SECOND round
(8) Sophie Ellis-Bextor, “Murder on the Dancefloor”
SET FREE
(1) Kylie Minogue, “Can't Get You Out of my head”
188-142
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
The Art of Bouncing Back: Diane Shipley on kylie minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
Who starts like that?
Not with a bang or a whimper, a call to action or a statement of intent but with the solitary note on the diatonic scale Julie Andrews’ Sound of Music character didn’t assign a descriptor, shrugging it off as simply “a note to follow so.”
And not just one. Thirty-two of them, in a breathy, insouciant row:
La la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la/la la la la.
The iconic beginning of Kylie Minogue’s 2001 megahit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” sounds more like a bridge than an introduction, as if it represented an ongoing conversation rather than an opening gambit.
For many of us, it did.
As a Gen-X Brit weaned on Australian soap operas, the first time I saw Kylie (the only person who merits the mononym, Ms Jenner’s legal efforts notwithstanding) wasn’t when she imitated a cyborg in a sideboob-baring jumpsuit, pout a vermilion slick. Nor was it years earlier, in fevered tabloid coverage of her ill-fated fling with INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, or when she modeled a mullet to mimic a steam train in the video for her previous US chart success, 1987 Little Eva cover “The Loco-Motion.”
No, like most people of my age and background, my first encounter with Kylie was when she played apprentice car mechanic Charlene Mitchell in Neighbours, a character who—with her STEM career and embrace of overalls—was considered progressive for the time. A twice-daily fixture of terrestrial television from 1986 until 2022, the show was popular in Australia but a phenomenon in the UK. When Charlene married her star-crossed lover Scott Robinson, played by Kylie’s real-life boyfriend Jason Donovan, more than two-thirds of the country tuned in to witness these teenagers pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. I watched the soft-focus scenes from my friend Janice’s couch, sinking into the cushions as my throat constricted from claustrophobia, but I sensed from the way she and her mum swooned that I was supposed to see a working-class couple getting hitched when they were barely old enough to vote as the epitome of romance.
Kylie had other ambitions, carving time out from the show to pursue pop stardom with pre-eminent British producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman, known for their work with Dead or Alive, Bananarama and Rick Astley. According to Pete Waterman’s self-mythologizing memoir, I Wish I Was Me, they were so busy that when his writing partner Mike Stock told him a post-“Loco-Motion” Kylie was waiting in reception for them to compose her a single, he quipped, “She should be so lucky.” Within an hour, they’d bashed out “I Should Be So Lucky,” the poppiest paean to unrequited love ever pressed to vinyl, and she recorded it that afternoon. It topped the charts in Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia and the UK, making Kylie a crucial component of the company’s “hit factory.”
Her simple lyrics, halo of curls and youthful exuberance (plus the fact we’d seen her on TV) meant she appealed to a young audience and I was as fanatical as the next newly permed pre-tween. Perhaps more so, given the hometown pride I felt at having been born in Brisbane, a mere 854 miles from Kylie’s native Melbourne, in the brief window when my parents convinced themselves they could live with flying cockroaches and 80-degree heat before they admitted defeat and bolted back to sodden South Yorkshire. In 1988, I turned nine, their marriage crumbled and Kylie parted ways with Neighbours to pursue singing full time, a gamble that’s seen thousands of performers fade into obscurity. In her case, it launched one of the most enduring and spectacular careers in the history of pop music.
Although she’s mostly been a footnote on the US charts, in the rest of the world, she’s an idol—nowhere more so than Britain, where she spent three decades and earned national treasure status. Here, she’s had thirty-five top-ten hits, is the only woman to score a number one studio album in five consecutive decades and sells a bottle of her branded wine every 1.5 seconds. When the late Queen Elizabeth II celebrated turning 92, she called on Kylie to perform and last year, the BBC kicked off its musical documentary podcast Eras with a season on the Aussie singer, ahead of The Beatles. We’ve so thoroughly embraced her, it’s a surprise her perma-smiling face hasn’t been stitched into the Union Flag.
The question it seems almost rude to ask is… why?
Why did she so thoroughly infiltrate our culture, why has she reached a level of success unmatched by artists with arguably more talent and why does she keep bouncing back into our heads, hearts and charts?
