Throwback Thursday: Barclay Dance Blend with ROOG, MC Rose & Susanne Alt
An old but great one: Barclay Dance Blend featuring ROOG, MC Rose and Susanne Alt in approximately 1999/2000. More than 20 years ago! When it was normal to promote cigarette smoking and they even sent us on a nation wide tour through the Netherlands. This was recorded by TMF, the 'MTV" of the Netherlands and broadcasted several times. It was a series of dj live acts and manifested what was going on in the underground house scene for a while already: live musicians and mc's/singers jamming together along with house dj's.
I remember that this concept worked really well in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague but it was kind of scary to play outside of these cities, the "randstad", which is the urban agglomeration in the (west of the) Netherlands: Sometimes our gigs would be super short because the crowd was not familiar with our kind of music and the club owner advised us and the Barclay promotion team to stop, for our own security... a local dj would then take over and play the usually more trance or hardstyle kind of music people were used... I remember sometimes we were a little bit depressed because they were not ready for it and we had traveled all the way there to make them dance!
Later, Ibiza would become one of the fancy places to go to on holiday. Since then, house music became much more normal, even for people from non-urban regions because they discovered house music on holiday on Ibiza and from then on only got positive thoughts about it. Nightlife, getting lost in the sounds and sound effects of this music and of course dancing. These days, except for big festivals with house music, wealthy people on the countyside love to have their Ibiza-style garden party... funny and nice how things can change!
This is the title track called Dark Horse. Just as in the album version it features sax and piano solos. It's a pretty wild performance, matching today's start of the Chinese New Year: THE YEAR OF THE FIRE HORSE!Live at Bimhuis, we added a drum solo. Afterwards, I decided to seperate it from the song and post it as an extra video below. Why not in one video?Because the video would become very very long and experience shows that people will not stick around for longer that 6-7 minutes. Yoràn's free drum solo is actually really great and in this seperate video, the true drum lovers can watch and learn from his drum story telling. Sometimes people ask me; What are drummers doing in their solos? To give you an idea of what Yoràn is doing in his solo: He starts with a pattern, an idea. He keeps the pattern going and plays variations over it. Then he combines it with soloing over it with call and reponse phrases and slides in new patterns. Technically it's interesting because he demonstrates a lot of independence and speed, as well as dynamics and sound colours, while telling a story, which means in musical context that the solo has certain elements which can be recognized by the (trained) listener. Many people in the Western part of the world miss the melodic and harmonic context during a free drum solo. It's fair to say a free drum solo without any accompaniment is like an abstract painting. Within the given context you can hear and see what you can manage, depending on your own frame of reference and expectations. In the end, it's about: does it resonate with you? Because both, the painting and the free drum solo, they lack a clear subject (no lyrics, no recognizable image), both forms are highly subjective and open to the interpretation of the audience. They function as a conversation between the artist's feeling and the viewer's/listener's perception.But you also can listen to it with a pure analytical drum ear and try to follow the patterns and phrases. As a musician and human I (try to) do both :-) Enjoy!More info:Susanne Alt: sax, Matthijs Geerts and Ike van Bergen: keys, Thomas Pol: bass, Yoràn Vroom: drums, Helene Jank: percussion Performed at 16th of January 2026 at Bimhuis, Amsterdam, Recorded by Onno Prillwitz Filmed by Robert Glass and Albert Nooij. - An old but great one:Barclay Dance Blend featuring ROOG, MC Rose and Susanne Alt in approximately 1999/2000.More than 20 years ago! When it was normal to promote cigarette smoking and they even sent us on a nation wide tour through the Netherlands. This was recorded by TMF, the 'MTV of the Netherlands and broadcasted several times. It was a series of dj live acts and manifested what was going on in the underground house scene for a while already: live musicians and mc's/singers jamming together along with house dj's.I remember that this concept worked really well in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague but it was kind of scary to play outside of these cities, the randstad, which is the urban agglomeration in the (west of the) Netherlands: Sometimes our gigs would be super short because the crowd was not familiar with our kind of music and the club owner advised us and the Barclay promotion team to stop, for our own security... a local dj would then take over and play the usually more trance or hardstyle kind of music people were used... I remember sometimes we were a little bit depressed because they were not ready for it and we had traveled all the way there to make them dance!Later, Ibiza would become one of the fancy places to go to on holiday. Since then, house music became much more normal, even for people from non-urban regions because they discovered house music on holiday on Ibiza and from then on only got positive thoughts about it. Nightlife, getting lost in the sounds and sound effects of this music and of course dancing. These days, except for big festivals with house music, wealthy people on the countyside love to have their Ibiza-style garden party... funny and nice how things can change!
