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.

Turning 32 in Hungary

The summer before I left Toronto I turned 30. 

The build up to that age was somewhat stressful, even for a man. It's one of those ages that society has decided that you should have your shit figured out.

On my 30th birthday, I went to a hardcore punk concert to see Refused, a band I have loved since I was 18. The next day I started work at a new ad agency.

I don't know if I will ever have my shit figured out – I quit that sweet job to move to Budapest and make ads for Big Tobacco – but I was closer to having myself figured out. 

The older I get, the more I know that getting my shit together has less to do with having a house or a bunch of kids and more to do with being comfortable with myself.

This summer I turned 32. After a weekend in one of Hungary's wine growing regions with Kata, we shared a birthday dinner at home before we joined a few friends at a Sick of it All concert – yes, another hardcore punk concert.

It's only an ideal birthday for a handful of people – even Kata was surprised at the prospect of watching aged punk rockers on my birthday – but it was me, it was fun, it was perfect for my birthday.

Badacsony! Wine! Heat!

Birthday dessert

The older I get, the less good I am at these cell phone photo thingys.

Up too early in Croatia

The long walk to the old city.

Grey skies, grey water, grey walls.

We had the streets of the old city to ourselves. 

There is no easy way to get from Budapest to Dubrovnik. No direct planes, no trains, just a bus. 

The bus only runs on Fridays during the summer. It winds its lazy way through Hungary into Croatia, all the way around most of Bosnia, which juts into most of Croatia. It labours up and down switchbacks along a coastal road from Split to Dubrovnik, where it scheduled to stop after 14 hours of driving time. In this part of Europe a bus does not stop if it can go further; this bus was continuing to Montenegro.

It was the only affordable way my sister and I could find that either didn’t cost a King’s Landing's ransom or require so many connections that the trip might be mistaken for a road trip on the Spanish Road.

The upside? Well, it was an overnight bus, so we managed to sleep a bit  – after we read until the lights went out and burnt out the batteries of our iPods – over the 12 hours (that's right, we were two hours early, which is a huge difference when you're folded up like a pretzel on a Balkan bus).

Left at the bus station all groggily-eyed at 5am in the morning on a Saturday, we decided to shake a leg and walk off our bus leg cramps.

Aside from us, the only people on the streets were garbage men and a slurry, stumbly couple in night club clothes. Then we saw another night clubber in full zombie mode, alternating between zig zagging into the street and leaning/riding along the fence.

We turned a corner and found the source of the late/early party-ers: a club just outside the wall. It was closing and disgorging the last few stragglers into the streets to greet the rising sun, look for a kebab stand, and, from the sounds of things, try to continue the party.

Zombies of Dubrovnik. All they want is a party and some kebab.

Our hostel’s office did not open until 8am, so we took that time to wander around the old city with the streets to ourselves. At this point, chairs and tables at some of the restaurants were being laid out on the main drag, but the side streets were quiet and deserted. We had no idea what a treat this is until we were shoulder to shoulder in the same streets later in the day.

We had breakfast at one of the only places actually open and went to the hostel office only to find out our room wouldn’t be ready until 12pm. So, we walked the city wall. We pretty much had that to ourselves too.

The morning light was great and it wasn’t yet too hot to linger in the sun to take in the views. Here again was a treat that we enjoyed but didn’t really grasp how special it was to be one of few on the wall – it was us and a bunch of early-rising seniors – until we saw the crowds trundling along the top later the same day.

This is the third overnight gypsy bus ride I’ve taken somewhere and I don’t regret any of them. In return for losing a bit of sleep you see Dubrovnik in this way, or the canals of Venice slowly come alive or dawn in the Balkan Mountains on the road to Sofia – things any sane, or sober, person on vacation would not usually see.