Eugene Hütz Gogol Bordello It’s rare these days for a man whose instrument is a nylon-strung six-string to play the Pyramid Stage, let alone take Glastonbury by storm as Eugene Hütz did last summer. Rarer still that he should perform with Madonna at Live Earth, raise the roof at Reading and Leeds, and headline at the Hammersmith Apollo. David Hughes reveals more. © Danny North Interview Gogol Bordello Gogol Bordello ‘Forces Of Victory’ tour 2008 UK dates: 28 Mar 29 Mar 30 Mar 1 Apr Academy Metropolitan Academy Academy Newcastle Leeds Manchester Bristol 2 Apr 22 Apr 23 Apr Academy Academy Academy Brixton Birmingham Oxford G ogol Bordello have gone from playing Russian weddings to being the rage of New York (their adopted city), the UK and the rest of Europe. Born in 1972, lyricist and singer Eugene Hütz grew up in Kiev. His grandmother was a Russian Gypsy (Servo Roma). His father, half Romany, was a guitarist in one of Russia’s early rock bands, Meridian. “My initial experience was of guitars and accordions floating around with food. There were three or four guitars. When I enter a house with no guitar, I don’t trust those people.” Assimilation into the Ukraine followed and, at the age of six or seven, family gatherings and birthdays were alight with an energy which Eugene acknowledged had been passed down to him. Regarding this ebullience Hütz says, “My grandmother wanted to call an ambulance for us.” Hütz, the teenager, was a long-distance runner encouraged into the Soviet athletics programme. He ran marathons. At the same time he was into black-market punk. Nick Cave was a favourite, although he continually cites his first inspiration as Jimi Hendrix. “His music had an otherworldliness that made me want to throw myself around the room and re-create the beauty, the dissonance.” In 1986 the 14 year-old Hütz was evacuated from Kiev and the shadow of Chernobyl. For six months he lived in his grandmother’s community. It was his first prolonged exposure to Romany culture and he joined right in. “The energy of the Romanies is different; it has a historical quality, very instant.” He played in their wedding bands and found himself naturally drawn to the duende temperament (“Devilish with a twist,” says Eugene), learning that when it comes to weddings there was one driving force. Hütz explains: “Economics – you play: Russian, Carpathian, Hungarian Gypsy, Jewish, everything. Be the best. You know the repertoire but that doesn’t mean you know what to do with it.” Back in Kiev, Hütz was in a band. “In Kiev, if you wanted to play an electric guitar you had to build it.” Then perestroika took hold. It brought literature out on the streets and he felt compelled to make a choice: “Did I want to read Nietzsche, Fromm, Carl Jung or run marathons? I quit running marathons and studying philosophy.” At 17 his band was in the Russian charts. His Russian pop career was interrupted by a resettlement programme which saw his family spend the next six years as refugees, travelling through Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy, finally ending up in the United States in 1993. The first stop was Vermont where he formed two bands. In 1997 he moved to New York where he met fellow émigrés: the accordionist from Sakhalin, Yuri Lemeshev, and former Moscow theatre director and violinist, Sergey Ryabtsev. Electric guitarist Oren Kaplan is Israeli, bass player Tommy Gobena came from Ethiopia, and drummer Elliot Ferguson is actually an American. Add to that two perc-playing dancers, Pamela Racine and Elizabeth Sun, and you have Gogol Bordello. “My brothers are protons, my sisters are neutrons. Stir it twice, it’s instant family! Bom!” If you haven’t seen them (the ‘Forces Of Victory’ European tour arrives in the UK at the end of March), there have been two documentary films in the last three years to help us up to speed, but we do know this stuff. We’ve heard it before. From Sophie Tucker, Alfie Bass, the Red Army Ensemble and various Bulgarian ladies, it’s the stuff that goes straight to your boots and you don’t know why but it does; that deep human melancholy that comes from a thousandyear diaspora. It’s all driven by Spanish guitar, accordion and fiddle, and has the audience baying like Cossacks. There’s a fascinating video clip of Sergey Ryabtsev playing Gypsy fiddle at a ‘Russian Nobility Ball’ in New York. Please check www. acousticmagazine.com for the link. He struts slowly around the ballroom implying such a rhythm in his sad tune that you know your heart is beating sixteen to the bar. His rasping double stops and pizzicato caprices, like Fritz Kreisler on Red Bull, dance and swerve from one story to another. By the way, this is where all the middle eights in pop history come from (wasn’t Irving Berlin from Belarus?). It was enough for one tipsy member of the Russian nobility to have to be told to leave the dance floor and return to his chair. To this fire, Eugene Hütz brings his songs of energy and intellect, coaxed out on guitar with his percussively strummed Gypsy two-step. His lyrics are smile-inducing and multilayered; a dry but emotional fact-finding mission through Eastern Europe to the West, and he is skilled in his art: “Do you have sex maniacs, Or schizophreniacs Or astrophysicists in your family. Was my grandma anti, was my grandpa bounty? Hek-o-hek-o-hej-o. They ask in embassy! Bom!” After his travels Hütz doesn’t seem at all misplaced. On stage his identity is as plain as the Polish docker’s moustache on his face. He is from Ukrainian Gypsy stock, he is young and has come to join us in the West with a story we want to hear. That story permeates his work in various forms whether as musician, actor or DJ. His work in tangent