Her name is Dominique Rijpma van Hulst but she travels as Do. Rhymes with "go", which is what she’s been doing all her 22 years. Here’s a suburban Dutch vignette from Eindhoven in the mid-80s: Do’s parents are playing tennis while she sits court-side under her Walkman singing along with Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. She is four.
Let’s consider genetic heritage for a second. Do’s aimed her at…tennis! Musical grandmothers and guitar-playing uncles aside - and as much as she loved singing Tina, Stevie or anything else with a little soul – it was Steffi Graff the precocious little girl wanted to be when she grew up. Into her mid-teens, she was dedicated to tennis, until she realised that she didn’t like the pressure of competition or the frustrating way in which injuries interfered with peak performance. In other words, she finally realised she’d never be Number One.
"I want to be really good when I do something," she says now. Then, with tennis no longer part of her life, Do had a lot of time on her hands. She thought about becoming a doctor, or even a pilot like her dad. And she also started thinking about singing, this time for real. She’d plug a mike into the sound system at home and sing along to divas – Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston. Next, she graduated to karaoke bars, so she could practise on songs other than the ones in the family record collection. Her parents wouldn’t let her out at night so she spent every Sunday afternoon for a year singing karaoke. And believe it or not, it gave Do her first break. She was spotted and signed up for a teen tour of Holland.
Her choice of material was telling: Breathe Again by Toni Braxton, Whitney’s I’m Every Woman, even a little Aretha. "I wanted to sing difficult songs," she explains. "Kids’ songs weren’t hard enough." And just how does a little Dutch blonde from Eindhoven plumb the feelings of "A Natural Woman"? "Listening to other people, copying their emotions ," Do says. "And my parents divorced when I was nine. That does things to you even though you’re very young."
The teen tour snagged a slew of new bookings for Do. And she started making money. So, just before her final high school exams, she dropped out to focus on her singing career. But it wasn’t quite bye bye to med school. In the back of her mind, Do figured she’d find out pretty fast what kind of future she’d have in music, and if she saw no progress, she’d still be young enough to resume her studies. But this was less self-doubt than sheer pragmatism. "I’m a hard worker and when you work very hard and keep on believing in yourself, one day you’ll accomplish what you want ."
Still, it was a winding road Do followed, everything from background vocals for other artists (Tony Hadley! In Maastricht!) to a duet with Marco Borsato (Holland’s No. 1) to a command performance for the Crown Prince of Morocco. And a lot of radio commercials. One such – was it Pioneer? Or BMW? – was produced by a man named Yanou . He conveniently arrived in Do’s life around the time that she was quite rightly feeling that she’d sung a little bit of everything, from pub rock to light opera, and now needed to knuckle down and find her own distinctive voice. Yanou suggested a cover of Bryan Adams’ early 80’s ballad Heaven. His love of trance inclined him to a heavily modified dance version of the song, but Do wisely insisted that she also record a version that was true to the original. By the time the double-A side was done, everyone involved was convinced they’d just created a breakout single. Which was, of course, exactly what happened. Number 1 in the UK, Number 3 in Australia, Number 4 on the US charts (and the only artists in history to have two versions of the same song simultaneously chart), Top 10 everywhere else!
Do should have been in that heaven she was singing about, except for the unfortunate fact that her name was nowhere to be seen on the label which read, instead, "DJ Sammy and Yanou". DJ Sammy had joined the team for this one project. His label licensed the record. Presto! No Do. Still, she hit the road to promote Heaven, spending a year in America alone. "Everywhere I went, people asked me if I was DJ Sammy," she remembers. "It takes away your positive energy." Still, she kept on Do-ing, performing in clubs with two back-up dancers, doing all the promotion, getting none of the credit, learning to be stoical. "In the end, I never wanted to be a trance artist, and I still got credit for being a good singer, having a hit and being able to go on as a pop artist."
Which is where she stands now. She’s still touring incessantly throughout Europe and America with her tapes, her dancers and her mum in tow as personal manager. The performing has helped Do hone the songs that make up her self-titled debut, to which Yanou (their friendship fortunately survived the DJ Sammy incident) and his production company Toneteam have just put the finishing touches. Heaven is on it, of course, but she has co-written the other 12 tracks and they show that the little Dutch blonde hasn’t lost the capacity to surprise that had her belting out Aretha at the age of 15. "I don’t know how to describe my music, to me it’s just me," she says, uncharacteristically inarticulate. But she quickly finds herself. "I want to give people goosebumps when I sing a ballad." And her Believe is just such a ballad. "I’d like to be like Janet Jackson." And, indeed, there is something of Janet in the skittering Selfish. "What Beyoncé does now is something I would aspire to. I would love to write so many songs, produce myself, support new talen" And who knows? Maybe Beyoncé-dom does lie somewhere in Do’s future…
For now, there’s an album’s worth of consummate pop-soul, sung by a young woman whose talent and beauty are backed up by clear-eyed dedication. "It’s not like I can do a million things," Do acknowledges. "I could never do what Madonna does. I just love to sing." And that’s something she’s really good at
Source: http://www.domusic.nl/