Fantastique (pop duo)

Fantastique (from French: fantasy) was a pop music duo from the Netherlands in 1981-1983. It was inspired by Ottawan and formed by the famous Dutch production team Cat Music (Geertjan Hessing, Aart Mol, Elmer Veerhoff, Erwin van Prehn and Cees Bergman), well-known till 1979 as glam rock/teenybopper band Catapult, and also as The Monotones. The duo consisted of Dick Van Dam and Astrid Leuwener from the city of Haarlem in the west of the Netherlands. They were deliberately chosen to fit the stereotype of the Dutch everyman, Van Dam with the mane of fair hair and Noel Edmonds beard, Lewener statuesque and permed. Neither could necessarily sing, so the vocals were performed by session singers Marian Pijnaker and Cor van der Hoogt.

The duo's defining moment was their debut single "Mama Told Me", a 4-minute electronic dance song. With its brassy-laden march rhythm, vocodered vocals by Van der Hoogt, a keyboard riff inspired by Lipps Inc.'s Funkytown, and singalong chanted vocals of "Let's do it, let's do it," it topped the charts in many countries in the early 1980s, along with their other singles such as "Costa Blanca". In October 1981 on the Dutch Top 40, its highest number was 5. In 1986, "Mama Told Me" spent 13 weeks and reached number 84 on the UK Singles Chart. There are a lot of remixes of "Mama Told Me" issued long after Fantastique drifted into oblivion, and it was even used as part of the soundtrack of the Dutch film I am Joep Meloen (Dutch: Ik Ben Joep Meloen, 1981).

External links

• An article about Fantastique in LD Catalogue music directory
• Biography of Marian Pijnaker on Zangstudio The Voice