Dewolff’s Drummer, Luka Van De Poel Shares Memories Of Starting The Band At 12 Years’ Old, And Plans For The Band’s April Uk Tour

Interview by: Mark Lacey

Since their inception in 2007, DeWolff have built a strong reputation in their Netherlands homeland for bringing nostalgic sounds back to life throughout their own take on high energy psychedelic blues soulful rock. In recent years, the band have made several visits to the UK, at first touring in support of Jared James Nichols, and then last year conducting their first ever UK headline tour. Such was its success that they’re back again from 12^th – 18^th April, in support of their latest album ‘Muscle Shoals’.

MyGlobalMind.com talks with Luka Van De Poel

MGM: The last time we saw DeWolff was when you played at the O’Meara in London last March. That was the last show of your first UK headline tour. What are your memories of those shows?

Luka: It was really cool. In the UK, it’s going pretty well because we haven’t toured that much over there. The first tour we did was together with Jared James Nichols and we were supporting him and playing maybe 200 capacity venues. And then our first headline tour, we also played these 150-200 capacity venues. The next time when we’re back in April, we’ll be playing even bigger venues, ranging from 300-400 capacity. So, it’s like, every time we come back, it’s a little bit bigger. We’ve been touring through Germany for 15 years, but it’s very slowly building up, and in the UK, it’s going much faster, which is really cool. I didn’t expect that. We had a good time. We played maybe eight shows across the country, and we saw some beautiful cities and met some really lovely people. I can’t wait to be back in April.

MGM: One of the things that will surprise a lot of people in the UK is just how big DeWolff are in the Netherlands. In recent weeks, you’ve been playing some enormous places back home.

Luka: Yeah, it’s crazy. We always used play in cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht, and then there are other cities, which are just a little bit smaller than that. And we used to play maybe 800 capacity venues over there. But now for the first time, we played in Groningen, which is way up north, and we played our biggest club show ever there. So that was kind of crazy. It was 1800-1900 people, and that blew our minds. Yeah, things are going really well, actually.

MGM: People will know you through your exuberance with DeWolff, but when did you discover the drums and decide that was something that you wanted to play?

Luka: Well, I guess when I was 8 years old, my interest grew in playing a musical instrument, and my brother, Pablo, was three years older. He already played the guitar, so I thought, I’ve got to pick another instrument, and I guess that will be the drums. I started out just playing snare drum and I had technique lessons, but I was eight years old. I wasn’t paying attention that much and I was getting frustrated when things didn’t work out. I remember one day just hitting my drumstick through the drum book. I was like, agghh, I hate this. I didn’t really like it because it was all about rudiments and that was not drumming for me. I wasn’t listening to drummers like Mitch Mitchell and John Bonham then. I guess my first heroes were guys like Mike Portnoy and Thomas Lang and those really technical guys. Back then when I was 8 or 9 years old that really blew my mind and I wanted to do something like that; have 16 bass drums and 200 tom toms. But that period didn’t last too long because my drum teacher quit when I was about nine years old. Pretty soon after my parents gave me my first drum kit when I was 10, and that was also the age when I was getting more and more interested in the music that my brother was listening to; artists like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. So, at a pretty young age I started admiring those drummers and that’s how things really started rolling. I really started appreciating the instrument. When you start with all the rudiments and all the technical stuff, you gotta watch out that it doesn’t get too boring and you just quit. I think a lot of kids, they stop at a certain point because they’re like, this doesn’t do it for me.

MGM: MyGlobalMind.com have spoken to a number of drummers in recent months about their technique, and some have mentioned the 25 different rudiments, but others have talked about just using a combination of singles and doubles to create their sound. It’s interesting you started out with a snare drum because everything really starts from there.

