With his song Sunday Afternoon Football, the Amsterdam singer / songwriter Mirco Haarmans managed to strike a chord with the 3FM DJs and many of their listeners. The song is about Cor Strik who died as a corporal in Afghanistan. The radio success earned do-it-yourself musician MiRco a record deal. Haarmans is not completely unfamiliar with the music biz, since in the mid-nineties he already played
… in the Dutch-language rock group Endless. After a solo career as an 'acoustic storyteller', his rock blood played up again and so De Wijze Mannen (including two women) were called in to give Haarmans' songs muscle. That works well, thanks in part to the extra wind section. The swinging blues-rock sound of De Wijze Mannen is sometimes an emphatic nod to the work of De Dijk and the Rolling Stones. MiRco has a real rockstrot, although it seems as if he sometimes wants to put too many words in a sentence. The fact that this album, without too much publicity, entered the album top-100 is proof that this Dutch-language no-nonsense rock appeals to many people. (PdK)more