to Gogol Bordello includes acting in the films Everything Is Illuminated, directed in 2005 by Liev Schreiber, and Filth And Wisdom, a short feature marking Madonna’s directorial debut to be premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. For the past ten years he has been the star DJ at the now celebrated Mehanata Bulgarian Bar in New York, mixing Gypsy, dub and vodka. His musical collaborations include work with the Russian Kolpakov Trio, Manu Chao and, more recently, Les Claypool from the thinking man’s progressive band, Primus. And now we hear that Hütz has been the inspiration for the House of Gucci’s latest collection of purples and velvets. There is the suspicion, though, that Gogol Bordello will last longer than one season. Their music has come to us over a millennium and may last another. It’s chaotic – and electric – Gypsy metal punk. Check out this following link to see Eugene at play Lela Pala Tute: http://uk.youtube.com/ watch?v=ca-cQd75EOA David Hughes © Photograph By: Angela Lubrano / Live © Danny North Feature Gypsy Music A Thousand Years Of David Hughes gives us a musical time capsule, containing the development and survival of the phenomenon that is Gypsy-inspired music. – Eugene Hütz. Migratory, alienated by religious and social prejudice, forced at points into slavery, they eked out a living in low-paid occupations. Their assimilation was rare in any form other than musical, where their playing was often of great depth and excitement. Traditionally, they did not read music, which perhaps allowed them more freedom with ornamentation, passing notes and “S ome of the most hurt people in the world…but optimism makes them stand out from all the other people in the world.” “Traditionally, they did not read music, which perhaps allowed them more freedom with ornamentation, passing notes and technique” technique. This may have been a legacy of their roots but it was also commercially driven. A living was to be had particularly when absorbing the musical traditions of their hosts. It’s generally accepted that the Gypsy race, the Roma, were likely to have originated in North West India from where they began to migrate north about a thousand years ago. I expect etymologists could talk all day about the Roma language and where that leads us, but there are significant similarities with the vocabulary of the inhabitants of the Rajasthan region around Jaipur. The repertoire of the musicians of that area, as represented by current bands like Musafir, suggest that the music, even then, could be deeply melancholic. The musical history of the Roma seems to have been predominantly based on stringed instruments both bowed and plucked or indeed, in the case of the cimbalom, hammered. To this may be added the accordion and reed instruments of a higher pitch, most notably the clarinet which also features prominently in the parallel musical history of klezmer. The language and musicality of the Roma betray their route through what is now Iran, Iraq and Egypt (where Europeans believed they had come from, hence the name) before diverging into the Ukraine on the one hand, North Africa, the Balkans, Hungary, Greece and Western Europe on the other. That, includes Andalucia where native, Islamic, Sephardic and Gypsy cultures evolved the traditions of flamenco. 30 You get an idea how pervasive the characteristics of the ‘Gypsy style’ are when you start thinking about places like the Balkans. You can hear the Gypsy influence on the national folk music there and, at the same time, hear those national characteristics in the music of the Roma. Take Bulgaria, for instance, the traditional region for the cross-over culture of East and West, where the music often sounds ‘Arabic’ with a hint of Benny Goodman –there are clarinets all over the place. Or take Greece; a typical characteristic of Gypsy music is the ‘czardas’ which consists of two sections, lassu (slow) and friss (fast) and the gradual progression from one to the other. Well, that’s Zorba’s Dance, right there. But it’s also, from the 18th century onwards, typically the ‘style-Hongrois’ (Hungarian). Find a version of virtuoso violinist, Roby Lakatos, playing ‘Csárdás’. Here’s one and it’s a corker: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RIZtcIn58H4 The name of Lakatos is synonymous with the keepers of the Hungarian Gypsy flame. Roby Lakatos’s father, Sándor, was witnessed in full flight during the 80s by a diner: “I was fortunate to see and hear the maestro at Matyas Pince Restaurant in Budapest in August 1989. I asked him to play the ‘Szekely Himnusz’ (Transylvanian Anthem). He consented, though it was illegal...and the whole restaurant stood up and sang along.” The influences are everywhere. Bela Bartok made a living out of it. Have a listen to his ‘Romanian Dances’. Incidentally, back in the USA when Eugene Hütz was working out what to call his new band, the first thing he came up with was ‘Hütz and the Béla Bartóks’ until he discovered that “nobody knows who the hell Béla Bartók is in the United States.” In the 20th century the music flourished and adapted. The ‘swing’ era produced its Gypsy variant with the French ‘musette’ style of pencil moustaches and Macaferri-inspired electric guitar. The sound of Django Reinhardt’s Quintette du Hot Club de France is unique but distinctly Roma. Even now, as the 21st century begins, the Gypsy tradition has found its way into the world of punk...which is where we came in. “It’s about magical life, which is still a big option there if you pursue it.” – Eugene Hütz. David Hughes Representative of the Gypsy guitar world, these two shapes have become iconic in their time. These are designed by British Luthier Steve Toon.