On paper, she shouldn’t stand out. Her small, thin soprano prompted early reviewers to ungenerously compare her to a chipmunk and a parakeet. She can’t belt like Adele, command the stage like Beyoncé or spark fan frenzies with her cryptic compositions and penchant for jocks, à la Taylor Swift. Sure, she’s conventionally attractive, can hold a tune and move in time but those characteristics alone don’t catapult someone into the stratosphere. Asked mid-career by patrician chat show host Michael Parkinson, “Why didn’t you become disposable?” she appeared unfazed by the implication, shrugging, “I’m more comfortable not knowing.” Whether natural or cultivated, this consistent, insistent humility has always been part of her draw, especially in the UK, where self-deprecation is practically a religion.
Trying to discern her star-making quality, I pored over interviews and profiles, most of which praise her likability, work ethic and determination, while YouTube commenters gush that she’s “a class act,” “goddess” and “an actual real-life angel.” When I asked friends, family and acquaintances to explain her allure, even the most Kylie-agnostic uttered the phrase “X factor,” suggesting she possesses an ineffable, indefinable charisma it’s impossible to pin down or resist. In an interview for Eras, singer-songwriter Jack Savoretti makes the astute observation that she’s an “eccentric” artist who loves to experiment, meaning she’s a great fit for the fast-moving British cultural climate, where reinvention is the norm.
Of course, the danger of changing direction is that others might not follow. In the mid-‘90s, Kylie renunciated her ringlets and teenybopper past in an effort to be taken seriously, crooning sultry ballads such as “Confide in Me” and “Put Yourself in My Place” as she adopted a sensual new persona cult magazine The Face archly christened “SexKylie.” The trip-poppy tracks were hummable, if anemic compared to Madonna’s boundary-pushing Erotica, but her image seemed so try-hard as to be laughable. Even my grandma joined the backlash, holding up a double-page spread showing the singer in full-body fishnets and tsking, “What is she playing at?”
Undeterred by sexagenarian scorn, the singer plunged into her alternative phase (working with Manic Street Preachers; the morbid yet popular Nick Cave duet “Where the Wild Roses Grow,”) but sulking and dying her hair red came across as contrived, a pale imitation of Shirley Manson’s alt-rock originality. This period of indie experimentation culminated in the 1997 album Impossible Princess, a commercial and critical failure that saw Kylie’s songs banned by one of the UK’s largest radio stations as part of a mean-spirited ad campaign.
While she agonized over her next move, I juggled the demands of university study, my first serious relationship and the incipient signs of disabling illness. Dressed in thrifted flares and Fred Perry jackets, I wandered campus perfecting my Justine Frischmann snarl as I blared Blur, Suede and Sleeper on my Discman in an effort to stay awake. The answer for both of us, it turned out, was to return home. I hauled a suitcase of books and clothes to my mum’s house for a two-week leave of absence that extended into more than two decades and Kylie took Nick Cave’s simple but incisive advice: “Go back to pop.”
She kicked off the new millennium with “Spinning Around,” a high-energy, zeitgeist-capturing return to form from her seventh studio album Light Years in which she self-referentially resolves: “I’m through with the past/ain’t no point in looking back.” It went straight to number one in her adopted homeland, confirming her dancefloor domination (and triggering bizarre on-air debates about whether 32 is too old to wear hotpants). Keen to capitalize on this triumph, the singer and her team searched for the lead single for her follow-up album, Fever.
It needed to be special. Magical. The kind of song an artist could be associated with forever, that listeners would find hard to shake from their skulls.
One that thrums, throbs and pulsates with post-Y2K, pre-9/11 optimism.
Bonus points for lots of “La”s.
The “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” demo took less than 20 seconds to win Kylie over though she’s never been able to articulate why, telling The Quietus, “it just... did something.” The first collaboration between ‘90s three-hit wonder Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis from ‘70s glam rock band Mud, the duo differ on whether it was written with Sophie Ellis-Bextor in mind. Either way, they pulled it together in an afternoon, inspired by the downbeat rock of New Order, electronica of Kraftwerk and the pounding bass of “It’s Like That” by Run-D.M.C. The “La”s were a last-minute inclusion, added after what Dennis told the BBC is an essential part of her creative process: a pee break, when she determined the song needed an extra hook that wasn’t a chorus or verse.
