A love letter to hardcore from Budapest

Bane in Budapest. There's nothing quite like it.
Photo by Arnold Torma

After a few months I moved to Toronto, I took my friend Dan to my first hardcore concert in the city. Raised Fist was in town and this was a big deal for me since they couldn’t get past the border for a Montreal show when I was living there.  I wasn’t going to miss this chance to these Swedes tear a place down in Canada, even if all my friends were seeing them in London and I was stuck in Toronto.

Midway through the set I turned to Dan and apologized. The band had played a few of their hits, and they were really giving it all, but the people in the half-filled venue were unmoved. They leaned, they talked and they drank their beers, ignoring the background music.

I wanted to tell Dan hardcore shows aren’t like this. I wanted to tell him about floor punching at friends’ shows and a lead singer who did flips off the wall of London’s Embassy Hotel. I wanted to tell him about getting knocked down by a windmilling fist in a mosh pit only to be quickly hoisted back up by everyone in the pit. I wanted to tell him that hardcore punk is not like this.

Getting in hardcore then was a matter of being around at the right time and place. For a few years London experienced an explosion of punk rock anger (there’s a lot of angst in London). Eventually it attracted everyone else and mutated into something more mainstream and less poignant. Nonetheless, as many bands died away, other band members started their own side projects, carrying the hardcore torch along, even if it was a smaller torch.

To be in that scene, in your teens and early 20s, had a profound impact on the music I was listening to. We’d go watch friends’ bands, which also opened up a world of bigger bands, some of which we saw see live and others we’d discover on a friend’s car stereo.

I’ve never grown out of loving that music. That love is so elemental, I can’t really explain why. You have to love it to know what I’m talking about. You play old albums and look forward to seeing those old bands and the newer (also younger) bands live.

As my London friends and I trickled up to Toronto, we got to know the bands in the area (Fucked Up, the Cursed, Haymaker, to name a few) and got to see the energy and devotion of the city’s scene. My initial dismay at Raised Fist soon evaporated. Before I left that city and its scene for Hungary, one of my concerns was missing out on live shows. There was no need for panic.

Budapest enjoys a devoted following for hardcore. I don’t know if it’s the anger and frustration floating below the pretty facade of the city (if so, Budapest has a lot in common with little, post-industrial London) or if it’s simply disaffection with the consumer culture /climb-the-corporate-ladder mentality of the big city (like Toronto), but they love hardcore and punk there..

This is fed by bands occasionally making stops here, and they are rewarded with incredible crowd enthusiasm. Last week, a few friends and I went to a hardcore festival to see, among others, Bane.

The band is a Budapest favourite. They’ve played here twice in the two years I’ve been here. They turned down the large stage and opted for the smaller one. That tight, sweaty little room exploded when they came on. I haven’t seen energy like that since the London hardcore days.

When we saw Sick of it All play an outdoor show in the rainstorm – we were soaked from hoodie to toe – a big crowd still showed up. Some were under umbrellas, others huddled along the edges, close to the covered bar, but most were in front of the stage with in the pissing rain.

For the last song, Us vs Them, the band invited the crowd onstage. Kata, who told me over and over again that this isn’t her kind of music was impressed. She had never seen a band do that.

As a side note, hardcore is usually something you keep discreet at the workplace. You listen to it with earphones and try not to wear objectionable t-shirts, like the Oxbaker one with the elephant stomping the guy's head. I work with two guys here who are also into the hardcore. We share music, go to shows, wear the t-shirts – this has never happened since I started working grown-up jobs in offices.

All of this is to say that there’s a genuine love in Budapest for an angry, niche genre of music. It's unexpected, but it is an immense relief for me. Expats seem to sacrifice a lot of their interests when they move somewhere, hardcore would have been a tough one for me to let go of.