‘When they used to say they wanted to play at Rock Werchter, everyone laughed at them. But look: now they are here.’ Presenter Stijn Van de Voorde subtly summarized Xink’s unlikely comeback: twenty years after their participation in Eurosong For Kids, Xink was on the main stage.
Xink
Seen on 1/7 at Rock Werchter
For the third day in a row it was a Belgian band that was allowed to shake up the Main Stage at noon. That’s no surprise on a rainy Saturday: it took halfway through the set before the field started to fill up. Those latecomers missed, among other things, ‘The other side’, one of the songs that still stands strong after all these years, with an amazingly mature text about the search for ‘more’ in life.
Singer Jonas Meukens seemed even more concerned with voice conservation than at the four comeback shows in the AB: now that he has a beard in his throat, he sings the songs he throated as a teenager a key lower. Guitarist Thomas Valckiers also contributed to a more mature sound: in the new ‘Aura’ you can hear the rattling rock that he also injected in recent years as a producer in bands such as Equal Idiots.
Apart from bass player Philip Valckiers – who now works as an international relations adviser at the Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection – the members of Xink have always remained active in the music sector. That made them in an excellent position to realize that the gaping hole of Dutch rock had not been dived for years. A new song like ‘Maybe’, which was already at the top of StuBru’s De Afaccount, showed how it should be done: that song was sung almost as loudly as ‘The friendship band’ as the closing song.
A punky ‘Volkslied’ and ‘It’s my own life’ showed that those new songs were also welcome – in the AB they dug up better songs from the old box. Fortunately, ‘Let me free’ – another precocious song – made it to the setlist. ‘Life is mine / don’t keep telling me what to do’, Meukens sang there. Many would have recommended a band like Xink to put the past to rest. On the Main Stage they showed that the future is what you make of it.
2023-07-01 12:13:44
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