Those are not handclaps, but Carol’s feet tapping on the floor : )

Jeroen's list

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: http://www.bettieserveert.com  
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years! 
X, the Betties

Peter: “Carol and I were invited to do some acoustic recordings for a radio show in Brussels (Belgium), called “Studio Brussel”. Not really sure if this was a live-radio show or pre-recorded. But anyway: After we’d done the songs we’d agreed upon, there was some time left, so let’s do another one! I looked at Carol, asking her what song she wanted to do. She held her head up a bit, looked to the ceiling and then to me. I was getting a bit nervous, ’cause I know that look of hers, it means : SURPRISE! “Why don’t you just play along with me”, she said. “What song is it?” I asked. “You’ll see”, she answered. Then she started playing and I had no idea what song it was. After a while it dawned on me that it was a cover of Paul Simon’s 50 Ways, a song that we’d never ever played before and that I had never ever heard Carol play, so I thought: “WHAT THE FUCK!” So I played along to my best abilities. And, indeed, surprise, it turned out to be great. Later on Carol said that I play best when I have to improvise on the spot.”

Carol: “Everything Peter just wrote about this cover is true! Ever since I was a teenager, I was a big fan of harmony singing, so of course I knew all the Simon & Garfunkel songs. Later when Paul Simon went solo, one of my favourites was ’50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’. The lyrics are beautiful and sad, but to be honest I always thought that the choruses were a bit too ‘happy’? So I changed the melody and made them sound more melancholic. I hope Paul Simon doesn’t sue me!”

50 Ways To Leave Your Lover (acoustic - Paul Simon cover) by Peter & Carol (Bettie Serveert)

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: http://www.bettieserveert.com  
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years! 
X, the Betties

Back in 1999 I wrote a simple song called ‘Roadmovies’, but it was not completely finished.
So we invited Bart Vincent and Does De Wolf of the Belgium band ‘Thou’ and asked them if they wanted to join us in ‘Eppie’s Rocket Dog Audio Studio’. They added keyboards to it, Reinier Veldman played drums. I’m not sure why we never released it, maybe b/c I was looking for an acoustic version like we did many years later. The one we released in 2006 has Martijn Blankestijn on acoustic guitar and special guest Tres Manos aka René van Barneveld (the guitar player of the Dutch band Urban Dance Squad) playing space-guitar. 
But 20 years after we made this ‘demo version’, it seems time to finally put it out there. Please let us know what you think of this demo version? We’d like to hear your thoughts! X, Carol

Roadmovies (demo version - 1999) remasterd - Bettie Serveert + Bart & Does

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

Before the Betties started recording their album ‘Private Suit’
in 1999, they went to a studio called ‘Eppie’s Rocket Dog
Audio Studio’ near Arnhem to record some demos with
Reinier Veldman on drums. It was there when they recorded
this 1st demo version of the song ‘Month of Sundays’ and
invited Pascal Deweze and Allan Muller of the Belgium band
‘Metal Molly’ to join them. Allan played keyboards and they
both did backing vocals together with Carol. During this
session, Pascal and Carol discovered their love for harmony
singing and that their voices blended very well together. Not
long after, they started the Belgium Americana band ‘Chitlin’
Fooks’ and recorded 2 albums. We hope you like this demo
of ‘Month of Sundays’! X, the Betties
ps: for those of you who want to check out ‘Chitlin’ Fooks’
, this is the probably the only place online where you can hear
all their recordings:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLavxZQYrNIWtUO5BPrQGudxhcxKAX2ehz

Month of Sundays (demo version - 1999)- Bettie Serveert + Pascal Deweze & Allan Muller

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

Between 2006 and 2008 the Betties did a theatre tour in the Netherlands, with Gino Geudens on drums & Martijn Blankestijn on keys. This live recording of the Bright Eyes’ cover ‘Lover I Don’t Have To Love’ was made in 2008. Besides being a talented drummer, Gino ‘Gigi’ Geudens is also a great backing vocalist, as you can hear on this song. It’s quite amazing, if you consider the fact that when he started touring with us, he hardly spoke a word of English! 
Btw, you can find more recordings of our theatre tour on our cd ‘Bare Stripped Naked’, which also includes a live DVD.
Please let us know what you think of this recording and if you have any suggestions for the next free download! X, the Betties

