MILK INC.

Belgian eurodance formation with lots of pop appeal & hitpotential.

The brains behind the project "Milk Incoporated" were Regi Penxten and Philip Vandueren, two people from the commercial house-scene in Belgium, who had been doing stuff in various guises, such as K-Lab (for Dance Opera), Regg & Arkin, Karnak-X and some of the Illusion-compilations. Their first release as Milk Inc. got a vocal remix by Praga Khan (with the voice of Nikkie Van Lierop aka Jade4U aka Darling Nikkie), and immediately set the project off on a flying start. "La Vache", as the tune was entitled, became a huge hit in France, selling over 300,000 copies (good for gold) and was represented on more than 3,000,000 sold compilation albums.

Regi about this later to Het Belang van Limburg : "Most Belgian dance-acts first score on their own turf and try to make it abroad afterwards. Milk Inc. did it the other way round: A French deejay that worked for the Paris-based label Scorpio Music heard the song in a Flemish discotheque and took it across the border. Without any pressure or promotion Scorpio asked for a licence for 'La Vache' for France, and the next we knew it was in the highest regions of the French charts. It came out of the blue".
From the diary of Jade4U : "Summer 1997: There’s a new dance act in Belgium called MILK INC. that Praga did a remix for. I wrote some lyrics for it and sang a little tune. Title: "La Vache". Guess what? It’s number 7 in France!!! I am a star yet again…yeehaaaa!!!!!! We made a great video clip in England and I got to travel all over France and Corsica. People recognized me on the street! There were 3 of us; Reggie (keyboards) and Tamara (dancer) and moi. After a while there was too much tension among us though, so I quit.". So, Reggie started looking for a new stage act, and hired 2 dancers from the club-scene in Brussels and An Vervoort (a dancer for Pat Krimson and graphic designer) to do the promo.

A second single "Free Your Mind" did absolutely nothing (Regi later : "We knew that beforehand, it was só bad"), a third one "Inside of Me" (February 1998) faired rather well in the clubscene, but did not "do" anything in the charts. In March of the same year, they did a tour of a number of locations in South-Africa, and were crowned with a golden album for "la Vache" in that country as well.

With their fourth single "In My Eyes", they found a new style which brought them loads of commercial success again, this time in Belgium. A part of the change in style was found when John Miles Jr. (son of the John Miles that had a hit with the symphonic "Music") joined the band and started co-writing songs on guitar. A third element of the appeal were the melodic vocals to the dance-tunes. The single was sold over 40,000 times here, and earned the band a Donna-award.

A number of singles "Promise", "Oceans" followed, with about the same style (and even melody), and in May 1999 a first album was released "Apocalypse Cow", in essence a compilation of all the singles they had released before plus a few new ones. The most succesful single of these became the melodic "Walk on Water", which would reach the n°1 spot in the regular singles-charts in Belgium, and would also become a huge hit in Holland a year later. The album itself also became the best-selling dance album in Belgium of 1999.

A minor shock was felt when the face of the group on stage, An Vervoort, announced her departure from Milk Inc., heading over to Ibiza to start a dance-label Benimusa with her husband Patrick Claesen (aka Pat Krimson, from dance projects such as Leopold3, Nunca and 2 Fabiola) and posing for a nude calendar. Regi started looking for a new "singer" (first rumoured to by Silvy Melody, who had a hit with the formation Liquid and the track "Turn the Tide" at the time, which was co-written by Regi Penxten) and found one in Linda Mertens.

In September 2000, the band released "Land of the Living", the first single with Linda, in October the band collected an award as the best dance-act from TMF, and in November, Milk Inc released their second full-CD, also entitled "Land of the Living". Regi about this album "We want to finish the cliché that dance-acts can only exist a few years. The previous album was sort of a mixed lot of dance tracks that we wrote some lyrics for. Now it is really a song-album. We've composed all the songs on guitar first - in Jordan, Amalfi and Johannesburg - and then converted them to dance. So the substructure of the tracks are mostly classic popsongs."

While Regi was getting a lot of succes mid-2001 with Sylver ("Land of the Living", "Forgiven", sung by the former Silvy Melody, a project he was co-producing with Wout Van Dessel), Milk Inc. was partying again at the end of the year: the band got another TMF-award in the same category (in front of Sylver and Lasgo), and one in the catagory "Best Videoclip" for the images to "Never Again". The new single that came out shortly after that, "Wide Awake" also was right on target again.

Band members :
- Regi Penxten (keyboards, production)
- Philip Vandueren (keyboards, production)
- An Vervoort / Linda Mertens (stage act)
- John Miles Jr. (guitar)
- Carine Boelaert (vocals)

Buy CD's of this band at

Releases :
- La Vache (CDS, Antler-Subway, 1997)
- Free Your Mind (CDS, Antler-Subway, 1997)
- Inside of Me (CDM, Antler-Subway, 1998)
- In My Eyes (CDS, Antler-Subway, 1998)
- Promise (CDS, Antler-Subway, 1999)
- Losing Love (CDS, Antler-Subway, 1999)
- Apocalypse Cow (CD, Antler-Subway, 1999)
- Walk on Water (CDS, Antler-Subway, 1999)
- Land of the Living (CDS, Antler-Subway, 2000)
- Land of the Living (CD, Antler-Subway/EMI, 2000)
- Don't Cry (CDS, Antler-Subway, 2000)
- Never Again (CDS, Antler-Subway, 2001)
- Wide Awake (CDS, Antler, 2001)

Websites :
- get.to/milk_inc, a good but unofficial site about the band.
- beam.to/milkinc, another good Milk Inc fansite (dutch).
- flashback to some youth pictures of An Vervoort at Move X
- Milk Inc. info at a subpage of the Antler subsite at Praga Khan's.
- Interview with Regi and An in February 1999, or september
- Pictures of Milk Inc at the Flemish showbizzsite
- Lyrics at Waltertje's Lyrics site