Dutch songwriter: Clown and Poet: Herman van Veen becomes 80

He jumps across the stage, dances, makes strange contortions behind the piano, plays virtuoso on the violin. He makes his audience laugh and cry with his melancholic ballads: the Dutch songwriter Hermann van Veen will be 80 this Friday (March 14), and one thing is certain – this man certainly does not need a walker.

Admittedly, the wrinkles have become deeper, the gray hair is more sparse. But the voice is still full and gentle. “Happiness and good genes,” he replies, when asked about his mobility and freshness.

Herman van Veen has been on stage for 60 years. “As a young person, I doubted everything,” he said recently in a TV interview. “Should I become a singer, violinist, teacher?” The doubts did not take long. He describes his first show with friends as a happy chaos, and as soon as he was on stage, he knew: “This was it.”

Today the Troubadour of the Netherlands is at home on the world’s stages. It is an impressive career: a good 180 albums, about 80 books, plays, pictures. “I got quite a few flowers for that,” he jokes, but also quite a few orders and prices – also from Germany, such as the most recently, the Cuxhaven Joachim wrestling price.

“I don’t have a lot of future,” he says. And yet. He turns his gaze forward out of the bright blue eyes. “It is a waste of time to ponder what was and to think about what you want to do later,” he said in an interview. “Do it now, be happy now, now smell the flowers, we only have today.”

But he has felt melancholy more often in recent years. Many of his (musical) companions died. Aging and transience are now also his topics. So he wrote the touching song “The Great for Forgetting” about the concern that I can no longer remember: “Should I forget, no longer know where I live … Then I walk along the houses, and I hear a violin somewhere, then I ring and ask: Can it be that I live here?”

Van Veen was born shortly before the end of the war, “between the bombs”, he now wrote on his 80th birthday. Childhood and youth were shaped by his parents’ memories of the difficult time of the German occupation. But in his autobiography he writes about his happy youth and his loving parents, who enabled him with many overtime hours.

The title of his first solo show “Harlekijn” became the program of his career. “Nobody the servant, none of the boss”. He has retained this independence. But even more. Van Veen sees a relationship with the musical jugs of the Middle Ages and the Harlekin of the Commedia dell´arte, the fun maker, the liar and maintains his audience.

Musical role models are also Bob Dylan – “he gave us courage at the time”, he describes the importance of the protest singer for his generation – and the Canadian singer Leonard Cohen. Van Veens Dutch interpretation of Cohen’s song “Suzanne” was his first big hit in his homeland in 1969.

Van Veen is a poetic clown, a musical narrator. He wrote texts against the arms race, the apartheid in South Africa, the Berlin Wall – to this day he is committed to peace and children’s rights.

Van Veen is even the father of four adult children today and sang a lot about and for children (“He, little Fratz”). Generations grew with the duck song “Why am I so happy?” on, from the cartoon series that popular in Germany about the adventures of the duck “Alfred Jodocus Kwak”.

His life span includes exactly 80 years of peace in Europe, the singer is very well aware of it. “I’m as old as peace in our country,” he says. The upgrading scares him. “I hope that this is not just an interbellum” – the time between the wars.

80 years – many have long since withdrawn behind the geraniums, as a saying in his homeland says. This is unthinkable for Herman van Veen. “You have to train the age,” he says. “Love you do, you practice happiness. When you don’t – then apathy comes.” And he doesn’t give a chance.

Van Veen will celebrate his birthday with a big tour all year round. With appearances in all those places that were important in his career. In Belgium, the Netherlands and of course Germany. Because this is where Van Veen has had a large number of fans for decades.

Perhaps that is the trick, he recently said in an interview: “Then you have to continue to brush your teeth and move. I can’t imagine life without playing and singing.”