Singer and composer Henny Vrienten passed away on Monday at the age of 73. He was best known to the general public as the frontman of Doe Maar.
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The family announced his death through concert organizer Mojo. A cause of death has not been reported, but Vrienten had been ill for a long time. The funeral will be held privately. The family asks for peace and privacy and will not make any further announcements, according to Mojo. Vrienten leaves behind five children from two marriages.
– Vrienten, right, on bass with Doe Maar, in 1982. Foto: BELGAIMAGE
Doe Maar was founded in 1978. Vrienten only joined two years later, as Piet Dekker’s successor. The band unleashed a real rage in the Netherlands with their typical Doe Maar sound – a mix of ska, punk and reggae, among others. Songs like ‘Doris Day’, ‘Is This All’, ‘The Bomb’, ‘1 Night Alone’ and ‘Pa’ became big hits. But the excessive popularity made the group, for the longest time in the occupation of Vrienten, Ernst Jansz, Jan Hendriks and Jan Pijnenburg, finally decide to stop in 1984.
In 2000 the band reunited and they made a comeback with sixteen concerts in the Rotterdam Ahoy. After that, more concert series followed and they toured festivals and theaters.
In 2021, Doe Maar planned a farewell tour, which would also visit Antwerp and Brussels, but Vrienten’s illness definitively put an end to those plans. The shows were previously postponed due to the corona measures. On September 3, 2021, the band still performed at the Crammerock music festival in Stekene.
Paul Santos
Vrienten may have been the face of Doe Maar, but he also released several albums solo. The first was published in 1977, under the pseudonym Paul Santos. The album of the same name included a duet with Herman Brood, ‘If you win’. It was Vrienten’s first single and it immediately entered the charts.
Na Paul Santos the albums followed no ballad, nice guys, Strange boarders in night work, the latter two together with George Kooymans of Golden Earring and Boudewijn de Groot. His latest album was released in 2019, Between the lines† It was the third and final volume of his musical autobiography. The three titles of the albums together form the sentence ‘And yet.. everything is different between the lines’.
sesame street
The musician has also written music for various films and television programs, including Left luggage, Abel, The Discovery of Heaven, The core in sesame street† He also participated in the musical Petticoat, for which he wrote no fewer than 24 songs. For the musical version of Ciske the rat he made the music for all but one of the songs, “I feel so damn alone.”
In Flanders, Henny Vrienten was also known as a producer of Habba† (1984), a record by Raymond van het Groenewoud including ‘Stapelgek op je’, and It is (1990), the well-known album by Jan De Wilde with classics such as ‘First snow’, ‘The fanfare of hunger and thirst’ and the song ‘Hè eh’ of the same name.
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