The Long Goodbye: Part 20

Our Grand Tour brings us to The Netherlands, land of tulips, cheese, total football and flood controls, and many other delights too numerous to mention. I first visited more than 35 years ago and it is always a treat to go back. This post is dedicated to my friends Charlotte and Eveline and to the great Dennis Bergkamp.

I have a fair amount of Dutch music in my collection, including this little gem which I picked up on my first visit to Amsterdam.

In his day Rudi was the cocktail cabaret king of Old Amsterdam. The cover is better than the contents - the other side has a photo of the Great Man and a pencil drawing of the exceptionally ugly Apollo Hotel - but I've included a short extract as a treat for our Caledonian readers.

As for the rest of the selection, I could have spent days agonising over which artists to choose. But I'm off on holiday for a week tomorrow so instead I have picked five tracks more or less off the top of my head, all of them pretty groovy in their own way.

"The Wee Cooper O' Fife" - Rudi Feenstra

"Kicks And Chicks" - The Zipps

"Rock In The Sea" - Shocking Blue

"Er Zou Er Een Meisje Gaan Halen" - Wargaren

"Tattoo Song" - Herman Brood & His Wild Romance

"Salama" - Kasba

Longstanding readers may recall that I always feature the same video when I go off on my summer holidays, and as it happens its by a Dutch duo (it is almost as if this planned). We'll follow the ring-rang-a-dong with some ding-a-dong and then slowly descend into gibberish.