Jo Bogaert

Early life and career

Jo Bogaert was born in 1956 in Aalst, Belgium. His father ran an electronics shop. Jo Bogaert studied philosophy and played in a number of bands in different genres, including blues and new wave. He released one album under his own name in 1984, None of them are green. in 1987, he wrote the soundtrack for the movie Riot 88.

New Beat and Technotronic

In 1989 Jo Bogaert (credited as Thomas de Quincey) created Technotronic and released Pump Up the Jam (which he produced and co-wrote), which eventually reached #2 in the Billboard Hot 100 and in the UK charts, and number #1 in Flanders and Spain. The single sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The group released a further string of hit singles, ending in 1992 with Move This which reached #6 on the Billboard Hot 100. They played as the opening act on Madonna's Blond Ambition World Tour.

In the same period, he was also the man behind a number of other New Beat bands, most famously Nux Nemo and Acts of Madmen.

Later career

Jo Bogaert released Different voices, a more ambient-oriented album, under his own name in 1993, and in 1996 he had the project Millennium (with one song featuring vocals by Robert Wyatt), but neither was successful or longlived. His main work over the next decades was as a producer, often for techno and EDM acts but also for completely different genres. He was the producer for the 1995 album Monstertje by Gorki. In 2000 he produced Oude maan, the first CD in ten years by singer-songwriter Jan De Wilde. In 1999 and 2006 he worked with An Pierlé for her albums Mud Stories and White Velvet and with Gabriel Ríos in 2004 for Ghostboy and in 2007 for Angelhead, which reached #2 on the Flemish charts. in 2015 he wrote "Dag meneer De Wilde", a biography of Jan De Wilde published at Lannoo. He also wrote two books about his hometown Aalst, and a work on painter Jan van Eyck.