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Innovation: the guts to burn money
Recently I was a guest at Portera’s podcast hosted and organized by Baris Kavakli and Waleed Siraj. The podcast is about innovation, digitization, and the emerging digital society we currently live in. We talked about gambling, lawnmowers, diving, burning money, and long hours drive with Eric Woolfson, the co-creator of The Alan Parsons Project. I realized one digital anecdote is left to tell about those days by listening back to the podcast.
It is 1995, Amsterdam. I just returned from my Australian road trip by motorbike, trying to make sense of the world around me and finding my way back in the urban jungle. In Australia, I picked up diving and witnessed the incredible and weightless underwater world. Back home, it was my old underground music life again. I was tour manager and drove artists around in the Netherlands: Fish, Proper Grounds, Ramones, Some have Fins, to name a few international ones. Also, multiple Dutch artists saw the inside of my van: Chicas Del Rock, Marshmallows, Jack of Hearts and Claw Boys Claw. By the way, Claw Boys Claw is still going strong after thirty years. Incredible. One of those rare bands that stays fresh, energetic, and improving while growing old. Or maybe it is just my imagination and sweet juvenile memories of the days that life was still more future than history. Anyway, check out their new album: Kite.
The road was my home, the asphalt my landscape. Dressed in the standard roady outfit: dark jeans, steel-capped Doc Martens, black t-shirt with band print, jeans jacket, bomber jacket and always a cigarette hanging in the corner of my mouth. How standard can you go? I gorged kilometres during the day and the night.
It was 50 years after the end of the Second World War. Time for a celebration. The reason to organize the World Liberty Concert: a huge musical spectacle near the place where the battle of Arnhem took place in September 1944. Multiple famous international artists took part in an extended live show, and I had to transport them between Schiphol and Arnhem. Depending on the traffic, a 1,5 and 2-hour drive, the perfect scene for good conversations. Here I met Eric Woolfson, who set the course of my life…
