Geert R. A. Kliphuis

Who is Geert R. A. Kliphuis?

Geert Richt Alexander Kliphuis is an author, songwriter and guitarist, born in the Netherlands in 1955, and currently living in Brussels, Belgium.

His father is the retired art therapist Maks Kliphuis, as a teacher one of the driving forces behind Middelloo, the training centre for therapists in Amersfoort, and later head of the department of creative process therapy [1] at the Jelgersma Kliniek of Leiden University. Kliphuis's mother, who died in 1964, was Nel van der Velde, a drama teacher, radio presenter and author of children's books, and poetry and fiction for adults.

Working as a street-musician in Brussels, the former West-Berlin, Barcelona, Hamburg, London and Paris during the 1970s and 1980s, Kliphuis wrote an extensive series of short travel stories for NRC Handelsblad, the national newspaper published in Rotterdam. He applied the same format for his songs: concise observations with a tragicomical undercurrent. The Belgian band Vaya Con Dios recorded his At the Parallel [2], to great critical acclaim, and On A Hot August Night [3]. Using the pseudonym Jay Conrad, Kliphuis recorded a twenty-odd songs on two albums, A Penniless Gentleman and Steeltown Girls.[4][5]