Flemish ’80s band return with new songs, but the same punk ethos
After a 25-year hiatus, pop band Aroma di Amore are back with a new album and tour
Back by popular demand
In the 1980s, the band combined electronic sounds with cutting guitars, which resulted in songs as sharp as a razor. “That was never a very conscious decision,” says Fred Angst, who plays the guitar. “When we started out, we worked with a cheap rhythm box and ditto organ because we couldn’t afford anything else.”
Their outsider status also extended to their lyrics, which were in Dutch. Angst, however, doesn’t understand what’s so odd about Dutch-language lyrics. “It’s weird; no-one ever asks a Flemish writer why he writes in Dutch,” he says. “It’s evident that, apart from the proverbial exception, authors write in their mother tongue.”
Singer Elvis Peeters, who, coincidentally, is also an author, adds that they were strongly influenced by the ideas behind the punk movement. “I didn’t want to comply with the rules of Anglo-Saxon pop music. And we weren’t the only ones,” he says, pointing out that German bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft also sang in their native tongue. “The lyrics would have been much more banal if I had sung in English because at that point I hadn’t mastered the subtleties of the language.”
An expensive question
Angst and Peeters are both founding members of Aroma di Amore, which formed in 1982. (Bass player Lo Meulen joined them a year later.) After a long hiatus, the band are now back with a brand-new album, Zin, a word that can mean “sense” but also “desire” and “sentence”.
Zin is Aroma di Amore’s fourth full-length album. Samizdat from 2012 was a belated follow-up to 1987’s Koudvuur (“gangrene” but literally also “cold fire”). But, notes Peeters, “it’s not that we didn’t play for 25 years”.
When we started rehearsing, it was as if we had never stopped
Though they performed their final series of concerts in 1994, they reunited for the Belgian Independent Music festival 10 years later. “When we started rehearsing for the festival, it was as if we had never even stopped,” says Peeters.
When record company Onderstroom contacted them to release the two-album compilation Onverdeeld (Undivided), they decided to start working on new material. “Ideas plenty and we really felt like doing it,” Peeters explains.
“Compare it to riding a bike: Once you’ve mastered it, you never forget how to do it,” adds Meulen.
The million dollar question is: Why did they break up in the first place? According to Meulen, it was a two-phase process. “I moved to London, and Elvis and Fred continued Aroma with a few other musicians.”
In 1994, they finally decided to pull the plug. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to take some distance for a while and recharge your batteries,” says Meulen. Angst also saw a practical reason: “We have to admit that 20 years ago, there wasn’t much interest in the band anymore. Period.”
Rabble-rousers
But over the years, prices in second-hand shops for Aroma di Amore’s vinyl albums – their discography comprises two albums, three mini albums and two EPs – went up. And ever since they reunited, interest in the band has continued to grow. At concerts, they see both contemporaries and younger fans who weren’t even born when Aroma di Amore first released their records.
But renewed interest in the music is not the only reason the three have started playing together again. “Social commitment has always been an essential part of Aroma di Amore,” says Angst. “Few artists in Flanders are as committed as we are. It’s necessary, more than ever in today’s society.”
Few artists in Flanders are as socially committed as we are
In the 1980s, too, the band were committed to social causes. “We were young then; we were still iconoclasts,” says Meulen. “The big difference between then and now is that in the 1980s, we hoped we could change things,” Angst points out. “Now, the struggle is about keeping what has changed for the better, because everything we fought for the past 30 years is being threatened by reactionary politics of a kind that I have never seen before in my life.”
But, according to Peeters, it’s still music first and politics second. “Regardless of the opinions we express, we’re first and foremost three guys playing music.” He points to a statement the German-born musician Blixa Bargeld once made. “You won’t change the world with music, but you can inspire people with it and let them know they’re not alone in their feelings.”
He offers the lyrics of “Mijn profeet” (“My Prophet”) as an example, which he describes as a sign of the times. “Ik ben een mens, ik houd God in mijn hand / Ik zaai hem uit, strooi hem uit over het land” (“I am human; I keep God in my hand / I sow him; I scatter him over the land”).
In the CD’s liner notes, the lyrics are accompanied by a picture of Christian iconography. “Like all Elvis’ lyrics, there is some room for interpretation,” Meulen says. “For me, it’s about religious fanaticism, regardless of which religion.”
Peeters’ lyrics aren’t usually overtly political. He tends to give them a jagged poetical side as he plays fascinating games with the Dutch language – in the process proving everyone who says it’s too difficult to sing in Dutch wrong.
You just need talent. And some guts.
Aroma di Amore kick off their new tour on 27 February at Ancienne Belgique, Brussels
Pictured, left to right: Elvis Peeters, Lo Meulen and Fred Angst
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