De Raggende Manne are a curious, yet legendary (at least in the Netherlands), genre-defying group active mostly in the 1990s and broke up in 1999, somehow quite popular under metalheads too.  All of a sudden they did a reunion gig earlier this year. And now in the last month of this year another two. This one being the first.

The support came from De Geweldigheid another Dutch rock group with many outside influences, including punk, elektro, dance, funk. Nevertheless, they could interest me at all.

After a long change-over, De Raggende Manne appeared on stage, with two guitarist instead of their traditional one. Dressed in something that would probably be hip in the seventies or so. Each of them started to play a bit on their instruments, apparently somewhat random, but eventually ended up playing the song Zand. Bob Fosko screamed his lunges out, like on the albums, like he is supposed to do with this band. The music is always weird and combines aspects from many other genres. Not in the least by the dissonant trumpet tunes that singer Bob played during some songs. The set consisted of a grand mixture of all their albums, but especially the brilliant Knuppelhout was prominent in the set with the illustrious Bruine Arme, Ik Zag Je Met Een Ander, Soms Gaat Het Niet, and of course all time classic, 6 second song Nee Da’s Niks. One of the other ultra short songs – Ik Vind Je Leuk – was even played twice.After some 45 minutes the band went off stage, but reappeared shortly to do another. couple songs.  Their other “hit”, and probably best known song “Poep In Je Hoofd” was also played of course as the first encore. Followed by perhaps some self-reflection in the song Bloedeloos. And then ended their set with the drinking song “De Fles” where Bob also played the accordion. A brilliant gig, and it was really awesome to see a band live that I missed when they were active. And most surprisingly, they played an hour instead of their usually very short gigs of the past.

Set list can be found here:

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/de-raggende-manne/2013/poppodium-013-tilburg-netherlands-3c4756f.html