Luka: Absolutely. It’s really important to have some technique because, in my opinion, if you completely skip that part, then the drumming can get really hard. If you have to play a two-and-a-half-hour show, it can be really tough if you don’t have a basic technique. But I went back to the rudiments and the technique at a slightly later age. First, you just have to bang those drums and do whatever you feel like, and don’t worry too much about technique When I was 11, I got drum lessons again, and my new drum teacher taught me all about rudiments again. But then, you have a whole drum kit in front of you and you can make some music out of it instead doing a paradiddle on your snare drum, which sounds really boring. You can do that on your drum kit, and put your right hand on the ride, and do some cool fills in between, and then you start making music.

MGM: It’s interesting that you started out listening to Thomas Lange and Mike Portnoy actually, because that’s so different from what you do now.

Luka: I also went to see Terry Bozzio with my dad when I was 9, and that blew my mind then, and then a couple of years later, my interest went into a different direction. I started listening to different kinds of drummers and that’s where the basic fundamentals of my playing are based on the drummers I started listening to when I was 11. People like Mitch Mitchell and John Bonham and Buddy Rich and Ian Paice as well. Ian Paice just played in Sittard, which is five kilometres from where I live, with his Perpendicular side project, but I was on tour so I couldn’t see him; he is one of my heroes. I met him before because we did their support, maybe 10 years ago. They were playing in Germany, and we were opening up for them. Roger Glover was standing on the side of the stage watching us and he said that we reminded him of the Deep Purple Mark II band. That was a crazy cool compliment.

MGM: Your drumming style is very jazz influenced, and so it’s interesting to hear you say that Buddy Rich was one of the drummers that you listened to. You’re also known for playing vintage Gretsch kits, and using very light jazz sticks. That must really influence your sound.

Luka: Absolutely. When I was about 13, I think my interest in vintage kits started. I have a pretty cool collection of vintage Gretsch drums. They’re all round badge 50s to 60s. I think when I was about 13 or 14, I started collecting drums, and it started out with just an old German Trixon bass drum and a Premier Tom. I just found some drums on the internet and I put together a vintage drum kit and then that’s kind of where it started for me. I was looking at all these vintage drums and I wanted to have a drum kit like that because it’s the tool you work with. My first drum kit was a Pearl Rhythm Traveller, and it didn’t do it for me. It was too modern sounding, and I saw Buddy Rich playing this crazy drum solo in a video and I was like, oh man, I gotta have a drum kit like that as well. So, I started looking for that and my first real vintage kit was a Slingerland from the 60s. Buddy Rich really influenced my playing, and I was endlessly watching his drum solos on YouTube when I was young. He’s super technical and I was just watching the fast stuff he was doing. I remember as a kid playing the Moby Dick drum solo. I set my kit in front of a screen and I was trying to imitate everything John Bonham was doing. But it’s hard when you’re 13 or 14 years old. He was also highly influenced by jazz drummers. My real interest in jazz drummers, that came much later, when I was in my twenties.

MGM: I remember seeing that you went to visit John Bonham’s grave, during your tour last year.

Luka: It gave me goosebumps. It was a tiny village and it was a beautiful drive. I don’t know where we came from, but we were on tour and we were passing that village and I was like, guys, we gotta go there. We drove, we saw some beautiful surroundings and then we came to this super tiny church with a graveyard next to it and there was this grave. When I opened the gate to the graveyard, I had the feeling that I was really going to meet him or something. It was really strange. But yeah, it gave me goosebumps standing there and that’s as close as you can get to your hero, visiting the memorial stone. So, it was kind of a special feeling for me.

MGM: When you were trying to find your own musical voice, did you naturally end up where you are now or did you have to work at it?

Luka: It went very natural, I think. I went to study at the conservatory in Amsterdam when I was 18. It’s a music school. I went much deeper into drums. I studied four years and those were four great years, and my technique went way up during those years. But when I came to that school, my mindset was vintage drums, vintage drummers, and all that kind of stuff. That style really suited me, and the teachers always said, maybe you gotta explore different kind of styles. Maybe there was something that suits you as well. But I was always really determined. This is what I want to do; rock drums, but with a very jazzy touch. It just fits like a glove, I think.

