Into the Tree! Into the Treeee!

This Sunday I will play my hometown of Antwerp. And I will be doing more than that. I will be returning to the place where, by now quite a few years ago, I started playing live again after, again, quite a few years.

Yes, I Did have a previous life as a musician. I was not always a sole man walking into the venue holding three guitar cases. I used to perform, heavily eye lined, with ‘A Forest’ of hair (couldn’t resist the pun) that would put Robert Smith’s to shame, flaunting hot fuchsia and black as my main stage outfit’s colors, apart from the bright white boxing shoes (‘dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee’). I had an altogether different persona when hitting the stage in the prevous century. We were six then, we were going to conquer the world and we were musically so in love with each other that the memory of it is like a gem on my life’s timeline, burning, even today, with the chemistry of what was.

Still, nostalgia is not my thing at all. Not all was better in the past and not all was worse. Flipping out on music Was worse for sure. One gruesome day the light just went out, in one instant, actually, although I did not know it at the time. I guess any aspiring musician hits that wall at some point. You victimize yourself until the jar breaks, everything flows out and there is no repair kit to grab for. I’ll tell you a secret. I had totally closed the door on making music (apart from playing blues in C minor with 6 fingers on my synth, safely under my headphones). I made theatre for years, because people asked me to and on the inside I went ‘why not?’. The wrong motivation, I know now. And deep within I knew then too.

I met my wife in theatre. She thought she was marrying an actor. I thought so too, until on our wedding party we sang a duet and a friend of mine asked whether I felt like playing live at Antwerp’s ‘Zuiderzinnen Festival’. I paused, said yes and, well, the rest is history of the future I am living now.

So after ten years of theatre or so, one fateful day I headed to a place called ‘De Nieuwe Linde’ at the southern tip of the city where I performed live again, all alone this time. I was hooked from measure one. I won’t try to describe what it felt like to truly come back into my own after so many years, to experience my very soul coming home, the pure exhilirating joy that emerges out of the deep. But it happened there, at ‘De Nieuwe Linde’. Over the years I got to know Dirk and Lin, the owners. They are both walking bundles of love and support, I would find out.

So on Sunday I will joyfully return to my roots, the roots of the linden tree, where, really, FLOATSTONE was born, although at that point the name was still strictly reserved for my  email address. It will not be my first return there, but when I think of the difference between the fuchsia and black clad lead singer of old and the guitar man who first performed at De Linde I feel the difference between that last guy and the musician playing there on Sunday is even bigger.
You are all very welcome there.

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