Fuelled by smoked salmon and recorded in Davis’s suburban garage, the result is sharply edited, slickly produced and unbelievably, almost annoyingly, catchy. In the US, it reminded an indifferent public of the petite Australian’s charms, propelling her into the top 10 for the first time in decades. Worldwide, it sold more than five million copies and was number one in 40 countries including the UK, where it won Brit, ARIA and Ivor Novello awards. It also led an artist formerly dismissed as camp and lightweight to be rightfully lauded by music critics, who used phrases like “mirror-ball classic,” “Arctic-blue minimalism,” and “truly wonderful bit of pop.”
In some ways a conventional synth-filled disco beat, the minor key ensures an undercurrent of melancholy, amplified by a video that shows Kylie driving through a deserted A.I cityscape before dancing with stiff-legged androgynes and helmet-wearing humanoids. Later, she slips into that unforgettable Grace Jones-inspired jumpsuit with waist-length slits—a far cry from her high-necked Neighbours wedding dress. In the career retrospective-slash-fan bible they co-authored (called, naturally, La La La), Kylie’s creative partner William Baker commends video director Dawn Shadforth for portraying Kylie as in control, unconcerned with appealing to the male gaze. Rather than averting her eyes as she strips or peeking up mid-bath, like in earlier videos, “CGYOOMH” depicts her as looking down on us, demonstrating her dominance.
In the same time period that Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and their wannabes gasped and warbled their way through flirtatious refrains and teen empowerment anthems, Kylie’s extra decade of experience infused her song with maturity and depth. More innovative and complex than the rest of Fever, it was a risky departure for a performer whose biggest successes had channeled her sunny character but its tongue-in-cheek sensibility and conflicted emotions paired with a rousing beat won over jaded new fans and former aficionados alike.
I first heard it in a hotel room in Scotland with my university boyfriend, four years into our relationship. He lay on the bed watching TV as I got dressed for a wedding where I’d try to find polite new ways to communicate to acquaintances that we wouldn’t “be next.” In our early twenties, we were older than his parents, my parents and Kylie’s parents when they all plighted their troths and two out of three of those relationships had lasted. But the thought of such a permanent commitment still made my throat constrict. It wasn’t just because of my parents’ divorce, it was how other couples made marriage look: like a stifling, mind-deadening drudge.
Fatigued from showering thanks to the post-viral illness that had stopped me from resuming my degree, I was struggling into a pair of tights when Kylie beamed into the room, strutting across a talk show set in a silver minidress, more radiant than I’d ever seen her. My first instinct was envy, thinking, It’s all right for her, I bet she can pull up her tights without wheezing. My second was shock that she’d released such a fun and idiosyncratic song. Eventually I settled on the kind of vicarious joy you feel when watching an old friend rally after a series of setbacks.
Which in a way, I was.
One reason “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” captivated so many of us who’d grown up with Kylie is that it played with her good-girl image, eschewing yet winking at her ingénue past in a way that resonated with her newly adult audience. In contrast with the innocent infatuation of her first singles or the toxic dynamics implied by early ‘90s songs like “Better the Devil You Know” (“Say you won’t leave me no more/I’ll take you back again”), it re-affirmed the self-assurance she first articulated in “Spinning Around,” when she sang: “I’ve found a new direction/and it leads back to me.”
Having completed two-and-a-half semesters of an English degree and heard the term “death of the author” on more than one podcast, I feel confident interpreting “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” as not just about an all-consuming infatuation but the urge to escape it. The lyrics swing between passion and indifference but the moment that strikes me as the most intense and desperate is the repeated plea, “Set me free.” The more I listen, the more convinced I am that the “dark secret in me” means that, for the subject of the song, a monogamous commitment isn’t the pinnacle of her aspirations.
