Early Years
It all started when Patrick De Bruyn and myself decided we would learn to play reggae. Actually it started much sooner than that. In fact, it was when my teacher allowed me to read books from the adult library, at age 8. I think I read most of the science fiction paperbacks ever written! When I was 11 years old, I became aware of the world around me. I saw the murder on Martin Luther King and the student protest against the Vietnam war. My uncles and aunts were hippies and their lifestyle and choice of music influenced my perception of good and wrong. I saw our future in a peacefully sharing world, an end to all wars, and world citizenship with equal opportunities for all. I wrote in my schoolbooks: "Make Love Not War", "Hippie Happy", "Flower Power". And my favorite song was "Israelites" by Desmond Dekker. My first self bought single was "Mother & Child Reunion" by Paul Simon. But it wasn't until 1977 that I knew that that music was called reggae. By that time I already had some Bob Marley records in my collection: "Live" en "Rastaman Vibration", next to Carlos Santana, Led Zeppelin en Hare Krishna. And I wanted to go to India, after reading Kerouac and Castaneda. I also wrote poems, thanks to my dutch teacher: Kut en Schaamhaar, Wordt er nog afgeruimd aan tafel 17?, Boddhisattva, Opera Sauvage, etc. Jan Wolkers en de Cobra movement were my cultural inspiration. And I was writing a book inspired by The Dreamworld of Kadath (H.P. Lovecraft), in that book, a rasta bonnet was among the dress code for a dream traveler. When I arrived in Greece in 1978 I realised the Flower Power route to India had changed into a 'born to be wild' hard drugs voyage, so I returned to Belgium with the Magic Bus and a Bob Marley Live cassette. I decided to change the world at home and the mentality of the youths and that's why we started to play reggae: ital vital and equal rights & justice for the poor!
It seems like I interpreted Bob's message a little different than the media did. For me it was the beginning of a spiritual search and a healthy life with organic vegetarian food, meditation and sports. Around that time I wanted to become a teacher (basic School). Because me and some of my classmates came to the conclusion that, in order the change the world in the future, one has to start with the youth. But all those long haired alternative elements were systematically banned from the school by the government. Our teachers wanted to break us so they said: 'Come back next year with your hair trimmed and show us that you mean it'. I was so completely disgusted with that. So I became an artist. Went to Saint Luke school of arts in Antwerp. During my student years I discovered that I could entertain the crowd with a nice selection of music, and my hippie uncles, who were music traders, brought me some crucial Jamaican pressed records like: Joe Gibbs Chapter Three, Heart Of The Congo's, etc... And we discovered a small record shop called Rasta Connection, on the first floor of the then famous hippie pub Het Pannenhuis.