For years Belgium was just a little dot on the global map of music. Today it seems even in London and New York they know the way to Destelbergen <where the famous Boccaccio club was located>...
The founder(s)
Much like House music New Beat came into existence as a reaction by DJ's to the more conventional dance music. The main feature is... indeed, the new beat : noticable slower and heavier than the one used in disco and house. DJ Dirk "TC" 't Seyen still remembers how he lowered the rpm of certain records drastically already seven years ago. "Together with the first Heaven 17 LP a 12-inch record by B.E.F. was released in 1981, of which I played the song Baby Called Billion on 33 rpm instead of 45 rpm. I did the same thing with the instrumental B-side of the Soft Cell hit Tainted Love. I wasn't the only one : several different Belgian DJ's had the same kind of idea. The fact we met eachother regularly at the USA Import (= an Antwerp record store, specialised in the latest dance music) had something to do with it for sure. I can assure you that New Beat wasn't invented by one particular DJ in a certain club or that one single record started the whole New Beat-movement. That movement just happened gradually due to several coincidents".
In Antwerp they tell me a different story however. The only true founder of New Beat supposedly is a guy called "Big" Ronny, a.k.a. Ronny Harmsen, who's an Antwerp resident but originally comes from Holland. "New Beat started off at the club where Ronny acted as DJ from 1984 to 1986, more specifically the Ancienne Belgique", according to Frie Verhelst, who runs the highly ranked shop USA Import, together with her husband José Pascual. "Ronny developed his very own unique style years ago at the New Wave club Scandals. While disco was the big thing, he played slow or slowed down tracks by artists like The Human League, O.M.D., Fad Gadget, Anne Clark, Severed Heads and Gary Numan, but also for example Max Berlin's track Elle et Moi, which created a real cult vibe."
Hidden pearl
"When he became DJ at the Ancienne Belgique he noticed his crowd kept growing untill it reached 1,500 upto 2,000 people every evening he played", Frie continues. "The music he played was so unique people started to call it A.B.-music after a while. Between his old, usually no longer available records, he played instrumental B-sides of rap- and house 12-inches, if necessary using less rpm's on the turntable, and also Belgian tracks by Front 242, Arbeid Adelt!, Poésie Noire, etc. We regularly got a large number of people asking us for a copy of several records that were launched by Ronny at the Ancienne Belgique. Numerous DJ's started to copy Ronny's style and today a lot of the records he played during that period, belong to the so called New Beat classics". One of those classics is Flesh by the electro-duo A Split Second from Ghent. The track was being very inconspicuous, due to its high tempo, on their debut 12-inch released in September 1986. But on 33 rpm + 8% (using the pitch-control on a professional Technics-turntable) an exciting feeling of pulsating bass-lines and a really tempting, deep, dancable beat magically appeared. Flesh became a mega club-hit in both national and international clubs and ended up being for New Beat what Phuture's Acid Trax meant for Acid House. However, the question remains who actually discovered the key to this hidden pearl. "Ronny", claims Frie Verhelst. "For him it had become an automatic reaction to try out 12-inches on 33 rpm + 8%". "I did", says Dirk TC 't Seyen. "Together with DJ PC Patrick from Izegem. By then Ronny wasn't even working in the Ancienne Belgique anymore. I still remember that where I bought it, they only had about 2 copies of that particular 12-inch. During that period I was DJ at the Carrera club located in Destelbergen. Everybody important from the Antwerp night-life was there when I introduced Flesh. That's how the whole thing got going."
The snowball effect
The success of Flesh really did have a snowball effect. While the Ancienne Belgique started to loose its clientele, due to the fact Ronny was no longer playing there, clubs like Carrera and the Antwerp club Prestige became the new leading New Beat houses. Also, in the national charts New Beat-projects like B-Art and Nux Nemo suddenly appeared. But the whole thing really exploded when in April 1987 the mega club Boccaccio opened its doors in Destelbergen. Their main competitor, the opposite located club Carrera, soon disappeared out of the picture because of a fire that burnt the whole place down. Boccaccio-DJ Olivier Pieters, once the helping hand at Ancienne Belgique, started his New Beat evenings every Sunday and nowadays those have become internationally famous. Between two- and three thousand youngsters came from all over the country and even from France, Holland and Western-Germany <Germany wasn't unified at that time> to submerge themselves into the hypnotic Boccaccio-beat Olivier played, even until the little hours. "The seeds were planted at the clubs Ancienne Belgique and Carrera, but it was in the Boccaccio club that New Beat really came totally to life", says Dirk 't Seyen. "Olivier has just been very cunning and commercial in his ways, but in fact he's taking all the credit instead of the people who really earn it. Both in the Ancienne Belgique as in the Carrera club, where he filled in for me one weekend, he wrote down the titles of dozens of records, thus taking advantage of the hard work both Ronny and I did searching the original tracks. ".
International break-through
Until late last year people only spoke of A.B.-music or Bocca-music. Former Prestige-DJ Marc Grouls claims to have launched the term "New Beat" and because of it he was incorrectly mentioned as "New Beat inventor" in numerous press articles. "Whenever giving interviews they twisted my words a lot of the time.", says Grouls to his defence. "I didn't invent the genre but thought of a new label for it. I found New Beat to be a logical name because New Wave and a specific dance-beat were the most important aspects of that music".
"The New Beat of Belgium is here to go". That's the final sentence in an article about the phenomenon in the English magazine i-D. In just under a year the New Beat movement has grown to unexpected proportions. Especially the Subway-division of record company Antler plays an essential part in all of this . New beat was redesigned to fit the masses by people like the threesome Morton, Sherman & Bellucci, as proven by the hitsuccess of for example Move Your Ass And Feel The Beat (Erotic Dissidents) and Hmm Hmm (Taste Of Sugar). A few months ago Subway released the very first New Beat compilation called "New Beat - Take 1", which was at the top of the Belgian album-charts in no time.
The New Beat fever is also slowly but steadily moving across our nation's borders, e.g. all over Europe and even the U.S.A. Leading English clubs like The Hacienda in Manchester and Spectrum in Londen already play New Beat. According to the influencial London DJ Jazzy M, New Beat is getting more and more popular in the British capital. "They're really hunting for records like Flesh by A Split Second overhere", he says. "New Beat is new and refreshing and is constantly redesigning itself. It may be a bit ironic for you Belgians but most of the London DJ's playing New Beat turn up the rpm's again to be able to combine it with (acid) house".
