Frans - Marie-José - Lanny - Joost - Wim

Henk Kloppers

I must have been four years old when I started to bother my mother and father to get me a piano. In response, they were desperately trying to explain that apart from the large amount of money involved, it would definitely fill up our living room and having dinner for four around the piano was not what I had in mind, did I?

However, due to my friendly persistence on the matter, ignoring all the reasons repeated so many times before, my parents came to the conclusion that I must have a particular interest in music and for that very reason they decided to send me to the music school at he age of six.

At the end of the second term, one had to pick an instrument and as our living room situation had not changed, except as the years went by we were growing and the living room seemed to get even smaller, the decision was easily made… a guitar. My father did not stall much further and ordered immediately a classical guitar, being hand made by an instrument builder in Schiedam .

After four long years of submerging and submitting myself to the study of the classical guitar, by a very strict teacher, whom also had the nasty habit of hitting your fingers in case he did not like your position, I fell in love with the upcoming Rock & Roll music.

Very soon after, together with my class mates Lanny Smouter en Fred Severin, we formed The Rocking Thunders. We practiced on average twice a week, which was maybe one of the reasons why results came quick and more often than not we were winning most of the talent shows in which we competed against other local talents. It sure came as a surprise that we were approached by some people, grown-ups, who wanted to manage us. During their leadership the band was extended to include a singer with a pretty strong voice, Tony Leckard (Ton Bosma for insiders). Once Tony was on board, things started to move fast, with performances throughout Holland and Belgium . Sadly enough, the then required army draft, put an abrupt halt to our musical aspirations.

After having fulfilled, for sixteen months, my somewhat meaningless and dull duties to defend my country, I was ready to expand my musical horizons and decided to take private lessons from Luut Buijsman, who showed me the ins and outs of the guitar in the Jazz world.

From the very start of the Jazz rock and Fusion, I switched to the Bass guitar, where I joined Peter Vlietstra, keyboard player, singer and song writer of the famous Dutch soul band The Free, and we formed a band called Flame, in which Wim Keijsers played the drums.

After a few years I got a strong desire (again) to expand my skills further and decided to achieve this by looking for a band which would play the professional circuits, as those musicians have to be capable of playing a much wider variety of musical styles. I decided to join, this time as a guitarist, a well respected band called Midnight Special and I must have played with them, as a professional musician, at least a thousand gigs over a period of about seven years. After this period, I played as a free-lance musician until the time I got a call from a friend, which asked me desperately to get some musicians together to save a large party. Now, if you have read our web site carefully, the rest of the story should be self-explanatory… and in all honesty, I must admit, that came2play is the band in which I play with more pleasure than any other band before, it’s fun, it’s musical, with well balanced and good humored musicians, and one can feel that the others share this very same experience, you can hear it thru the grapevine.


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Frans - Marie-José - Lanny - Joost - Wim