musicThe last concert of the late Coolio in our country was not in the Sportpaleis or at Rock Werchter, but at a small, free festival in Oostkamp. “They thought it was about Parkpop in the Netherlands”, it sounds. On radio station Joe, programmer Dries Lescouhier tells how he managed to get that top name, and how the rapper reacted when he discovered the mistake. “He had absolutely no desire to perform, but something magical happened on stage.”
On Sunday 21 August – just a month ago – Coolio performed in our country for the last time. Not at some mega festival or in a large hall, but at the free Parkpop festival in Oostkamp, for about 8,000 people. “If I’m very honest, his agent thought we were Parkpop in The Hague”, programmer Dries Lescouhier admits to Joe. “A festival of 100,000 people. To this day you can see that his European tour ‘Parkpop (NL)’ mentions, and not ‘Parkpop (BE)’.”
It was therefore quite a shock for the American rapper when he arrived in Oostkamp that Sunday. “In the end I was happy that he had landed in Zaventem”, says Lescouhier. “He was very cool and distant. Our backstage is of course not really VIP, it is a parish hall. Not what he expected.” So Coolio and his friends withdrew to the hotel. “Suddenly I got a text asking what time they had to perform. “7pm,” I sent back. To that they replied: ‘Okay, then we’ll perform from 7 pm to 7:20 pm.’ Twenty minutes, and that for a headliner that we had booked for 75 minutes three years earlier. You don’t want to know what that does to an organizer. My heart broke.” After many phone calls, texts and emails, it was finally agreed that Coolio would perform for fifty minutes. “And they clearly didn’t feel like it,” it sounds. The rapper had the artist shuttle wait at the hotel for over an hour before he finally got in.
Children
So a performance in minor? Nothing is less true. “Then something magical happened on stage”, Lescouhier recalls. “After the show, Coolio came to tell me it was one of the best shows he’d ever played. ‘Why?’ I asked. Because so many children were present, he said. He was so positively surprised that so many children were dancing to his music. He even had about twenty or thirty dance on stage with it. It made him emotional that that generation, completely on the other side of the world, was so enthusiastic. He thought it was strange and beautiful.”
Nice detail, after another big party, Coolio asked the organization for a t-shirt from the festival. “And the next day he was in the hotel at the breakfast buffet, in that shirt.” By the way, anyone who is curious about how much Parkpop has paid to bring in the rapper, that works according to bidding, it sounds. “With hotel and flights we ended up around 15,000 euros. We wouldn’t pay more for a Belgian top act,” concludes Lescouhier.
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Tags: Coolio free festival Oostkamp summer manager thought Parkpop Netherlands Music
