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Tijs Vanneste

Tijs Vanneste (b. ca. 1979) is a Belgian singer and tattoo artist from Dessel, also known as Jef Van Echelpoel, one half of the music duo Van Echelpoel. Vanneste has used the alias since childhood, e.g. when his name was asked after he had done something. In secondary school, Vanneste took an art course at the Heilig Graf in Turnhout, and later studied in Breda and Ghent, and has been a student of the art school. Vanneste is a professional tattooist and has tattooed Tom Boonen and Ben Segers, among others] and was a plastic arts teacher in the past. Vanneste sang with the metal band Oceans of Sadness, which existed from 1995 to 2011 and included six performances at Dessel's Graspop Metal Meeting, including a one-off reunion performance in 2015. He subsequently sang with the melodic rock band The Searching, which released the album Closure. In late 2016, he had a number 1 hit with the fun group Van Echelpoel with the strongly Yello-influenced electropop song Ziet em duun. The following songs also became number 1 hits in the Flemish top 10. In 2017, he was one of the contestants of The Smartest Man in the World,[9] and he was the first person to be nominated for the contest. In April and May 2021, the program "The Kemping" aired on One. Vanneste's humaninterest program in production of The Chinese follows Vanneste and nine long-term job seekers who built and operated a summer campground in the summer of 2020. The accompanying non-profit organization De Kemping aims to help vulnerable young people gain work experience and thus get them back into the workforce structurally.