Club of High Eyebrows

The hooded SWAT team finally overwhelmed the man who entrenched himself in the Amsterdam pedestrian square with a machine gun. The directive concerning the measured amount of violence saved the delinquent’s life so that the capture only led to a broken arm (but still a multiple fracture). The culprit, in pain, asserted that the weapon was not loaded and that he just wanted to show his people the real meaning of the pictures broadcasted daily from Afghanistan or the West Bank. Besides his musical escapades and his strict refusal to give interviews, episodes like this have advanced P.Tilon to a “persona non grata“ for some of the (mostly Dutch) press – specifically for those who don’t understand what relevance means.

“too hard, too noisy | my show a five or ten | but the media men clap their hands | now you wonder“. Nothing could better express the “do or die“ mentality of Patrick Tilon aka Rude Boy than this prophecy from the Urban Dance Squad debut “Mental Floss for the Globe“. Musical utopist and soundscape Argonaut, subtle altruist with the physique of a ghetto soldier, mysterious enfant terrible in the global pop skirmish. Patrick Tilon is no friend to soft tones, on stage a hardly describable inferno, on tape a conserved spectacle.

Complete spectacle is also the story of the man from whom Rage Against The Machine say that their music would have been unthinkable without him.

Of all things, a black MC from the Grachten-Metropolis of Amsterdam duped the U.S. American avant-garde by fusing the most important currents of black and white music in an earth shattering (in that it was unconstrained) manner. That’s what’s meant when the encyclopedia identifies Tilon as the originator of “crossover“. With a ludicrous mélange of hip hop- und hardcore-, funk- und ska-, soul und trash-fragments, Urban Dance Squad ran over the music like Attila the famous chief Hun ran over the peace loving Gauls. And as Tilon so snottily predicted, it rained hits on all continents and tours, solo or together with nobility like U2, Soundgarden, George Clinton, Lenny Kravitz, the Beastie Boys or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, .

(The whole fandangle in detail at www.uds.nl)

Actually a good chance to make peace with the world and drown in triumph. But Tilon is no apostle but rather a revolutionary. His handicraft is the revolt, not the message. And as five more albums didn’t want to stop being full of success instead of full of consequences, he understood that royalty never sparks revolution. He understood that he himself became the status quo. Not much later, a mighty „Saturday Teenage Kicks“ reverberated throughout the discotheques of this world. Behind the duo, Junkie XL, stood the Amsterdam sound guru Tom Holkenborg and a certain Patrick Tilon, former singer of the famous Urban Dance Squad. But Junkie XL remained only a project. With the founding of the (still) Hip Hop formation, „League Of XO Gentlemen“, which more criticized than celebrated their brand of music, Tilon finally initiated the irrevocable renunciation from the genre that, from his point of view, degenerated into a sham.

Club Of High Eyebrows
Of course a formation of such nature that tries to fight fire with fire could only be transitional. For a long time, the new demanded a beginning. In 2006, Tilon can’t resist the inner convulsions anymore. Club Of High Eyebrows – the cryptical symbolism of the idea is, and not accidentally, reminiscent of the wondrously bizarre facial expression of the Vulcan, Mr. Spock. Similar to the cosmoprominent son of Sarek, Patrick Tilon is at times just as astonished with his own doings as with the doings of others. Isn’t it the critical distance to oneself that raises brows, opens eyes, tears down walls and bears the essentials? But a club is, like a good band, not an attitude but a union – a concert of individuals that serves the conspirative nurturing of common passions. And so Tilon began the search for birds of the same feather and he found them in Michael Barkey, the congenial bassist and songwriter of the League of XO Gentlemen, in the young Amsterdam guitarist, Niels Tusenius, in Keith Caputo’s (Life of Agony) drummer, Jochem van Rooyen as much as in the notorious Hazelwood producers Two Horses, Kaneoka One and 3ft. Pete.

Older Now ... declares Patrick Tilon and renders his alter ego in the color of the introverted. Mascis, Bowie, Dylan, Moore – as though it was no big thing, the legendary MC mutates into an androgynous white propagandist and entangles the Club Of High Eyebrows in a staccato of new wave- and post punk-fragments, of garage- and noise rock-hymns, of soul wrenched sing-a-longs as though they couldn’t be more contemporary. Thinking about the fact that not long ago the black man singing here, treated throughout the world as one of the vanguards of the extended hip hop scene, then the long play debut of the eyediosyncratic order virtually develops metamorphic features. “Older Now“ declares Patr