The boat shimmers in the distance, neon reflections over the Danube on an eerily balmy October evening. I always feel a thrill when I get off the tram at Petőfi Híd, Budai hídfő- the name itself has become synonymous with intimations of happiness, hours of respite from the madness of our world, swaying on the…
Category: concert review
A Case of Scandi Happy Sad:Peter Bjorn and John @ A38
For a Saturday night with a fairly well known act, the crowd was somewhat scarce, which plunged me into an analytical mood over my beer. It may be the price of the ticket, which was above the boat’s general average for a band that has not been very much in the limelight lately. The tour…
When I Grow Up I Want To Be Neneh Cherry
In an anecdote I sometimes tell my younger friends to amuse them, a considerable part of my late childhood and early teens were spent in front of our TV set, in a sort of limbo. I would turn on MTV and wait for songs I liked. The songs that came in between were marginally interesting…
Best of 2018- Concerts
It’s probably high time I stopped introducing the best concert round up with complaints as to how every big band always avoids Budapest vs remarks as to how some bands actually don’t and the year wasn’t so bad after all, and I promise to do just that. Next year. As for this one, let’s tick…
Play It Like a Woman- Anna Calvi @ A38
When I was a kid, I used to play football with the boys, and, in all fairness, some girls too. We were all perhaps too young to get the implications, we just played. For manifold reasons in my case. Principally because I sucked at all the things girls were supposed to be good at, like…
Pleasures of the Over-familiar: Goran Bregović Wedding and Funeral Band @ Arad Open Air Festival
When you are a regular concert goer of a certain age, you reach a point where some gigs attain an almost mythical status which manifests itself in your retelling them in the Homeric tradition to anyone who cares to listen, with details varying slightly from account to account to the degree that you yourself, and…
In Wine There is Truth, in A38 There is Music: Best Concerts of Sziget 2018 Part Two
#5 La Femme As a part of my Summer of the Ignoramus project (the season is interchangeable, the ignoramus remains) I arrived at the La Femme gig knowing principally that they were French. As in did not just have a French name because it was cool, in the way all high street store T-shirts have…
A Matter of Energy: Best Concerts of Sziget 2018 Part One
This is somewhat of a novelty list for me: for the first time ever, I have managed to keep it down to an actual ten acts, and not go for some esoteric number like 12 or 17. I haven’t landed one of my favourite bands at number one, a crime to which I plead guilty…
And on the Last Day Cometh the Monkeys and the Flood- Sziget 2018 Day Seven
It’s been a strange and somewhat unwelcome Sziget tradition, but the rain insists to come on the last day of the festival and insists to do so in the manner rain generally prefers in summer time, in the form of the mother of all storms. As with any form of extreme weather, even such a…
The Fangirl Awakens: Sziget 2018 Days Five and Six
Day five started early with the yearly pilgrimage to the VOLT stage, this time at 3 PM, which in szigetian translates into bloody morning, to catch Black Bartók– previously it’d be for Hangmás, of which Black Bartók is basically a second coming, with a slightly modified line-up. The scheduling obviously meant a scarce crowd idling…
Pocket Diary Budapest 