Two key clubs keep West Flemish music scene rocking & rolling
Since the late 1980s, The Pit’s in Kortrijk and 4AD in Diksmuide have been the indisputable centres of the West Flemish alternative music scene
Punk meets the West
But the two oddball colossi at the heart of the West Flemish alternative music scene are 4AD in Diksmuide and The Pit’s in Kortrijk. Both opened in 1988 and both fuse the punk DIY ethos and Flemish volunteering culture with financial backup from the governing powers-that-be.
Diksmuide is perhaps best known for the brutal trench warfare that took place around the Yser river during the First World War. It’s a strange place to find a music club named after the British record label that was home to rock bands like The Pixies, Cocteau Twins and Xmal Deutschland.
Patrick Smagghe, a Diksmuide local, started 4AD in a tiny bar on a shopping street in the late 1980s. It later moved to a larger location by the town’s railway station. Its third and current home is an old Belgacom depot, which 4AD moved into in 2004 and which was gifted by the town.
In 2005, the depot was enclosed by an enormous cuboid structure of soundproofed concrete, over a metre thick in places. The cost of that operation, including that of all the new tech gear inside, was well over €900,000. The bulk of it came from the government of Flanders.
Not just entertainment
Fortunately, successive Flemish culture ministers over the years have agreed with Smagghe that “pop and rock are art”. The 4AD founder hopes that current culture minister Sven Gatz will take that same motto to heart. The minister is expected to decide by June whether the club’s funding will be continued for the 2017-2021 period.
The subsidies for which 4AD has applied are part of a wider initiative: to stem the brain drain eastwards to Ghent. “In West Flanders, we’ve got the sea, but when you’re 18 or 20, you’re not so interested in the sea,” Smagghe notes drily.
He adds that the area has also been haunted by an alarming phenomenon. “In this region, the Westhoek, we’ve got one of the highest percentage of suicide by youngsters.”
In West Flanders, we’ve got the sea, but when you’re 18 or 20, you’re not so interested in the sea
Fittingly, what 4AD offers goes beyond entertainment. The club has three rehearsal spaces outside the concrete cube, which can be rented for only €7 for a three-hour slot. They are sandbagged to a height of four metres for soundproofing, closely resembling the preserved First World War trenches of the Dodengang around the nearby Yser.
Smagghe, 49, is also proud of 4AD’s green credentials. The stage lights are in the process of being converted into LEDs, and all food prepared for the bands is vegetarian. With the money raised through a recent crowdfunding campaign and help from sponsors, the club will also plant 6.6 hectares of new woods near Ostend at the end of this month. “At that point, we will become the first carbon-neutral arts centre in Belgium,” he says.
Premier tastemaker
Smagghe books about 50 bands a year, and it’s his taste that prevails, absolutely. “I consider myself an easy-going guy, but not at that point,” he admits.
Fortunately, his tastes are broad. “We do singer-songwriter, reggae, dub, post-rock, metal.” He likes to pay the bands well and, in return, the kind of misbehaviour you might associate with touring musicians rarely happens at 4AD. Each show is also recorded by three fixed cameras, edited, burnt to DVD and given to the performers for free.
Local bands, unsurprisingly, have nothing but love for the long-time club. Alek Pigor of Ostend’s The Glücks calls Smagghe “the real crème de la crème – honest, no bullshit. The same can be said for all the 4AD team.”
4AD has salaried staff for key technical roles and its production office, but the work of some 60 volunteers is also indispensable to keep it running. They, for instance, help organise the onsite accommodation for bands – next door in the converted Belgacom shop – where local musicians recording an album can also stay.
Quirky traditions
Meanwhile, 50 kilometres southeast – a lot further from the sea – The Pit’s is under the stewardship of Claudia Lippo and Sebastien Dessauvage. According to Lippo, the club has been handed down through generations of “misfits who sought out a place to get together”.
All in all, it has been through some 40 pairs of hands since it opened in the late 1980s. “There have been lawyers, accountants, welders, cooks, all getting horribly drunk and booking shows together,” says Dessauvage, 26.
He and Lippo, 30, are fiercely proud of the traditions of The Pit’s, from the steak with kroketten and mushroom sauce that meat-eating bands are served, to the “Fuck That Weak Shit” club anthem by Kortrijk’s own ’90s punk band The Jesus Disease, to the enforced intimacy of the urinals, which are in the same, very small room as the merchandising table.
It’s a deviant, outcast, family thing – an intimate, raw way of experiencing shows
Bands that perform at the club often stay overnight in the spare room of the couple’s apartment, which comes with three cats, fresh sheets and a proper breakfast. This is part of The Pit’s rock-solid reputation for looking after bands, says Dessauvage. “We don’t ask: ‘How much do you want?’ We ask: ‘How much do you need to get to the next venue?’”
The Pit’s genuinely seems untouched in decades. The exception is the graffiti bands are encouraged to leave behind in the backstage lounge. The Glücks scorched their name on the ceiling with lighters; Los Explosivos wrote theirs with what Lippo says is Nutella that is now 10 years old.
An anarchist squat
Alek Pigor of The Glücks says that the Kortrijk club is “the closest you’ll get to that ’77 CBGBs vibe in Belgium. It’s a deviant, outcast, family thing. It’s an intimate, raw way of experiencing shows.”
Like that legendary New York music club, The Pit’s revels in its shabbiness, which is seemingly at odds with the solidly bourgeois atmosphere of a city like Kortrijk. It might still look like a West Berlin anarchist squat, but the club actually does its level best to keep things simpatico with the police, local residents and the town council, from which it gets a vital grant as a youth club.
“Our rent is paid for by the city, as well as 80% of the utilities,” says Desauvage. Local officials quietly overlook that many of the members are way, way over 30 – the upper limit for a youth club. Maybe that’s because The Pit’s also fulfils a valuable social role. Or maybe it’s because the Kortrijk mayor “is supposedly a metal head,” laughs Desauvage.
A wee corner pub
It was a now legendary show by the US garage punk band The Mummies and Supercharger in the ’90s that put The Pit’s on the map as a venue for international acts. The US punk band The New Bomb Turks played there not long after The Mummies came through. Their frontman, Eric Davidson, devoted a paragraph to the Kortrijk music venue in his 2010 memoir We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut.
“A wee corner pub not big enough to hold the cast of Waiting for Godot but which would, about twice a month, pack in a hundred drunken nutjobs,” he wrote. “From the upstairs, the club got smaller and smaller, until you practically had to walk sideways to get to the bar. Then crawl over the bar to get to the six-by-six stage.”
It got smaller and smaller, until you practically had to walk sideways to get to the bar
That route still exists. It’s that, or go past the merch and urinals, and then through the entire audience.
The Pits and 4AD have taken two very different routes to great music since 1988. Indicatively, 4AD’s backstage is full of cardboard boxes of high-end sound gear from the German retailer Thomman, while that of The Pit’s is crammed with crates of Bockor Blauw beer.
But here’s how similar they are: In the next few days, each will host two of North America’s wildest and finest outsider rock’n’roll acts. Daddy Long Legs play 4AD on 4 March, and Bloodshot Bill will take The Pit’s stage on 21 February.
Proof indeed that no weak shit is allowed in these glorious and unique corners of West Flanders.
Photo courtesy The Pit's
