In Antwerp you’ll find one ‘real’ music club, Trix. There you’ll see all kinds of bands from different sizes. The bigger events take place in the main hall, which used to be Hof Ter Lo, and the smaller shows you’ll see in Trix club or Trix bar. And of course, there is also Petrol club.
But then that’s it. I’m not complaining about their programmation, but back when my two companions and myself founded pooping bird we were utterly frustrated about the limited amount of shows we could go to. We as ‘big’ music lovers would change this and I’m sure this is the incentive that drove our colleages aswell.
DIY promoters overall are people who are driven by their love for music in the first place. They are often youngsters who don’t have the money to regulary buy € 15 tickets, but who’d love to see more live shows as they already do. Overall, they have a very critic view on today’s music industry and it’s mainstream way of thinking.
pooping bird.As I told you before, most of the DIY organisators felt there was something missing in Antwerp, and so did we. Back then, Noon was still studying in Ghent where a lot of DIY concerts took place. We started to get the hang of these very cheap and still very decent concerts, and wanted to take them to Antwerp. We knew a couple of places like for example Scheld’apen who did such shows, so we started to get to know the Antwerp scenery a bit better.
Screamo, post-punk and math rock were our personal favorite shows, because of the no-nonsense attitude and the energy of both the bands and the promoters. But with our organisation, we wanted line ups filled with unknown bands of all genres with just one thing in common: the high standard of their music. pooping bird was born.
Our first pooping bird. event ever was in a small squatted venue, called ‘t Logement. We still had a sloth left on the bill and so little time to promote the event, so we asked our friends of Intergalactic Lovers if they’d like to play that night for gazoline costs. They gladly said ‘yes’ and that was the birth of pooping bird.
Of course, we aren’t the first nor the last DIY promoters Antwerp will ever know, and luckily, we became good friends with some other organizers. Some had inspired us, like Jelle with his Hands Like Birds shows in the beginning of 2008. Others found us to be inspiring and founded their own organisations. Sometimes, we collaborate if we want to do a ‘bigger’ event (cultus online).
When asked why they to what they do, a lot of my fellow colleagues answered that on top of their unconditional love for music they’d miss an underground scenery, where everything was made possible. Through MySpace (ages ago), facebook and the growing number of music streaming sites, a lot of brilliant bands nowadays can easily find their way to a promoter and vice versa.
Antwerp still has too little high quality concerts in specific genres, but I’m glad there are a couple organisations now (like: Kelly Splinter, Hands Like Birds, Teloorgangshows, Kaspar Hauser Records, ...) who are still trying to work together as a front to lower the threshold and bring decent music to everyone interested.
