The Hungarian Punk Scene
The origins of the Hungarian punk movement go back to the early Eighties, when a handful of bands like ETA, QSS, CPG and Aurora emerged as angry young men playing fast and raw punk rock music with anti-Communist lyrics. It's a kind of controversy that while British bands like the Clash where flirting with a Communist ideology, their Hungarian counterparts living in a country crippled by such a totalitarian regime had the only choice to revolt against it. But the change of systems arrived in 1989 and it brought a new situation. Now the punk bands, such as veterans Aurora and newcomers PICSA revolted against the Americanisation of the country, against the new system that retained bad things from the previous one, but lacked that good things that people expected - organized crime appeared right away, but the standard of living haven't risen much in the past decade. It resulted in a hatred against the new system as well, so now we had PICSA, a punk band who declared itself anarcho-communist. ("Picsa" means "cunt" in Hungarian.)
Aurora, who are the oldest Hungarian punk band with their fifteen years of history, come from the Northwest Hungarian town of Gyor and their originally U.K. Subs-type music has been recently updated with a NOFX-like flavour by using a trumpet in some of their ska-influenced tunes. Going down to the Southwest, we can find the town of Pecs, which has troublemakers PICSA, who became infamous a few years ago, when they wrote a song entitled 'Hang Istvan Csurka'. Csurka is an extreme right wing politician, the Hungarian Seselj if you like, who is now an MP, unfortunately. To cut a long story short, PICSA (a.ka. HetkoznaPI CSAlodasok meaning Everyday Disillusionments) became the second most well-known punk act due to the media coverage they got.
Hungary's third major punk act is Prosectura, a fun-punk four-piece who sound a bit like the Dead Milkmen. Similarly to PICSA, they are also going on for about ten years now. Their hometown is Szekszard, which also has to offer another punk band similar to Prosectura: Furgerokalabak. Out of the newer bands, two Northeast Hungarian bands are the most known, both playing California punk: Alvin es a mokusok come from Nyiregyhaza, while Macskanadrag are from Salgotarjan.
All these bands have lyrics in Hungarian, the only local band with English lyrics is Bankrupt, which happens to be my band. Bankrupt follows the traditions of classic punk bands like the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers or the Ramones, and all these get mixed with the 90s indie guitar sound. To find out more about the Hungarian Punk scene check out the Hungarian Punk Page at
http://surf.to/hungpunk
or directly at
http://www.angelfire.com/ok/HungPunk/index.html
This was created by me as an effort to get the local scene closer to the world-wide punk community and to help local bands and other people to establish contacts abroad. We have some decent venues and any bands who want to play here are welcome to contact me, I'll get them through to the right people.
Rufus Rockstar
rockstar42@hotmail.com
bsarkadi@mail.matav.hu