That’s still a subversive sentiment in our romance obsessed society, especially when it’s expressed by someone who shot to fame as part of a beloved on- and off-screen couple and whose liaisons with a succession of brooding models and performers have been subjected to an Aniston-level of scrutiny since. Kylie has largely remained schtum about tabloid speculation over when or whether she’ll get married and have children, aside from commenting to Vogue Australia that it feels “slightly disproportionate.”
In 2016, it looked like she was about to give the gossip rags what they wanted after she got engaged to actor Joshua Sasse, describing herself as “on cloud nine” but she crashed back to earth a few months later when they separated. She went on to tell a British magazine that she’d been temporarily seduced by the prospect of marriage, despite never believing it was for her, thinking: “Maybe I should do what most of the world do. It works for them,” before realizing she needed to trust her instincts.
I read that interview in 2023, shortly after Kylie broke up with her magazine executive boyfriend Paul Solomons and two decades since my first and only long-term relationship ended. I’m chronically ill and she’s a megastar so our lives look very different but I related to the subtext of what she was saying: that it’s confusing and alienating when the life you have doesn’t align with the one society says you should want. There’s a loneliness to not conforming that’s alleviated somewhat when such a high-profile person bucks against convention, even in small or performative ways.
Last summer, 36 years into her singing career, Kylie completed her lyrical journey from adorer to adored. In her unexpected club smash “Padam Padam,” she referenced and reversed the concept of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” boasting: “I can tell you how this ends/I’ll be in your head all weekend.” After more than a decade of albums with little cultural impact, she found herself back in the UK top 10 and number one on the US dance chart, hyped by everyone from VP Kamala Harris to Gen-Z TikTokkers who made viral remix videos in which they labeled her MOTHER, their quintessential all-caps compliment.
Her surprise return to prominence proved once again that you can’t write Kylie off but in spite of what I once assumed in a Scottish hotel room, she hasn’t made it through life unscathed. She was clearly grief-stricken by Michael Hutchence’s death, stung by the reception to Impossible Princess and admitted to the BBC that media intrusion at the height of her fame led to “my version of a breakdown.” Worst of all, in 2005, riding high from her early-aughts revival as she prepared to headline Glastonbury, a breast cancer diagnosis forced her into an extended hiatus. In keeping with her warm but guarded public image, she’s shared minimal details about that terrible time, repeating vague truisms like “I learned a lot about being human,” presenting a simulacrum of vulnerability that allows her to keep her life private while fans project their assumptions and expectations onto her.
Kylie devotees now view her as a survivor, not just of cancer but a regressive music industry (the initial exclusion of “Padam” from radio playlists on apparent age and gender grounds caused a public outcry and was quickly reversed) and her long-running LGBTQIA+ allyship has positioned her as a low-key social justice activist. She’s living proof that hard work, kindness and—let’s be honest—being a tiny white woman from a high-income industrialized nation can get you far, that you don’t need to compromise who you are to fit in, and that commercial failures, periods of semi-obscurity and personal difficulties don’t have to hold you back (as she’ll remind an interviewer at the slightest provocation, the name “Kylie” means “boomerang.”)
There’s still time for her to have a hit that’s bigger and better than “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” but as the decades pass, it seems less and less likely. Last year, radio listeners voted it “the ultimate Kylie song” and people expect her to perform it during every public appearance but if she’s weary of this inextricable association, she doesn’t let on. It was the centerpiece of her set when she finally played Glastonbury in 2019 (in the “Legends” slot) and attracted the most TV viewers in the festival’s history. I watched at my desk on a break from a remote writing shift, slumped over in sweats as, zipped into a scarlet jumpsuit, she scampered across the stage singing a stripped-down, acoustic rendition, accompanied by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and a word-perfect 100,000-strong crowd.
Halfway through, she held out her microphone to the audience, inviting them to serenade her with a lyric that, isolated from the nuances of the rest of the track, doubled as a supplication to the singer they adore: “Stay forever/and ever/and ever/and ever.”
That appears to be the plan. Last month, after scooping the inaugural Best Pop Dance Recording Grammy for “Padam Padam,” she made it clear that—irrespective of her Las Vegas residency—she’s not content to be seen as a legacy act. Speaking to Laverne Cox on the red carpet, she thanked her queer fans for all of their support and confirmed her desire to keep innovating, calling her win “the start of the next era.”
