Lurking for many years amidst the many different shades of obscurity in The Hague's illustre cult underground music scene, the members of ICONOCLAST may be old-time punk veterans since 1976, but they surely are no 'geriatric reunion experience' as these guys just never stopped playing wild energetic music after quitting their first (and notorious!) classy punk rock cult band 'The Mollesters'. Many heavy bands, many heavy live performances and many heavy record releases followed in the '80's, '90's and '00's, like with 'Prairewhore', 'Urban Heroes', 'Sound of Stuka', 'The Gang', 'Sonic Litter', 'Johnny Cohen And The New Age Nazis', 'Psychedelektrik Freak Club' and 'Total Loss' to name but a few, and they have seen and done it all within a whole wide spectrum of hard rock, post-punk, new wave, garage rock, hardcore punk, freakbeat, psychedelic blues, acid rock, (dub) reggae, surf and straight downstroke rock'n'roll, you name it!
The 2012 reunion of 'The Mollesters', for which its surviving members Pierre de Luxe, Domenico Gagliardi and Hans Wesseling, assisted by young master Tristan to play the bass, were brought together to play a few old hit songs ('Plastic' and 'Dog Song') at the release party in Amsterdam of Leonor Jonker's book 'No Future Nu' on the early history of Dutch punk and as an immediate follow-up, their contribution to a Dutch-'70's-punk compilation-album release 'Punks Not Deaf', had suddenly generated quite some new interest in having more of where it all came from, leading to quite a few more Mollesters' shows all over Holland. But as Hans Wesseling got replaced on the drums by, eventually, Hans van Mourik, another 'old-time survivor' of the band, they soon realised that they all had outgrown repeating their old punk repertoire over and over again and that a new Phoenix should rise out of its ashes, with a completely new range of songs, combining their original raw punk rock'n'roll energy of the '70's with all their collective life-long music experience, broadening their horizon and refreshing their inspiration to become ICONOCLAST, to break with any standardized and formatized 'golden rule' for 'being punk', just like 'The Mollesters' once were all about, back in the days of 'non-conformity'.
Blow you away
So from anything rocking like the sharp and tough 'Chuck Berry'-style of 'true R&B' and the wild and heavy 'Iggy And The Stooges'-like garage punk influences to the more dramatic and psychedelic 'Velvet Underground'-style stuff and even reminiscent (and swinging hard!) of 'The Slits' and 'Basement 5' sound, ICONOCLAST can handle it all with greatest ease and mix it all with a most natural grace.
For this a new album is on its way and many shows all over Europe are currently being prepared as these veteran rockers are still very much capable of blowing away many a good young boys' band, you bet!
Guy Tavares
's-Gravenhage, August 2014
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