Jules Deelder

“When I do my suicide for you, I hope you’ll miss me too,” Herman Brood sang in “Rock ‘n’ Roll Junkie” – just one of many announcements of his own death Brood worked into his songs. It’s a subject Brood, who jumped off the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton 15 years ago, often sang about. In Unknown Brood, a whole range of people look back on the rock and roller’s turbulent life, including fellow musicians, his manager, a former girlfriend, photographer Anton Corbijn, Brood’s wife and their daughter. Video footage shot by Brood himself and never seen before is intercut with a rich collection of archive material, including a humorous clip of Brood barking the Dutch national anthem. His sister Beppie Brood stresses her brother’s split personality: on the one hand the shy, vulnerable man wary of other people, and on the other the one who played Herman Brood – an extravagant, hedonistic junkie and rock and roll star.

Video registration of the theatre show "Deelder Leeft" by Jules Deelder, Dutch author, performer and Rotterdam "night mayor".

Bank robber Herman Brood becomes a rock and roll star with the help of Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich.

One day, Louis - who seems obsessed by weapons and all things related – visits his old school friend Ada. She is quickly won over and not long after they marry. After the wedding their honeymoon takes them to Verdun in northern France, where over 500,000 soldiers died during the First World War. Louis runs from one monument and cemetery to the next, like someone possessed, salivating because of how hard the fighting was there. Ada feels increasingly uneasy with her new husband. One day, he purposely has himself and Ada locked in at Fort Douamont where terrible events took place during the war. There he turns out to be a stark raving maniac.