Peter Visser: On a Friday morning I had coffee at a friends place.
On the kitchen table the newspaper lay open on the music page.
My eyes were drawn to a review of a Bright Eyes album.
Didn't know the band but was intrigued.
So we checked it out and I told Carol about it.
Listening to ‘Lover I Don't Have To Love’ Carol thought that it could be cool to cover that song.
And so we did. Later a friend of us sent us a newspaper article interview with Conor Oberst.
There was a photo with the article of him sitting in front of a bed with our Lamprey LP posed next to him!
Sometime later we played at the (new) Knitting Factory club in New York. We played the Bright Eyes cover.
To our surprise afterwards in the dressing room we got a visit from Conor Oberst and his manager Nate.
He had not announced to us that he would be coming to the club, he said, thinking that we might not have played the song knowing he was there, which is true.

Lover I Don't Have To Love (Theatre Version 2008 - Bright Eyes cover)- Bettie Serveert

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

Late 2016 we were invited to participate in a fundraiser cd for WFMU, an independent radio-station in New Jersey, who has always supported Bettie Serveert. The ‘rules’ for the compilation cd were that it had to be a song that had been a number 1 hit somewhere in the world in the ’70s. We decided to do a cover of the song ‘Coz I Luv You’ from the British band Slade. It was No 1 for 4 weeks in 1971 in the UK and at the time very popular in Europe. 
For this occasion we asked Jesse Beuker, with whom we did a project in Australia called ‘ME & STUPID’ in 2009 and who recorded & mixed our Bettie cd ‘Damaged Good’, to play drums! Peter and I did all the other instruments. Btw, I’ve always been a big Slade fan. Even Ozzy Osbourne and Kurt Cobain thought that Noddy Holder had one of the greatest voices in rock, ever :) We hope you like our cover version! X, Carol

Peter: “ I never ever knew that Carol was a big fan of Slade. And you know what? She was right, they are great!”

Coz I Luv You (Slade cover)- by Peter & Carol(Bettie Serveert) feat. Jesse Beuker

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

Recently we found this demo recording of a song called ‘Crows On The Roof’, which was recorded around the same time as ‘Month of Sundays’ at ‘Eppie’s Rocket Dog Audio Studio’ near Arnhem in 1999.
And just like that other song, it has backing vocals by Pascal Deweze and Allan Muller (who also played keyboards) of the Belgium band ‘Metal Molly’. For some reason we decided not to release it and then totally forgot about the song.
We’ve also added the lyrics (for those who are interested), we hope you like it!
X, the Betties


You were ‘fed-to-please’
There’s a shadow underneath
Now, add it up, you get nothing
You’re on the borderline of something you don’t need
Evidently un-agreed

You were ‘born into’
But you seem to be stuck on this ‘poor-me blues’
Add it up, you get nothing
You’re on the borderline of something you don’t need
Now turn it all around
Turn it upside down

‘Cause the crows on the roof’s crying out
That it’s better than nothing
You can tell by the way that they’re crying outside

Now, add it up, you get nothing
You’re on the borderline of something you don’t need
Turn it all around
Turn it upside down

‘Cause the crows on the roof’s crying out
That it’s better than nothing
You can tell by the way that they’re crying outside

Crows On The Roof (demo version - 1999) Bettie Serveert + Pascal Deweze & Allan Muller

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

When we were working on our ‘Bare Stripped Naked’ album & DVD in 2005, we also recorded an acoustic version of our first single ‘Tom Boy’ in Peters’ living room. But for some reason we decided not to release it, probably because we had too many songs to choose from. So we totally forgot about this recording.
Peter and Carol will be doing some acoustic shows in the next couple of weeks and of course they will play ‘Tom Boy’.
The photo was made by our dear friend & Dutch photographer Lex van Rossen, who passed away too young in 2007. We still miss him. 
X, the Betties

