0
“I just do what I do. That’s the way I am. That’s how my mama made me and that’s fucking good for me.”
Eugene Hutz does not mince his words. He is the front man of his ‘familia undestructable’, Gogol Bordello, who have creative flair and a raw energy that beats all punk bands of this decade.
Gogol Bordello “confronts the jaded and irony-deceased” through their “acts of music, theatre, chaos and sorcery.” Chaotic is definitely a grand word choice for this band due to their highly-excitable and creative nature. On stage and off.
Despite the initial accent barrier, Purple Revolver grabs twenty minutes with Eugene to talk band dynamics, music of the moment and crazy happenings on the tour.
With regards to the band, Eugene does not believe that he is the leader of the group, rather that Gogol Bordello is a whole dynamic, full of quirky artists who are described as the indestructible family.
“Gogol Bordello is an accumulative fireball; it doesn’t really have any beginning or end and [that’s] just the way it goes. There’s a core of the band and it feels [like] the universe [because] it has rotating members as well.”
So Gogol Bordello is constantly changing and growing, much like life itself – something that is reflective in the band’s mission statement. “It’s the normal flow of things. The band has been together for five years and it goes through some change. It’s normal.”
Speaking of the normal flow of things, music style and fashion changes every second in different cities.
Eugene had been living in Latin America for five or six years – in Brazil and Argentina – before he returned to New York City. He says, “I thought I would be so excited and overwhelmed by all the sounds that I’d missed, but actually the sounds were even more archaic than when I left. Archaic – like obsolete.”
He clarifies that he’s talking about the latest electronic music that sound “completely archaic” to him.
“I don’t know what the fuck is going on or why that it’s happening or anything. I feel like there’s some kind of massive twist going on where things are becoming archaic and obsolete because they have no depth to them”
“It might sound paradoxical but I basically ended up listening to the blues and that sounded more like the futuristic music of the moment” meaning in comparison to the electronic music. It is everywhere you turn at the moment. There is not one sound that hasn’t been remixed in some disorderly fashion which makes the track sound completely distorted.
You’ll be glad to know that Eugene is a fan of the UK, and that he’s heard of Liverpool. Who hasn’t?
He loves British people, saying that we “will go ballistic for the style or fashion of music, or for the cultural, political, historical story of it, for the pure raw energy of it, the rowdy things.”
In his eyes we have it all including intelligence, “very good knowledge of music, very good at standing at the great hits circuit and rowdy as fuck.”
As British music lovers, we should all be grateful and proud of that statement.
Eugene Hutz, a modern Ukrainian punk legend calls us lot music intellectuals and says that our country is the perfect place to display Gogol Bordello’s music which, again, is “rowdy as fuck.”
When Gogol Bordello visits the UK, they “get gratification of every kind.”
Eugene loves playing anywhere. “At this point I’ve been around enough to get a hell of a homecoming wherever I go, but of course, there are special features and specific attachments to a place, the UK in particular. It has its own groove. Plus, the rides don’t take so long to drive down town.” Always a bonus.
As part of a mental, intelligent, and creative punk band, there had to be some crazy antics that have happened to Eugene and his fellow Gogol Bordello members during their infamous tours.
The latest concerns a trailer, a spooky knock and a random man.
Eugene sets the scene: “We pulled over in the middle of the night” – not a good start.
“Everybody came out to have a smoke and we heard a knocking inside our trailer in one of the tour buses – from the inside. Naturally, that’s pretty spooky already.” You got that right.
“When we cooped up and opened the trailer, an old man appeared who was very excited to know that we were not police. We said we were cops and he ran into the woods. I don’t know who he was. I have no fucking
idea.”
Clearly someone was hitching a ride.
When speaking to musicians and artists, it’s always interesting to see where they think that they would be right in that moment during their career if they weren’t such a singing sensation and an image of greatness in their fans eyes.
Eugene gives the best answer yet: “somewhere between a martial artist and a writer, an actual writer who writes and always writes.” He admits that it would be an impossible version of reality.
The idea of a martial artist is so random that we thought of another random question. We went with; do you
like pickles, Eugene?
He answers: “Sure, we invented that shit.”