There’s a band called Hamfatter, best known for stomping onto Dragon’s Den and wrangling £75k out of the dragons by playing their song Sziget as a marketing pitch. Sziget is a song about getting wrecked at the Hungarian uber-festival, and I bloody love it, because of the lyric…
I’m at the front, right in the middle and they start to play / Gogol Bordello, gypsy punk / we’re blown away
… which told me that it mattered not a sausage whether or not Hamfatter made any difference to my aural satisfaction; I love Gogol Bordello, and they love Gogol Bordello, and therefore we’ll all be friends for ever and ever.
Gogol Bordello, a steamroller of wanton creativity lead by beautiful loon Eugene Hutz, are set to play the Olympia in Dublin on Monday 22nd of November (and Belfast’s Mandela Hall the night before). This is on the back of new album Transcontinental Hustle, which is more of their brand of inspirational leppin’ about but with a generous side of Brazil, an experience any south Galway woman can recommend. As smouldery an’ all as they look here, live, they’re more an explosion of pirates badly disguised as a wandering folk band. Here they are on Later With Jools Holland with We Comin’ Rougher (Immigraniada).
Plus, Eugene Hutz, everyone! I’d admired the man since I heard 2005 album Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, but after seeing Everything Is Illuminated, I fell utterly in love with him. I don’t use the term Ledgebag lightly, you know, and Eugene Hutz is Ledgebag General. I would have his babies. Not literally; I mean I’d mind them for a few hours if he needed a night out.
Tickets go on sale on Monday morning (July 19th), and they’d make deadly Christmas presents for your favourite hardworking, word-slinging culch.ie writers.