Logic and our current understanding of mortality dictate that at some point, far into the future, her career will wind down and she’ll hang up her mic for good but it’s never paid off to underestimate the Australian pop princess. It seems equally plausible that for as long as she lives and possibly beyond, Kylie Minogue will keep coming back to entice listeners with another huge hit that for some ineffable, indefinable reason, we’ll find ourselves powerless to resist.
Diane Shipley was born in Australia and raised in the UK. She has an MA in creative nonfiction from Manchester Metropolitan University and her bylines include Literary Hub, The Guardian, and Longreads. She enjoys podcasts where no one gets murdered and photos of miniature dachshunds.
LUUK SCHOKKER ON SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR’S MURDER ON THE DANCEFLOOR
It feels foolish to write about Murder on the Dancefloor in the year of our Lord 2024 and expect to get away with ignoring its resurgence in popularity. (If you think you’re getting away, I will prove you wrong—right?) Then again, I don’t really know who Barry Keoghan is, I haven’t seen Saltburn, and I don’t feel much for haphazardly interweaving cultural criticism in a piece that’s mostly about me (as it should be, considering the song at hand). But hey, I’ll play along. I should at least point out the obvious and mention that the song reached #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this year, a list it never managed to make upon its initial release, courtesy of the Irish actor dancing around naked to it in the 2023 Emerald Fennell movie, introducing the song to a whole new audience in the process.
Here’s what I can do. I can imagine being back on the ship. Being driven up to this industrial beast of a machine, rectangular and off-white, bluntly blocking the view of the horizon over the North Sea. The steam rising from its chimneys. I can re-imagine its interior, a non-space if there ever was one, a plug-and-play commercial area that might just as well have been anything else, anywhere else. A German airport, a mall in the Balkans, whatever. What counts is not the ship itself, but the fact that we’re about to come aboard. We have a school exchange trip to England ahead of us and this journey across the Channel is our gateway to testing our shiny new vocabulary on actual native speakers, our chance to finally see if our extra hours in class mean something in the real world. The two buses that park deep inside the belly of the beast hold three freshman classes and just as many teachers. Upon leaving school grounds, it feels as if we’ve taken a sizeable chunk out of the student population, but by the time the buses unload, there’s an even bigger crowd to dissolve into. We’re kids, young and clueless. And yet we walk around boastfully, act as if we board these giant cruise liners on the daily, pretend we know what we’re doing. There’s some seventy of us, the boat is as big as our school—there’s no way the three teachers can keep track of us all, much less oversee what we will do for the next couple of hours, but we take their lackluster chaperoning for a vote of confidence and strut around the ship as if it is, indeed, the local mall. Watch us go.
The change in atmosphere is almost palpable. It happens in every group of teens doing something exciting for the first time, and our entrance on this giant ship is no different. We summon more confident versions of ourselves to mask our prepubescent insecurities; we collectively hide how impressed we are by these otherworldly surroundings, how much the second-rate casinos wow us, look at us adulting here, no big deal. We hope it all comes true if we continue to play the part, going at it with the same frantic eagerness us little nerds tend to reserve for our schoolwork. It’s not all an act, though. It doesn’t take much to believe it. As we take the first candid shots with our disposable cameras, we really do start to feel as if we’re evolving from secondary school freshmen to citizens of the world. There’s something about this journey that sets free actual confidence in even the shiest among us. We intuit that this five-day trip marks a shift in how we move through life. Only a year ago, we were kids, rehearsing songs for our primary school farewell musicals[1]. Now, we embark on an international adventure. (Recalling this experience more than twenty years later, I can obviously see how this trip barely qualified as life-changing—I mean, we were twelve and thirteen years old, we practically still had to discover there even was such a thing as an individual self to shape at all. Still, a feeling often makes a more lasting impression than the actual experience, and the ship undoubtedly stirred up our feelings.)