MGM: It sounds like it was a pretty early decision for you to follow music as a career. Was that always the intention to be a professional drummer? Being a musician can be a hard life.

Luka: It kind of grew. I was doing high school and we were all already playing shows every weekend with DeWolff. My friends were going out into town and I travelling the country, going from venue to venue, and that’s what it was. I didn’t really think about it, but I thought it was pretty cool that we could do that in that way. But I never really made a decision to quit my job and go to make music every night. I just rolled into it when I was 12; we started DeWolff when I was 12 years old and that was it.

MGM: So, DeWolff has been your first, and in theory, only band? That started in 2007 and then your first EP was released not long after.

Luka: Yeah, that EP would have been 2008. That first year we travelled from jam session to jam session and did some shows and small pubs. Then there was this guy, Eddie Bopp; he wanted to record us in his home studio and we went over there and that’s where the EP was recorded. All the while I was in high school, just a kid, learning, and making music at the weekends. When I finished high school, it was logical for me to go to the music school and study some more music.

MGM: Watching you and your brother, Pablo, and Robin performing together is mesmerising. The connection between you is almost telepathic. This must be the result of almost 20 years of hard work to make it look as seamless as that.

Luka: Yeah, about 18 years. I think we had to work hard in terms of playing a lot of shows, and I think playing shows is really cool, but it’s also hard work. You’ve got an audience you have to please and that’s the school we had; just play a lot. But, from the start, we were like, OK, we want to make music in the style of the Allman Brothers and the Doors and Deep Purple. And they did a lot of jamming on stage, so that’s what we wanted to do. We started doing that when we were really young, and that’s a skill you have to develop. By starting doing that as teenagers, that skill grows, and then now we’re at a point that we can close our eyes and we don’t even have to look at each other. We hear and feel what the other wants to do. But, that’s only because we’ve been playing so much with each other.

MGM: When you’re on stage and you go into those improvisations, who’s the person who instigates it? Who decides you’re going to go off-piste, if you like?

Luka: It’s the three of us, I think. Just the other day we were playing in Eindhoven, and we were in this part of a song called ‘Treasure City Moonchild’, and there’s this one part which is only drums and singing, and I forgot the lyrics halfway. But, instead of panicking I was just started doing something else and the rest just followed. Everyone said, man, you gotta forget those lyrics more often because then the really crazy stuff happens. Sometimes when you make a mistake and you have to fix it, that’s when really cool stuff can happen. And that’s how a lot of live versions of our songs develop. Maybe someone forgot something or maybe someone played a riff differently. But it’s also in the melodic instruments in guitar and Hammond. It’s easier for them to initiate a jam, I guess.

Photos credit: Satellite June

MGM: Every single one of your albums seems to sound quite different. It’s very diverse, and your early music is really psychedelic, but as your career has continued, the music has taken on more blues and soulful influences. Your latest album ‘Muscle Shoals’ is very obscure yet again. Pablo mentioned that you guys were listening a lot to Redbone last year. The song ‘Ophelia’ is highly influenced by that.

Luka: Yeah, I was playing the King Kong beat, which is the Redbone signature groove. And that’s how that song started. It’s funny because when I say to people, that song is based on Redbone, people are always like, who are Redbone? Either they don’t know them or this reference comes from a place they didn’t expect. But, there’s a lot of soul on our last two records. I remember getting this super cool compilation album on CD from my parents when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old, and that’s what really threw me into soul music. That has been an inspiration for us for a long time. But for a long time, you couldn’t really hear it in our music because we were in a very psychedelic phase, more kind of British sounding, up until the album ‘Grand Southern Electric’. That’s when influences like Leon Russell and The Band and that kind of stuff were more audible.

MGM: You’re capturing a really quite unique moment in time, and being able to bring that to new audiences. A lot of people won’t really have experienced that kind of music on the live scene for a long time – and those vintage sounds have disappeared from many live music venues. You talked earlier about your use of the 50s round badge Gretsch drumkits, and how you’re looking to capture a sound with authenticity, and this must influence why you’re going off to record in places like Kerwax and Muscle Shoals. How do you go about finding those studios and making sure that they’re going to do your sound justice? Or do people find you?

