Tails Blue

Biography     Discography

When most young boys do play with guns or cars at early age, both brothers Jan (b.1954.7.17) and Luc Van Dessel (b.1956.5.28) from Lier, where crazy about making music. As their parents were practising music themselves, it was rather obvious that their young children would one day pick up an instrument. Jan was 12 when he got his first drum-set while Luc had already convinced his dad when he was 9 to buy him a guitar, as the violin he studied earlier didn’t satisfy him. At the end of the sixties they formed their first band The Tails. Jan played drums, Luc sang and played guitar while a friend of them Guy Van Hool played the bass. Besides a few cover-tunes (like The Who or The Cats) they soon played their own written (pop-)songs and managed to open the Gouden Lier concert, for Belgians well known rock bands The Pebbles and Wallace Collection. Not a bad start for these rookies considering that Luc was only thirteen when he played his first concert. One of the few gigs they got was on a big festival in Westende; it had a contest for unknown bands and to their surprise The Tails won the first prize!

Another band who played there was Black Sound Collection who were from the same region as The Tails and that’s why they became friends with their singer Willy Vissers (b.1952.11.27) from Lille and their bass-player Ferre Cuylaerts. Black Sound Collection played cover tunes from The Who, The Troggs, The Equals and Blue Cheer while Ferre’s energetic stage performance had really made impression on the Van Dessel-brothers.
Early 1971 The Tails changed style towards blues-rock and Guy Van Hool left as this wasn’t his cup of tea.

The next one to join was singer Jos “Stone” Piessens from Herentals, who also brought a lot of stage-presence to the band, as Luc wanted to concentrate only on playing guitar.

Jan always played a long drum-solo while Luc did a lot of guitar-throwing like Pete Townshend and together with Ferre they ran and crashed in on each other. Even the amplifiers and speakers were kicked down quite a few times.

Above that Luc got a broken string which made him really angry that they weren’t allowed to redo their performance. Luc remembers: “in those days a guitar had to be really loud to have a good sound and with the first note I played, the producer got this sound in his headphone, pulled it off and started yelling at us that we were not in Vorst-Nationaal (a big concert-hall) as this sound made him nearly deaf;… so he hated us right away…”

It was in the summer of 1974 when he was replaced by Danny ”Jumbo” Goovaerts while also bass-player FerreCuylaerts (as he went along with his friend Stone) got replaced by Luc Vermeulen.

Koen agreed and this made their sound change towards Uriah Heep (although they had a song on the set-list entitled “Warm Love” which was played with talk-box like the then immense popular Peter Frampton).Koen had not played in a band yet, but he had studied music all those years and could play besides the keys also guitar and bass. He had just ended his military service and was glad to finally show his musical ability. Later in September they played the Kioskival in Rijkevorsel for the second time. In 1976 they had seen Living Blues headlining while this time Dizzy Man’s Band where the final act. Other support-gigs were Kayak and Focus.

That same year Jan took an offer to jam with jazz-rock band Outfit; they had a lot of musicians coming and going (one of them Octopus’ Paul Michiels) but they never managed to record something. He liked playing different styles of music; two years ago he had already replaced the blues-rock group Working Class Band’s drummer for only two gigs (one of them on 1976’ Rock Werchter!) Before Outfit he also played drums in a band from his hometown that just started; they were called War (later renamed De Kreuners) but as they sounded awful Jan left quite soon.

The promoter Xavier Dries finally found Lizzy in some Antwerp hotel, completely drunk and unable to play. The management pretended the stage wasn’t big and high enough so the organisation had to give everybody their money back. The only other support spot worth mentioning was with Dutch rockers Normaal.

On October 27 th till October 30 th at De Molen in Nijlen he played the drums for 78 hours which gained him the Benelux record and a lot of media exposure.

Another year later they asked Wim Wouters (b.1964.4.26) to step in on bass. Wim used to take guitar lessons at Luc’s place, and had founded his first band Cemetery in the seventies while since two years he played guitar in melodic metal band Oracle. When Oracle supported Tails Blue (Zaal Centrum, Rijkevorsel), Luc asked Wim if he would like to join the band to play bass, which he accepted. Wim: “In Oracle I played guitar but now and then I switched to bass for the more difficult tunes as our bass-played didn’t knew all those by then”. It would be March 1985 when this new Tails line-up played his first gig at the Kokatoe in Turnhout with once more, (the renewed-) Oracle as support act. They all where eager to play the songs they already had recorded a few months earlier in the studio.

