BIOGRAPHY

He used to grow flowers / The beautiful kind / Now he’s chopping them down / With his lawnmower mind.“

When asked about his obvious preference for lawnmowers, Melle de Boer, head of the Dutch alternative-folk-band John Dear Mowing Club replies: "They are a typical tool of my home country Holland; an expression of smalltown, bourgeois density in all those backyards. I also like keeping things short. I think I have a destructive nature."

A troubled childhood in a dismal suburb of The Hague gave the poet, painter, singer/songwriter, de Boer, a veritable speech disorder. However, the experiences of a difficult youth have given his work the density of reinforced concrete. With a vast and surreal vocabulary the scraggy and, in real life, rather taciturn de Boer pulls objects from the borders of consciousness and arranges them in word, image and sound. He's not one to use grand gestures; rather he sacralizes the supposedly banal. However, his 2003 debut album "Lawnmower Mind" hit with a wave of euphoria, proving how interwoven with the zeitgeist his melancholic existentialism really is.

De Boer's artist-friendship with manic-depressive songwriter genius Daniel Johnston has limited his appearances at international festivals to just a handful. Whenever the opportunity arises, de Boer and his John Dear Mowing Club back Johnston, who can count David Bowie and Kurt Cobain as his biggest admirers. Johnston's music, mainly published on tape, has been covered by more than 150 bands across the world, such as Tom Waits, Beck, Wilco, Pearl Jam, Bright Eyes, Firehouse, and The Flaming Lips, just to name a few. Despite this grueling double engagement, de Boer puts, impressively, his own creative work back into the center of attention with the LP "John Dear Mowing Club", released in 2008 on Hazelwood Vinyl Plastics. Despite its introverted pace and de Boer's own categorization of "County Noir", the album rose from place 0 to 4 on Holland's Moordlijst.