Much has been made of the similarities between Balkan Beats and punk rock. There are, admittedly, a few parallels. Serbian kafana behavior, whereby drunken bećari (revelers on a spree) smash glasses, furniture and sometimes other people, is in some sense essentially punk in attitude. And there is a certain live-for-the-moment outlook in much Balkan Gypsy music that also parallels the ...
BERLIN-DONBASS (Part 1) My fellow musicians remember that end-of-March-2020-feeling we all had while staring in disbelief at the calendar, watching the scheduled dates vanish one by one. April, May, June shows, all gone. However, in my timetable there still was a trip planned for October, and for some obscure reason it just wouldn’t disappear...I couldn’t imagine how, under the newest ...
It’s somewhere in the early Eigthies Johannesburg and I’m on my way to see National Wake. My grey and blue-flecked box cut zoot suit with its pleated baggy pants may have been a slight overdress - the kind of thing not totally suited to a punk gig in Rockey Street Square (outside what would a decade later become Rockefellas). But ...