Now that the band was tighter than ever, they really felt it was time to make a proper recording themselves and try to sell this as a finished album. After a while the boys found producer Marc Smitt; he was a drummer who worked for Paiste cymbals but sometimes he did small productions in this studio C in Leuven. As he was relatively cheap and the band had to pay it all for themselves, they accepted his offer. They all worked a long time to get the recording and mixing right, although too much time was spend to get the vocals right after which there wasn’t so much time (money…) left for the instrumental pieces, who looked way more important to the band. Even the so called more “commercial” stuff was recorded in order to have a bigger change to get a record company interested. “Fool For The city” was the last song they recorded, so now they had enough songs for a full album. When everything was recorded they posted tapes to all the record company’s. Most of them weren’t interested at all and if they were (EMI), they only asked for a 7” release. Jan about this: “I never forget the one who wrote: We’re not talking about musical quality here, as we hear a lot of them, but unfortunately we don’t hear a song that’s fit for single release…”

Main-man Alfie Falkenbach was impressed and as he said that the label wanted to broaden his horizon, he was willing to give it a try. Wim saw it this way: “ You could not exactly call it a record-deal; it was more a “purchase-contract” as we got paid with some albums…”. A few weeks later they got a call to check out some cover-artwork and immediately they agreed that this futuristic head that Michel Bouchat had draw, did fit the title “Brainwash” perfectly. The album finally (as it was already announced for April!) hit the shops early august 1986 and it was clear that Tails Blue had made another big step forward; already on the first song “Leaving Time” they showed off an even more symphonic sound than before. The title song was the only one who had survived from the previous demo-album although it had a new long Rush-like intro. But they had managed to leave other Rush influences behind in favour of some more “Kansas-touches”, and came up with six diverse songs; the melodic “Black Out”; the more rocking “You”, “Starwater” in true “pomp-rock-style” and the nine minutes long masterpiece “Fool For The City”. This song written at the time with the trio line-up was rearranged with keyboards and with his climax and rich tempo changes it had a real “Kerry Livgren” feel among it.

The album was presented in concert in Geel but soon after, in October that year, bad news was spread as record-company Mausoleum was declared bankrupt.

One of the highlights in the bands career came in march 1987 when they were asked to support British rockers Magnum at their Belgian show in Borgerhout’s Hof Ter Lo. Wim remembers: “When I got a call from Frank Dom, our manager at that time, who said he could arrange this gig, I really had to think twice as I was doing my military service by then. I agreed to play but had to sneak out from those military barracks, to be at the hall on time”. They opened with an older unreleased song “Follow Us” which was really up-tempo and heavy. Two more new songs followed: “Place InMy Heart”, a beautiful ballad and “Summer In New York”. During their set they were told to expand Jan’s drum solo a bit more, as there was an accident happened with Magnum’s guitar player Tony Clarkin. After the Tails set Bob Catley came on stage to announce that Tony cut his finger and was unable to perform that night so the concert was postponed to April 7 th. This gave the Tails boys the opportunity to play a second time for a lot of people. And this time they also had a surprise in store. By the end of March their old friend Willy Vissers had agreed to rejoin the band as his group Victim had fallen apart. As this night the set-list was exactly the same, the audience were now able to see the difference between the four-piece from the first show and this renewed five-piece, and it was clear that the band had improved a lot. This time the Magnum entourage asked to cut down the drum-solo which of course Jan refused to do…

One of the conditions on witch Willy had rejoined Tails was to form another band at the same time to play only cover-songs. This was no problem for the others as also Jan had since 1984 been in sixties band Mirror 60; just to play more often. And after that, both brothers together with “Stone” Piessens and Luc Vermeulen (both ex Tails Blues) had also performed blues-rock covers now and then as “Twilight Stone & The All Round Boogie Clowns”.
So their new cover-band was named Rock Circus and had besides his Tails Blue mates Jan Van Dessel (drums), Luc Van Dessel (guitar) and Wim Wouters (bass), two keyboard-players: Koen Van Hoof (ex-Victim) and Luc Van Den Heyning (Tails Blue). They both stayed only for a few rehearsals and were replaced by another ex-Tails Blue musician: Koen Bergmans, while Guy De Bock (ex-Victim)replaced Jan Van Dessel (who became professional drummer with country star Jimmy Lawton)not only on drums but also on vocals. This line-up was later expanded with Willy’s brother Ronny (later on replaced by Chris Peeters) while there were also a few different girls who helped singing lead. Rock Circus were extremely successful and played for thousands of people up until 2002.