Luka: When we recorded at Kerwax, that was in Covid times. We had plans to make an album in the style of the ‘Get Back’ documentary from the Beatles, and invite people to see how to recording process works. But that didn’t really work out because of Covid times and the restrictions. So, we thought we’ve got to record an album with our friends somewhere at a cool place, and we wanted to create a super cool experience for ourselves. So, we invited all these friends to a studio in France. Pablo was following Kerwax Studio on Instagram, and he was seeing the recording space and all the gear they have, and all the microphones they build themselves. So that was our first pick for that album, to go to Kerwax and record over there. As soon as we stepped into that room, it sounded amazing. It was so lively sounding. It’s one of the coolest studios I’ve ever been to. I really want to go back there someday. It was one of the few studios that was big enough to fit 15 people inside, with the horn players in the back, the background singers and a percussion player. For ‘Muscle Shoals’, we had different plans. We wanted to record an album with Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes. We did a tour with them back in 2021 or 2022, and after a show in Paris, he came to us and said, how about I produce your next album? We were like, whoa, are you serious? You want to produce our new record? And he said, yeah, man. So, the next couple of months we were trying to find a date to do this, but it was really difficult to plan. We had saved May ‘24 for recording, and we didn’t plan any shows in that period. We said to Chris, hey, can you do May ’24, and he said, no, I’m on tour. Then we had to find something else. And that’s when the idea of recording in Muscle Shoals and Fame came about. I’m really super glad that we did that because we’ve been looking up to these records that have been recorded there for years and years and years, and to finally be in a place in a legendary place like that was something else. Fame was an up and running studio when we came there, but Muscle Shoals Sound was more like a museum. So, we really had to rent some stuff to make it work because there wasn’t really a functional tape recorder and there wasn’t an interesting drumkit in that place. So, we had to come up with some things to make it work. I think we did, but I think you can put us in almost every studio and we kind of make it work, if they have a tape recorder. We’ve been recording so many songs in our own studios with Pablo behind the knobs and doing all the twiddling and making the sounds and stuff. So, he’s kind of our producer, and he can make it work.

MGM: You’ll soon be returning to the UK to play a number of shows in support of the ‘Muscle Shoals’ album. What are your plans for those shows? During your European dates you’ve been playing four or five songs from the new album and you’ve also been playing a number of songs from ‘Love Death and In Between’. Will your UK set follow a similar flow or will you see how the mood catches you, and experiment on the day?

Luka: We love to experiment, but we’ve also had these periods where we’ve had a really cool set and it just works, so we’ll just do that. Not like every night, but now we’re in a new situation. We have a whole bunch of new songs, and a whole bunch of songs that we want to play live. So, for the next tour we’re going to switch some songs around more than we did in the past. We’ve got a lot of songs now that really work really well in a live situation and I wish we could play all of them, but then it would be like a four-hour set.

MGM: As your popularity overseas continues to grow, you’re playing a lot of shows, and you’re away from home for longer periods of time. How do you manage to keep yourself mentally well and physically well while you’re off touring.

Luka: I became a dad a couple of months ago. It’s my first, and the first one in the band as well. So, it’s a completely new chapter for us. So, that makes it a little bit harder for me to go away, but what I always did, was try to be in touch with home as much as I can. That keeps me sane, I guess, because being on the road and being homesick, that doesn’t work out. You won’t be able to play those shows if you’re feeling bad. So, I try to be in touch with home as much as I can. I try not to drink too much and I eat healthily. But sometimes that’s difficult because you arrive at a venue and it’s a fridge full of delicious local beer, and that’s how it goes. But we talk; that’s what helps for us. We’re in the van many hours driving from town to town, and you’ve got to have someone to talk to. We always make it a good time and have good conversations, read books, and that keeps you talking because if you’re getting lonely on a tour, that doesn’t work out.