Schooldays (Jeroen)
I’m from a family with 2 happily married parents, a 8 year older sister and a 6 year older brother. Between 4 and 12 school for me was easy. I learned easily and I didn’t have to do much to have good results. I had fun most of the time and was tall for my age, too bad I stopped growing too soon! My parents were social and kind people who met each other in the 50’s. My mom told me about Elvis and so I was already hooked on Elvis when I was 10. Between 10 and 25 I collected everything that came out from the man even the worst bootlegs and most awful gadgets like mirrors, scarfs, mugs, radios and so on. The love of Elvis made me want to play music myself early in life. An other influence back in those days was my brother Eric. He played guitar in all kinds of bands. He encouraged me to get my own guitar and start playing, as I did when I was 14. The schooldays between 13 and 18 were fun. Besides Elvis I got into some different music like the Jam, Madness and Stray Cats. I bought my first guitar which was a bit like a copy of a Fender Jaguar. Music was a big part of my schooldays back then. I played with my friends in all kinds of bands. I started to perform when I was about 15 and I even released an EP when I was about 16 which was really awful, so I won’t disclose any details on that! Silly outfits were only normal back then. So I changed hair colour regularly, I went to school in a golden ’50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong’-suit and people in the streets called me Elvis all the time. When you’re a kid, looks matter, as it should I guess. So the funnier I looked the happier I felt.
Then I met Johnny and shit hit the fan. He heard about my love of Elvis and old rockabilly so he asked me to start a band with him and we did. To start things off we listened to some music together. To mind comes a picture of Johnny and me sitting on a terrace down town with a ghetto blaster yelling out The Blue Cats. That’s just what we wanted to sound like, so I quit all my other bands and we asked Eric to join in, because we really needed a bass player. I was 17 back then and really getting into neo-rockabilly as it was called back then (Blue Cats and Restless), but also the more psychobilly oriented bands (Richochets, Deltas, Sharks and Meteors, well Johnny liked the Meteors, I was more into Elvis and neo-rockabilly, but who gives a shit). This all lead to the first shows we did with Batmobile when I was still in school. Our school really promoted the stuff we did. When our school was asked for a TV show they did a large item on subcultures, including Psychobilly (!) and they let us play 2 songs live in a TV studio. We did Bring All My Love and Killer’s Crew and those recordings were even released years later on our Buried Alive album.
