In the early 80's a lot was happening outside of the bigger cities in the Netherlands. For example, Steenwijk had great festivals every two months or so and a LOT of bands started all over the country. There will be more on that in future blogs.
Alkmaar had a squat called Parkhof where many punks from that city found shelter and had a place to hang out and do stuff that could not be done elsewhere. Parkhof actually existed untill a few years ago when the city council decided to tear the place down. My friends Eef or Bill can probably tell you a more detailed story about it. Fact is that with the end of Parkhof, the Netherlands (and Alkmaar especially) lost one of it's longest going venues.
In 2005 I went to the annual 'Kerstival', a festival with a bunch of hardcore punkbands. This edition had the reunion of Zmiv and Zweetkutten. Zweetkutten stand for 'Sweaty Cunts' in Dutch and as you can guess that did frownmany eyebrows having that on a shirt or leather jacket back in the days.
The reunion was fun to watch, although the line up was 75% original. Ditte (their singer) still had a voice like an animal and that is a good bridge to the demotape I have uploaded on the blog today.
Back in the eighties we started our tape label 'Er is Hoop' tapes and amongst the releases were three 'Holland Hardcore' compilations. Through tapes, fanzines and live concerts we contacted bands from all over the country and asked them to contribute to the tapes. We also wrote to de Zweetkutten and CKN, both from Alkmaar and both willingly contributed to the compilations. I remember when I first listened to de Zweetkutten, I could not believe they had a female singer, but when I saw them live a few weeks after that I was proven wrong. Musicwise it is raw hardcore punk with a hint of Motorhead (I think). Lyricwise it's in Dutch (except for a cover song) and the topics vary from being in prison to a cover of a Dutch kids program, to beer to nuclear power to celebrating beer (Ik wil Grolsch)to suicide and more. Punk as fuck indeed.
I am not sure if this was released as a demo tape, since I only had these songs on a dubbed copy of a copy. Some ex members might be able to shed some light on that.