As one of the most recognisable front-men in music, the vibrant Eugene Hutz has led his band Gogol Bordello since their creation way back in 1999. With several UK tour dates coming up shortly for the gypsy punks, Matt Tarr managed to grab a brief chat with Hutz to talk touring, ten year anniversaries, favourite tracks and more…
MT: You guys have some shows coming up in the UK on your tour. Can we expect anything special for the live shows?
Eugene: Fuck yeah! We always have special plans. I would call them a special remix of beholding the bedazzlement and bewilderment of it all. It’s just a natural state of affairs here. As you may have noticed, what we do is unpredictable and it’s not because that’s what we need to show you, that’s just the way it is. So the natural state of affairs here is quite rumbunctious and creative, so when I write a set list five minutes before we go on stage it’s just a mirror of the situation and the vibration that’s around at that moment. No further planning is allowed.
MT: So do you guys plan your set list five minutes before every single show?
Eugene: Absolutely! Each and every fucking time! You can’t go into battle with any kind of plan. As a martial artist you always learn that first thing. You have an arsenal of tactics and moves, in this case they’re musical moves, but it is only to be applied into a direct response of the situation when it’s happening. Therefore I’m not a big broadway fan!
MT: Do you feel there is a big difference performing in, say London, compared to other areas of the UK or do you just see the UK as one whole entity?
Eugene: Well I have a lot of friends in the UK and that alone sets the vibe for a certain homecoming feeling. I also spent a lot of time in London; I made a movie in London at one point. I actually have quite a long history with London before I even appeared on the radar as Gogol Bordello’s singer. I used to fly to London quite regularly for DJ gigs in Favella Chic and other places, bringing music that was basically baffling to people at that point. It is quite possible I was one of the first people to bring favella funk, reggaeton and other nasty booty music to London back when I was an expert on all of that jazz. So there are many pubs who will remember me dancing on their bars with an acoustic guitar after closing time. That was all before we played our first gig in London at the Tate Modern. The rest of the UK has its own character too; you can go to Bristol and go to a pub that’s been there for five hundred years or to Newcastle and discover that one of your favourite Russian writers, Zamyatin who wrote the dystopian novel ‘We‘, lived there.
MT: You guys are well known for touring and traveling all round the world every year. Have you got a preference between recording tracks in the studio for your albums and playing your music live on the tours?
Eugene: There’s no preference. I mean I really don’t differentiate one thing from the other. I feel they’re both equally enjoyable and important things. In the larger picture even the music and lifestyle itself is just a further expression of my understanding of life. The rest of the personalities in the band are very adventurous and we gravitate to each other. That’s what forms the core of Gogol Bordello, it’s a fireball of these adventurous personalities, not to be confused with reckless personalities. A lot of people can’t see the difference between recklessness and creativity and they’re completely different. We’re centred in what we’re doing.
MT: Talking of the other members in the group; as you’ve been through a few line up changes over the years, how have you managed to stay together as a team and still push out such great music?
Eugene: Well there’s a quite obvious group of core members, which is six of us and think about it this way, the existence of any band is like five years or six years and it’s granted that they will have one or two changes over that short period of time. If you left it for decades, more people would come and go and that’s normal because people go on to create a family and stay home and things happen in life. People who are lifers are lifers. We’re a lifer gang and even with all of that we have side projects and we encourage each others side projects and stuff like that.
MT: 2015 is the ten year anniversary of your Gypsy Punks album. Have you got anything special planned around that, a tour of the album perhaps?
Eugene: You’re hitting the nail on the head because there is a lot of talk about that and what to do about it. There are offers to do certain things, the Gypsy Punk tour and that sort of thing. That is a naturally occurring idea of course but at the same time I don’t feel complete in any way. I feel like I’m only scratching the surface, so with every album that comes up I think “that was pretty good, now it’s gonna start blossoming”. I feel like it’s constantly growing and evolving and I’m not big on nostalgia of any kind. I’ve received offers to write my autobiography and that’s the same thing. I just don’t wanna do it man, I mean what the fuck, what am I a soccer player where everything is done after thirty three? It’s not what I do you know. We’ll see what happens but I have my sights on things that are not archaic in any way.
MT: What would you say then, on a personal note, is your favourite Gogol Bordello song?
Eugene: Songs are like chameleons, they can really go up in your personal charts and fall out of them, so that is just nowhere near being possible to say. If NASA called me now and said “hey listen we’ve got a new Voyager out and it’s going up there, we need one song from you”, I’d say ‘Illumanation’. And that’s only the choice of today because tomorrow it might be different. Things are highly impermanent.
MT: My personal favourite track from you guys is ‘Avenue B’ from Gypsy Punks.
Eugene: I don’t even remember that song actually! I grew up listening to this band in Los Angeles called War, they were a great band. That band had so many fucking awesome albums. They had Latinos and black musicians together which was like a big no no back in LA, especially in those days because of the pure gang hatred between the two. This was a band merging it all. At one point I was in Japan playing the same festival as them and I ended up having a drink with the singer and he literally could not remember my favourite songs, not a riff of them! So things like that happen.
You can still grab tickets for some of the Gogol Bordello shows which hit the UK on 8th December 2014 here. Make sure you keep up to date with all the latest info and news from the band by following them on Twitter and Facebook too!
Matt Tarr
@MattTarrJourno
Matt Tarr
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