Available online:

All three albums by DE FUCKUPS are available for free on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, TikTok/Resso, Google Play/YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal, Napster, iHeartRadio, ClaroMusica, Saavn, Anghami, KKBox, MediaNet, Instagram and Facebook.

^ The last two albums by De Fuckups are also available on 10″ vinyl. Contact Menno to buy them.

Both Dandruff!! albums are available for free at Bandcamp.com, thanks to Heideroosje Marco Roelofs of Windmill Records and Jos Haijer of TopHole Records. If you want to download them just ‘buy’ them for $ 0,-. Please don’t pay for them, that will only complicate things.

Bands I’ve played in, from first to last:

Sperma – 1977 1978

I started my first band in Enschede after seeing our local punkband KUT play when I was seventeen. I was friends with their singer Jan de Klere / Jan PK. We were the only two punks in our small rural town of Enschede in 1977. At that concert I met Wim Punk from Almelo, and together we started Sperma. I sang, he played guitar. Later my childhood friend André would become the drummer and a bassplayer from my school in Hengelo, Peter Ruck joined. We rehearsed a couple of times, and even got a gig at Club DDT666 in Amsterdam. The gig was done by Wim alone though, as the rest of us weren’t allowed to travel to Amsterdam during the week.
I did visit Amsterdam with Wim quite often during the weekends though, and we got to know Diana Ozon (back then going by the name of Gretchen Gestapo) and Hugo Kaagman (back then called Armadillo) who owned DDT666 and Galerie Anus. Diana and Hugo made fanzine Blondie which later became De Koekrandt and we spent an entire night making a Sperma songbook with all our adolescent lyrics in it. Forty years later I saw one print of that songbook going for 85 euros at an auction. Ridiculous.

Mid 1978 our bassplayer Peter got me expelled from school. We went to the same school and he had spray painted SPERMA across the entire back wall of our French classroom. I had our band name on the back of my leather jacket, so obviously they thought I did that. I didn’t, but also refused to say who did.
By that time Wim P. had moved to Amsterdam permanently and with me changing schools, Sperma sort of ceased to exist eventually.

The Slashers – 1978

After the summer break in 1978 I went to a new school where I met Niek. We started an a capella punk band for fun, called the Slashers. It was just us two mimicking guitar and drum sounds. I don’t remember ever doing a real concert, but we had fun. We’d hang out at the Enschedese School (where the first Dutch punk single was made, Paul Tornado’s Van Agt Casanova) after school and we made silk screen posters for a local youth club that we had squatted the wardrobe of. Niek called himself Vim Attacqo and I was Ed ter Pus. In the years after that we both went to study art in different cities, but we stayed friends and we’ve been in bands on and off for over 46 years now.

Tup & de Taarten – 1982

I studied graphic design at the school of fine arts in Arnhem, and didn’t really have time for a band in those years. I did sing in a band called Tup en de Taarten for a while; we did rock ‘n’ roll covers, songs by Elvis, Louis Prima, Johnny Ray, Eddie Cochran etc. I don’t even remember who were in that band exactly. I do remember the keyboard player had played for Hank the Knife and the Jets.
More important was me and Fred Smeijers getting into ska and reggae

Henk en het Huis – 1986-1990

In 1979 Niek had moved to Groningen to study there. Our mutual friend Ricky just got kicked out by his parents and decided to move there as well. Within a month, the entire punk scene of Enschede (which had grown to about 20) had moved to Groningen.
So when I was done studying in 1984 I moved to Groningen as well, as I had already spent all my free weekends and vacations there. Ricky played bass for de Boegies at that time, and I had been designing their merch and album covers for a while. Niek had picked up playing the drums for real and was in a band called Scarecrow.
Being fed up with the Boegies Ricky started a new band with Niek and me; Henk en het Huis. Niek brought the two guitarists from Scarecrow, Piet Kleinganseij and Siep Wip.

We did our first concert in Vera and released a couple of cassettes and one split live LP, Gas! Our music was a weird postmodern mix between punk and sixties psychedelica.

Not many songs are available online -and that’s probably a good thing- but there is one guy that put some songs on youtube from a demo that we recorded in our rehearsal room. The first song is about a night following a fIREHOSE concert at Vera that I spent binge drinking with Mike Watt until 7 in the morning. Pretty good pastiche even if’n I does says so myself.
The other song wasn’t finished yet; I was still singing a poem by John Cooper Clarke that I used as a place holder for lyrics.

The Hanky’s – 1988-1992

Piet, the guitarist of Henk en het Huis and me started performing as a duo, to practice singing in harmony. We were singing sappy Dutch folk songs (smartlappen), some Beatles songs, country and western. We performed on the streets, in bars, and we did a lot of opening acts for bigger bands and festivals.
We changed names every now and then as well; we were de Afsluitdijkers (smartlappen) the Purple Necks (country) or de Neefjes. And we’d be joined by other musicians like Siep Wip (Henk en het Huis), Toni Trekzak of Roeg Toeg, and Thuur Caris of Jammah Tammah.
As we mostly played covers, no recordings or records were made. Our last concert was as an opening act at the Gutterblast festival, opening for Bettie Serveert, Gore, Bad Religion, Crop Dusters, Urban Dance Squad and Cosmic Psychos, where we did horribly bad jazz versions of their biggest hits.

