A forgotten English song written by comedian Toon Hermans has been found in the Dutch Jazz Archive in Amsterdam: The Sun is Out. The song was performed once by singer Jerry Rix on a television show by director and record producer Rob Touber. Cabaret researcher and journalist Frank Jochemsen found the number by chance.
“I have been working on a major investigation into Rob Touber for some time,” says Jochemsen. “His name is not well known now, but Touber worked in the 1960s with his television shows with well-known artists such as Jenny Arean, Gerard Cox and Adèle Bloemendaal.”
Most shows have not been preserved on screen, but the so-called playback tapes have been, explains Jochemsen. “Touber valued how his shows sounded. And having an artist sing live with an orchestra and on screen was a lot of work.”
big band
That is why Touber often had everything recorded in advance in record studios, with an orchestra. “Those recordings were then played in the TV studio and later placed under the image. A lot of those studio tapes have been preserved.”
The sound quality of the original is excellent, says Jochemsen. “It sounds like a clock and it’s a nice song too, especially because of the big band arrangement.”
Listen here to a fragment of The Sun is Out, sung by Jerry Rix:
Fragment The Sun is Out
Although Touber worked with many great artists, that did not seem to apply to Hermans. “In fact, he hated Hermans, because Toon was a difficult person,” says Jochemsen. “But when I was composing music for the Toon songs tour that the Metropole Orkest is going to hold, I suddenly found that song.”
Jochemsen found proof of Hermans’ authorship of the issue in question in an old newspaper article. “In it, the show with the performance of Jerry Rix was announced, with Toon Hermans mentioned as the writer of the song,” says Jochemsen. “Jerry Rix’s father was the artist Toby Rix, who had the same manager as Toon Hermans. I think that’s how the collaboration came about.”
The tour with the Metropole Orchestra on which Jochemsen participated was postponed four times due to corona. In retrospect, a stroke of luck, says the journalist. “I only found the song in November of last year, when the tour was actually supposed to be performed from the spring of 2020.”
The tour will start on Saturday in Sittard, Hermans’ birthplace. The song will then be sung again for the first time by actor and comedian Remko Vrijdag.