My first attemps at making music took place ''at the bottom of the stairs" when I was 8 years old. My brother played the guitar in a band (in the fifties). He practised on the landing and I sang along from below. I also learned some guitar chords. I also played the ukelele at the time. That instrument is now lying about at''s Ron''s place for his daughters to have a go at it. Together with some mates from school I formed a band "The Lightnings". We did numbers from The Shadows, Jim Reeves, Lonnie Donegan and other hits from that period. Then I started to like country music. A favorite song of mine was the theme song from the "Beverly Hillbillies"-series on TV. We can still play that number now. I bought a 12-string guitar but I didn''t use it for very long in the band, because we took up studies and went our separate ways and that was the end of our band. During a school-outing in 1981 Ron van Doorneveld and I find out that we shared the same musical taste. It appeared that Ron has a 5-string banjo. I took it on home with me and after some time I managed to play "Cripple Creek" on it for a bit. Ron got enthousiastic as well and wanted to pick up the banjo again.That''s how we began playing together, I already had a guitar and now I got me a banjo too. Ivo Vlot, who was a labaratory assistant at our school, joined us with his base and we practised at school in the evening once a week. One day we were playing in a schoolmusical and Chris van Breemen came to us and asked if he could play in our band with his mandoline. From then we performed under the name "Country Stuff" at parties of company-staff, birthdays, market-places, streetfairs, the Vestingdagen in Hellevoetsluis and the like, until Chris stopped playing. During a country-concert (Byron Berline, John Hickman) Ron and I met Jaap Spijk. Jaap had played in a band which was also incomplete at the time we met and by uniting the two parts we became Except2. When Will Pieters joined us in the band with his fiddle play I also began to appreciate Cajun Music and now I play and sing that too.