The recordings they had made up till then at the small Artist Anonymous-studio in Schilde (still with Luc Van Den Heyning) were released as a demo tape to try to find someone to release a second album. Thanks to the fine vocals this turned out to be Tails Blue’s best release yet. Tape opener “If She Walks By” starts off quite heavy but soon it’s clear that the bands major influence these days can be found in the rhythms and melodies of Canadian band Saga. There are no weak songs on the tape while songs as “The Building” (lots of tempo-changes with howling guitar and synths) and “Summer In New York” (with exiting long instrumental bridge) deserve a special mention. Also the already performed power ballad “Place InMy Heart” were singer Willy stole the show, had finally found it’s proper recording.

But besides that, not that much happened with the band except rehearsing, so most energy went to Rock Circus and also the Boogie Clowns. The difference between both cover bands was that the last one played much more blues- and hardrock, so when their singer Stone had to stop in 1991 due to some health problems the others decided to continue Boogie Clowns with ex-Mirror 60 singer Died Daems and a shortened name. Much too their surprise they had loads of work with both cover-bands.

All the songs from the last demo tape were played together with “Leaving Time” and “Starwater” from the album, before they ended up with “Jakke’s drumsolo” and “Smoke On The Water”. A memorable night after all….

Despite this success Koen and Willy explained the others they wanted to stop with Tails Blue and only concentrate on Rock Circus. Willy: “I really got to the point were I thought it was useless to rehearse every week just to play a show twice a year…” while Koen left for the same reason as several years ago.

The others understood their point of view but decided to continue anyway. Wim Wouters took over the keyboards, so that they were a trio just as when they started playing symphonic rock back in 1978. Wim had taken a few years of piano lessons and had already studied a lot of keyboards on his own. They started working on new songs, but as they had a lot of work with Rock Circus it was already 1994 when a new tape with five songs saw the light of day. Being a trio with it’s limitations had automatically changed their style towards that other famous Canadian trio…. Finally the old “Follow Us” had it’s proper recording when it opened this new tape in an impressive way. It was the structure and tempo-changes of the songs in which the band had once again made a lot of progress as exposed on the following “You Fool”. “ Temple Of Love ” also deserves a special mention not only for the beautiful melodies in the refrain but certainly also for the fine acoustic intro.

The Boogie Clowns were asked by Tessa records to record a live-cd who was released in 1996 in many countries and even in Brazil on Ipanema Records (who managed to sell several thousands of it). Besides well known songs as “Maggie’s Farm”, “Stranglehold” and “Voodoo Chile ” it also contained five own compositions. Two more cd’s; one with own work (“Originals”) and another with covers (“Undercover”) would follow but this time without the back-up from a record company.

When Luc Vermeulen had to leave the Boogie Clowns in 1997 it was rather obvious that the others would ask their friend Wim Wouters to fulfil bass-duties, who accepted and made the whole “Tails Blue – Boogie Clowns – Rock Circus” story indeed a real incestuous one…. It was with this line-up they even made it to Kroatia to play large outdoor festivals.

And back in 1996 Jan had found another challenge on his way; together with his brother Marc (who had already replaced his older brother on the Boogie Clowns drum-seat a few years back), he founded the Van Dessel Drum Duo (initially Luc was also involved). They played both drum-improvisations on a base of programmed synthesizer tunes. The 4 song demo they had send to all venues didn’t gain any interest to let the brothers play (for free) so they decided to embark on a summer tour to play under bridges. That year 1997 they got a lot of media talking about it but the three following years (in 1999 with Jan Geerts on guitar) they had every time more trouble from authorities who didn’t allowed them to play, as well as an increasing audience. Last sign of life from this remarkable project was another demo-cd once again with brother Luc (as Van Dessel Trio named “Boecht”). In fact, Jan had always been extremely busy playing music. Besides teaching drum, he had worked as a freelance drummer during his entire career. One of the bands he started working with back in 1980, was funk-rock band Mix. Playing with horns was something he hadn’t done yet; they recorded some songs and even got into Humo’s Rock Rally contest but not in the finals.

And to made this Tails Blue story even more complicated; 2004 saw the birth of another “super-de-luxe”-cover band named Undercover to fill in the gap that Rock Circus left two years earlier. Luc Van Dessel, Wim Wouters and Guy De Bock were all former Rock Circus members and they were completed with Wim Horemans on (outstanding-!) vocals and Dominik Vannuffelen on keyboards. The cd they released at the beginning of 2006 with some of the songs from their set-list made clear that this wasn’t just an ordinary “juke-box-band”.Although both brothers Van Dessel talked about playing a Tails Blue reunion show, until now nothing emerged from that as it would take a lot of hours rehearsing to study those complex songs again. Hopefully some of the songs who never got a release on record will see the light of day in the near future as they are simply too good to be forgotten.

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