Tom Boy (Acoustic 2005) by Peter & Carol (Bettie Serveert)

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

In 2006 we had our 15th anniversary at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. For this special occasion we invited Jeroen Blankert (who played drums on our albums ‘Attagirl’ and ‘Log 22’) to join Gino Geudens on drums to play ‘White Dogs’ simultaneously! Besides being a talented drummer, Gino ‘Gigi’ Geudens is also a great backing vocalist, as you can hear on this song. It’s quite amazing, if you consider the fact that when he started touring with us, he hardly spoke a word of English!
There is also a video of this song (and ‘Given’) on our Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/484155721 
We hope you like it! X, de Betties

(photo by Sjors Schuitemaker)

White Dogs (live @ Paradiso 2006)- Bettie Serveert feat. Gino Geudens + Jeroen Blankert

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert! To celebrate this special occasion we’ll give away a free mp3 download every month to everyone who has joined our newsletter. If you like, you can join our fanclub by subscribing to our newsletter here: www.bettieserveert.com
Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years!
X, the Betties

In March 2004 the Betties were invited to do a recording session at Andy Hong’s home studio in Boston. It was at the end of a long American tour and we had done some shows with Chris Brokaw as our support act. We knew Chris since the early ‘90s as the awesome guitar player/singer of the Boston band ‘Come’ and later as the guitar player of the Evan Dando band.
We ended up recording several songs while staying a weekend at Andy’s home, ‘Storm’ is one of those songs. Chris played guitar on it, the photo was made by our sound engineer Jeffrey Kok.
We hope you like this recording! X, the Betties

Storm (March 2004)- Bettie Serveert feat. Chris Brokaw

30 years ago we started our band Bettie Serveert & to celebrate this occasion our fanclub is giving away a free mp3 download each month to those of you who joined our ‘newsletter’! You can join by subscribing here: uts@puntnul.nl Thanks to all of you for your love & support throughout all these years! X, the Betties

In January 2013 the Betties were invited to play some songs at the Dutch radio station show on 3FM called ‘Giel’ and were asked to do a cover of a song that was in the Top 40 at the time.
So they chose a song by Ben Howard called ‘The Fear’.
For those of you who don’t live in the Netherlands: ‘Giel’ is a popular early morning radio show. Which means getting up at 4:30AM, going to the storage & loading the backline into the van around 6AM and being at the radio-station at 7AM. Sometimes it makes more sense to just stay up all night :)
In December ’12 Peter and Carol recorded this version in Peters living room. X, the Betties

The Fear (Ben Howard acoustic cover 2012) by Peter & Carol (Bettie Serveert)

The acoustic version of ‘Semaphore’, recorded March 25 '10  in the dressing-room @ Vera, Groningen by Peter and Carol & mixed by Bart Matthias.

Semaphore acoustic

here is another version with the tablas played by U-zhaan.
solidarity for those who have been protesting against the restart of Oi nuclear plants!!

ODAKIAS - Ryuichi Sakamoto+U-zhaan

solidarity for those who have been protesting against the restart of Oi nuclear plants!!

ODAKIAS - Ryuichi Sakamoto+Soon Era

Taken from Jan Bang's debut album "...And Poppies From Kandahar".

For more info visit:

http://www.samadhisound.com/janbang

Passport Control

Taken from Toshimaru Nakamura's album "EgRETS" (sound-cd ss 017)


Nimb Number 42


A beautiful live recording taken from last year's Punkt festival featuring a remarkable line up of musicians


jan bang - exile from paradise / undertow

(bang/ endresen/hassell)

jan bang: samples
lars danielsson: double bass
sidsel endresen: vocals
jon hassell: trumpet, keyboards
arve henriksen: trumpet
erik honoré: live sampling

recorded by geir østensjø at punkt, september, 2010.
mixed by erik honoré and jan bang at punkt studio kristiansand.

see also:

... and poppies from Kandahar (http://www.samadhisound.com/janbang/)

Semaphore acoustic

bettieserveert

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