7 Amsterdam

I knew I’d got the job when, arriving home one evening, my next door neighbour told me he’d just had a visit from the police asking for information about me. Was I responsible or irresponsible? Did I have criminal tendencies? Was I drunken or drug addicted? What of my family connections?

Though he was not told why he was being quizzed, my neighbour had worked out for himself that a foreign country, possibly Holland, was interested in me. Amsterdam was not yet the drug capital of Europe, and clearly did not yet want to be.  Indeed, during my period there, it still showed a strong streak of Dutch puritanism, not unlike that of the Scotland in which I grew up. At any rate, I passed the test, or whatever it was, and within a month or two I was working for the second time in my life in another country.

But not in Amsterdam.  Philips Phonographische Industrie - known more simply in Britain as Philips Records - had its headquarters in a handsome old country mansion on the outskirts of Baarn, a sleepy town to which it brought a spot - a very  tiny spot - of life.  Few of the great Philips performers, in my experience, ever visited the place. We were the industrial work force, my section of which operated five and a half days a week on the production of record sleeves for which I, as sleeve-note editor, wae expected to supply the copy.

My boss, in overall charge of the record sleeves, was WL (short for Wim or, more mysteriously, Pim) Zalsman, a noisy, fast-talking, well-upholstered Dutchman, member of a Rotterdam newspaper family, who was constantly in dispute with the London leg of Philips, as well as with some of his own colleagues. I'd met him, and liked him, at my job interview.  On home ground he was prone to prowl around the small annexe, a former gatehouse, in which we worked, periodically snarling “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.”  But, though he shouted  rather a lot, he was not hard-hearted and in his spare time he was a virtuoso player of Sjoelbak, a traditional Dutch form of shove-halfpenny, which he played with terrifying velocity on a polished wooden  table in the basement of his home.

He was also a virtuoso of old Dutch expletives, not just of the basic ”God be doomed” variety, but of more imaginative an startling wordings. Summoning you to his room, he would stare at you through almost closed eyes and ask you - an artful ruse - what you were staring at. “Have I got green snot coming out of my nostrils?” he would exclaim.  “Have I forgotten to get dressed?  Have I wet my trousers?”

He was nothing if not forthright.  When he returned from official travels, the word would go round: “Zalsman is back.” Though some of us feared his temper, he was more of a barker than a biter.

Mostly he spoke to me in English, and only switched to Dutch if he wanted to gain an advantage. If he said “Dag Meneer Wilson” (Good-day Mr Wilson) in greeting, I knew I’d made some editorial blunder.  But on the whole,  as the company’s resident Scot, I was lucky to find myself encouraged.  We were a young team, most of us in our twenties, Zalsman still in his thirties, and the staff proof reader, Jan Huizinga (no to be confused with the great Dutch historian), for whom I had a special affection,  as an erudite fifty-year-old father figure.

Everyone was eager to speak English and came to me with grammatical questions and rules I’d never heard of, such as the positioning of place before time in the running order of a sentence. Every day there would be requests. Can you let me have - I was asked more than once - a sleeve note on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, by lunchtime if you please?  The work was not yet the popular classic it later became.

Notes on jazz or pop or what Philips  obscurely called Dancers’ Dorado tended already, all those years ago, to take priority over the classics.  I had to remember that photographic transparencies were known as diapositives. The company’s relationship  with Columbia Records in America meant that some sleeve notes were already written over there. German sleeve notes, on the other hand, were written by me in English, then translated into German.

The atmosphere, as I have mentioned in an earlier blog, tended to be convivial, and the sleeve designers with whom I worked were skilled and chatty. Living in Holland was seldom less than fun. For the best part of three years I continued, almost every night being a night out in Amsterdam, 45 minutes away, where I had chosen to reside.

But it was not, as I gradually decided, a job for life (though one of my successors, David Hogarth,  got married there and stayed on).  Sleeve notes and other articles could never be works of criticism. Even the most minor concertos had to be extolled as masterpieces. Philips performers were always  the best, even when they were not. I was already too much of a critic to find this acceptable in the long term.  But my Dutch friends were a joy to spend time with, and  the Amsterdam restaurants, particularly the Chinese and Indonesian ones. were a pleasure also. And even Zalsman’s outsize personality was, I decided, something to savour and certainly remember..

8 July 2014