01/10/2026
Exactly 20 years ago, on the first of October 2006, this thing happened. Swipe to read my letter, or read it below. Tom
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Exactly 20 years ago, on the first of October 2006, this thing happened. Dreamt up 6 months earlier, in the kitchen of the ICP studios in Brussels whilst finishing Pocket Revolution, came this idea: We have to do something against that rising extreme right in the city of Antwerp. Something against it. Because it was awful, it was big and it was gathering momentum. It was going to take over this beautiful, open, experimental city that Antwerp had been for centuries. What the fck. We have to raise our voices. So I called some friends, and they mailed some people. Soon singer Arno joined in for Brussels, which was a bit like Lou Reed picking up the phone on behalf of New York City. Then Frederik Sioen for the city of Ghent. Then, and thus making it a national project, the city of Charleroi. After that, the floodgates were opened: artists, musicians, theatre makers, film directors, painters, fashion designers, underground people, top-of-the-charts people, it grew and grew and this beautiful thing happened. It blew up into one of the biggest cultural-activist events in the history of the country. Correct me if I’m wrong. Over 140 artists? A live audience of more than 100,000 people in 4 cities? Multitudes of that in front of the TV? It just… happened. And of course, the bigger it became, the more recuperation by all sorts of entities started to occur. Bad stuff. But also good influences. “It shouldn’t be against something, Tom. It should stand for something.” Fair enough. Enter ‘Concerts for Tolerance.’ Good.
I felt out of my depth many times. I’m not a political person. As a particular kind of Gen X-er, it doesn’t even occur to me to oppose injustice in the world from the comfort of my couch, in the shape of some frigging newsletter or Insta post. The only way to truly react is to do something. And, you know, sometimes I’m not tolerant myself (yesterday, puffing away in the open air in Rome, I was pretty intolerant to a protesting anti-tobacco American), so… when the whole thing started to flirt with a moralistic, do-gooder vibe, I wasn’t always comfortable with that.
But it wasn’t about me, and 0110 was still against extremists and separatists and racists. (And, as you may know, Antwerpians like to be against stuff. I blame, quite intolerantly, the Spanish).
And so this ‘idea’ took flight like you wouldn’t believe. Enter a cast of thousands: schools, associations, restaurants, companies, private citizens, your little grocery shop on the corner, the book club of St-Truiden, b**r brewers, multicultural families from tiny villages, all of them, chipping in. And like with all big things, you almost don’t have to do anything anymore; it just feeds on, and grows by itself.
I’ll always remember the soul-warming companionship, the coming together of partisan cultural tribes, that united goal, that complete lack of cynicism, that ‘folks from all walks of life getting things done’… That, my friends, was unforgettable.
So to thank people would be ridiculous. There were too many of them to thank. I hope their number is still growing. Or growing once again.