In anticipation of a new audience, the English, the soon-to-be exchange buddies we have yet to discover as real people, real-life versions of the headshots on photocopied sign-up sheets, being on the ship nudges us into re-shuffling our freshly established social hierarchies. We restlessly wander around in unaccustomed groups of five or six, gauging what cruise life has to offer. We line up for off-brand fast-food, burn through our pocket money in the tax-free stores. We find the right form for talking about girls and boys we may or may not like by coarsely ranking our classmates in ever-shifting top-5’s. The year is 2002, and when we pass any of the giant screens that seem to appear everywhere on the passenger decks, we are ambushed by music videos, Top 40 songs blasting on a volume that we never hear during daytime. These are the songs that will soon turn up on the quarterly Hitzone CDs, records we copy religiously so we can listen to these same tracks on our discmen over and over. For the coming weeks, it will be one song in particular. Wherever we walk, wherever we huddle to share our fries and chicken nuggets, re-iterate our top-5’s, munch on overpriced yet undertaxed candy, we can hear the same song—an anthem of showing yourself to the world that fits the moment like a glove. It’s Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
There’s something remarkable about Ellis-Bextor’s breakout hit that hits right from the get-go, when the singer’s distinct Queen’s English first joins in with the snappy instrumentals, singing—almost whispering—murder in a way that demands the listener’s immediate attention. Of course no one is actually murdered on the dancefloor, but still, the very concept of murder instantly clashes with the Ellis-Bextor’s quirky tone and the song’s upbeat instrumentals. She comes out swinging with what I suppose I can best describe as a performance of self-confidence—the accent that doesn’t directly match the bluntness of the lyrics, the posh voice that you wouldn’t expect to insist on burning the goddamn house right down. Here’s someone who is stretching the limits of how she wants people to perceive her, acting tougher than she is so that doing so can make her tougher in return. (A comparison to Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U comes to mind—if you want people to think of you differently, showing a more explicit side of yourself in your lyrics may help seal the deal.)
There’s a reason why Murder on the Dancefloor has remained Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s biggest hit in a career that now spans more than two decades, why she still loves to sing it and why audiences keep requesting her to do so. It’s the same reason why it suits a movie about desire so well and why, back in the pre-summer of 2002, it feels so fitting to constantly hear it on the boat to England, to have it become an inescapable anthem for our inaugural trip as a herd of individuals. When Sophie Ellis-Bextor demands her audience to hear me when I say, hey, she sounds a little shrill, slightly hoarse, but somehow in control. This, I’ve come to think, is the essence of the song, perfectly echoed by the line “If you think you’re getting away, I will prove you wrong”. There it is again, the desire that comes true because you speak it out loud. Ellis-Bextor is breaking out of her mold, egged on by the playfulness of the strings—an element you could easily miss if you don’t pay close attention to it, but which is essential to propelling the song forward over its repetitive beat, giving the arrangement just that little bit of chutzpah. Yes, it’s murder on the dancefloor, but just as much, it’s us twelve-year-olds testing the waters of our stunted individual voices. It’s the perfect nu-disco translation of what this trip will come to mean for us.
The song keeps reappearing for the full six hours it takes to cross the Channel, blaring its message from every giant screen the ship has on display. I am a person in my own right and if I have something to say, you better damn well pay attention. The fact that I connect it to what we’re experiencing is a performance in itself, to be honest. I mean, what do we know? We’re cubs. When we roar, actual grown-ups will only want to pet us. But we recognize the song for the truth it carries in its package regardless, instantly understanding the universal message that will keep ringing true until and beyond Murder on the Dancefloor’s chart re-appearance in 2024. A surprise revival, you might say, but is it really, though? Sure, a naked Irishman going wild over the beat is bound to tickle the unpredictable whims of the TikTok generation, but I’d say this song was always destined for a comeback. As far as hyping up self-confidence goes (and don’t we all need that every once in a while?), Murder on the Dancefloor is up there with the very best. The magic is there. It’s always been there. And it always will be. Sophie Ellis-Bextor will continue to blow us all away. (Hey.)
[1] Yes, this is an actual Dutch tradition.
Luuk Schokker writes short stories and the occasional essay. His work has been featured on Catapult, as well as on Papieren Helden, De Optimist and Hard//hoofd in his native Netherlands. In addition, every once in a while, he makes an appearance as an unexceptional but crowd-pleasing DJ, heavily (and joyfully) relying on 00’s bangers.