near the big marketplace in the center of Groningen. That was pretty cool playing in the middle of a police station filled up with the local punk and new-wave crowd.’

‘We even played at the pre-rounds at De grote prijs van Nederland. We were not granted a soundcheck which proved a disaster; it was one big sea of noise on the stage and we could not hear each other at all. Still, Max Palfenier wrote that we were a talented lot in the local newspaper the day after. We also played at a big summer festival in Woldendorp called Niet Grijs (Not Grey). It was located on a large campsite in the rural outskirts of the north of Holland. But the pop festival proved an organizational disaster; there just was nobody there. But we played on the biggest stage ever, standing it felt like a mile apart from each other and with an audience of only about 15 people, most of them friends. Another strange gig was at the Christmas convention of the Christian Youth Union for Nature Study(Algemene Jeugdbond voor Natuurstudie).

​I remember we arrived there around 19:00, and that there was no food left in the big pan in the kitchen. So we played on an empty stomach. Other venues we played at were ‘Café onder de linden‘ in Roden, the ‘Platform theater’ located on the Boterdiep, and at the De Trefkoel in Paddepoel in Groningen. These were about all the gigs we could remember.’

Songs from an operating room

Tjook: ‘What are my texts about? I think it was pretty much the same as my visual work. It probably felt like pretty gloomy stuff for most people. I could of course say that we were an intrinsic part of the doom era with its inescapable darkness, but I guess it has always been part of my character, so it did not occur to me as gloomy at the time.

Titus: ‘I always felt that Tjook put a lot of chords in his song ideas and I felt that it was not always easy to stitch those together. But when I tried to say something about it Tjook said that we just weren’t a folk & dance band. Tjook and Dick were both art students and I remember we often went to the night movie theater in the Poelestraat and saw cult movies like Stranger Than Paradise. It had music from Screamin Jay Hawkins I put a spell on you. It was a great movie and we all loved it. As a base player, I was a great fan of Jah Wobble. My bass part in God Is A Prisoner was definitely inspired by his music.’

God is a Prisoner

All the restless races 
Of the mind to get free
Free from the coercion 
Of the 'animal me'
All the promised power 
That lies just beyond
It wants to be the god 
And not the mortal in yourself 

But god is a prisoner 
Of the people that pray 
God is a prisoner 
In oh so many a way 
All the people that kneel down 
Just in order to win
All the promised glory, 
They know where to begin

First they make up the rules 
For all the guilt and the sin 
Then they sell out their souls and 
They'll be crowning their king 

But your god is a prisoner, 
A prisoner of prayers 
And seldom a listener, 
Seldom that he cares 

Facing up to the limits 
Facing up your the limits of soul tonight 
Facing up to the limits of your life tonight 
Facing up to the limits of your time tonight 
Face up to the world and be strong tonight.. 

©Tjook - Groningen 1984 

Playlist

Looking back

Tjook: “I still think we created a lot of alright songs. We really worked hard and intense but we did not put enough effort into getting enough gigs ourselves and in the end the juice kind of ran out. Rhu-Barb, not surprisingly, was not discovered in time. Dick is right: ‘We remain an unknown and obscure eighties band from Holland.”

Tjook: ‘I moved to the west of Holland in 87, trying to start up as a visual artist while studying a master’s degree in psychology. I kept writing songs and played a little with some English musicians that lived in the neighbourhood and even recorded some songs on a 4 track together with Dick in my artist studio in Leiden.  We recorded songs like ‘Nobody man’ with a fine piano piece from Dick Boshoff and ‘No prayer around’.  Titus told me a great many years later when I met him briefly in Vera in Groningen that I was the reason for him starting drinking. I thought, you really give me too much credit Titus, but thanks. In 1990 I fell in love with a Norwegian singer who had a band of her own. I helped out with a few of her songs while we were living together in The Hague. We moved to Norway in 1997, but the relationship fell apart soon after that. I still live in Norway somewhere in the Norwegian woods near Oslo and now and again I still write a Tjook song and even perform on local revenues with some short-lived band formations like Retro Wracks and Tjook & the Husjband.’

Dick played a while as a drummer in a street band called De Boefjes, but focused mainly on film and especially bird photography. He won The One Minute Award of Theoneminutes short film festival in Amsterdam with a movie of a brief encounter between tree falcons. Dick also worked at the local television station as a cameraman, a program developer, and a camera-instructor. After Rhu-Barb, Titus remained active as a musician and he played in several bands in Holland like The Beavers, The Dactaris, The Firebirds .»

But anyway, I’m really grateful for the time we spend playing music and creating songs together, many of which I still really like. It was an extraordinary experience and an invaluable part of my life and in my modest opinion, also of the obscure dutch eighties.’

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