The Wicked Path of Sin -1989 – 1994

In 1989, Piet bought a banjo, without knowing how to play it. As The Hanky’s we played some extremely simple bluegrass songs nevertheless, just to give it a go. Some musicians of the Bluegrass band the Blue Hearts saw us fuck these songs up during a live concert and they decided to join us. With Jan Jansen and Hendrik Koers on board, we rehearsed a lot, played bars and were busking on the streets of Groningen. Siep Wip (Henk en het Huis) joined playing mandoline, Laura ter Beek swapped from classical violin to fiddle and before you knew it we had an all punk bluegrass band. We never recorded a record (again: most of what we played were covers) but we were recorded many times live as we were picked up by national radio. We played quite often for KRO’s Country Time (once we were denied entrance to our own show because we were punks) and we even won their award for best country band of the Netherlands in 1991. I shit you not. Thankfully this all happened before the entire inline dancing craze. We would certainly have added a pinch of moshpit to that.

I left the band because doing concerts with them as well my other band, Dandruff!! meant I was doing concerts every weekend all over the country and beyond, and I hardly had time for other things, like going to see concerts by other bands. After a couple of years they regrouped and went on as the Hillbilly Holler.

Dandruff!! 1991 -1998

Mark played guitar for de Boegies, and the two of us always had fun getting drunk and adding background vocals to whatever punk song was being played. In 1990 de Boegies had stopped and he and Jan Heddema started a band that played melodic punk, in the style of Bad Religion. They got a band together with Edwin Pot on bass and Mark Regelink on drums, and because they needed a singer Mark asked me to join. I had never heard of Bad Religion but I liked the Saints, Buzzcocks, the Crabs, X-ray Specs, all kinds of punk bands that sounded like pop and bubblegum. We rehearsed their songs for a couple of months, recorded a demo at Boer Jelke’s studio in Kielwindeweer and in hindsight you could say that demo went ‘viral’ in the music press. We got to do many concerts all over the country and in Belgium and Germany, and we got offered record deals! We stuck with Top Hole records (they had also done de Boegies and they had Sony on their side) and they set us up with a full week in the same studio we recorded our demo. Somehow it didn’t work out as before, but Jelke called his old band mate Tom to fix things. He got Jelke to give us an additional two weeks in the studio for free to record the entire album over again. Tom had never produced loud music but he did a fantastic job and we got a first album that was kicking ass and got much acclaim in the music press. As a result we played every weekend for about a year. Tom got addicted to noise and started an industrial band called Nerve, and later had world wide hits as Junkie XL.
After a couple of years Jan Heddema left the band because we were kind of stuck and he got bored. John Krol got to take his place, mainly because he came up with the brilliant salsa break for this song. We recorded a second album because the two weeks of studio time were paid for by Marco Roelofs of de Heideroosjes after Mark confronted him for releasing a song by de Boegies on record without giving credit or paying royalties and squeezed a record deal out of him and the record company he owned.
That second album wasn’t half bad, but we were getting fed up with eachother. So we split up not long after releasing that album. We did one last show in Vera, completely over the top, and that was that. As always, some of us came together again. More about that in the next episode.

De Fuckups 2000 – now

After doing concerts almost every weekend for seven years with Dandruff!!, I had become utterly bored with singing and standing front and center of the stage, making lame jokes. I taught myself to play rhythm guitar and joined John ( solo guitarist of Dandruff!!) and Niek to make simple but powerful old school punk songs again. Marjan (singer for Blue Hearts – see Wicked Path of Sin) joined us on bass and both Petra Geelink of Sexy Dex and Ricky van Duuren (by then best known for playing bass in Moonlizards) had a go at singing, but somehow that didn’t work out. In 2003 Menno Schreuder of Hellectric joined and we recorded our first album at Pot Studios, the studio of Edwin, the bass player of Dandruff!!
Edwin did a great job and our first album got great reviews. Since then we’ve recorded every record with Edwin. John left the band when his son Nemo was born, and he was replaced by George Whiteflood of The Kickers.
We’ve done many concerts, opening for our childhood heroes, playing with our GGI friends in Ireland and Glasgow. And although I haven’t been in good enough health to join them for the past couple of years, the rest of the band still does concerts. I hope to join them again once I get better!

With three graphic designers, two art school teachers and one accountant, De Fuckups have an almost constant flow of logos, posters and nonsense.
Look at our website or follow one of our forty social media accounts (we keep forgetting our password) to check them out. I’ll try and share some below:

Some logos:

Some video clips:

A video of Stuff, made by Menno using footage from our England/Ireland tour
Lie to Me animation by River Roest
A video report by Menno of that same tour
A video for Letterman, made by me.
A live video of When We Shake a Hip, The Town Swings
An extremely long video of me presenting our second album live.
A video for The Lights On These Tables Are Rubbish, that I made using footage from our concert at the Gideon camp.
A promotional video of the VVD slightly altered and combined with Peacock, by me.
Peacock live, by Quince
Robot Jesus by Sissy, made by me
Press briefing about the delayed release of out third album recorded by Radio Garmerwolde, made by Menno, Marjan, Michael Hall, Michelle Provoost, Petra Geelink and me.
Stuff animation by River Roest
A video of Gut Feeling using only free stock clips by me.