Wandering Stars

Eugene Hutz currently resides in Rio, but his spiritual home is on the road. Hundreds of years ago, Hutz would have been an itinerant musician, pitching up with his band of musicians with equal ease at campfires and palaces, because wherever he was, he’d have brought the party with him.
Today it’s different only in scale. Gogol Bordello are global stars, playing to thousands, but the essential quality is the same. New album Trans-Continental Hustle shows Hutz and Gogol Bordello firing on all cylinders, picking up influences from wherever they happen to be and in the way gypsy musicians have always done, infusing them with their own spirit and making them their own.
Produced by Rick Rubin, Trans-Continental Hustle marries Gogol’s inimitable incendiary gypsy-punk to the sounds and rhythms of Latin America. Tunes are infused with a mariachi vibe, heightening the impression that in this incarnation, the band have marched out of a spaghetti western to deliver their rebel songs. The best parts, though, are when Hutz’s desperado vocals are matched to the wild, virtuoso violin of Sergey Ryabtsev or Yuri Lemeshev’s atmospheric accordion.
The songs tell stories: some infused with plangent melancholia (When Universes Collide); or irrepressible lust for life (lead track Pala Tute). Hutz fits into the company of the Joe Strummers, Manu Chaos and Rachid Tahas of this world, voice fraught with conviction and with raggedy eloquence making personal music from global injustice as well as his own adventures.
He and Gogol may be firmly established in the rock‘n’roll hierarchy but, in contrast to many of the polite players on today’s scene, they make music for the underdogs of this world and the people who have no choice but to find themselves on the wrong side of the tracks. It may not be where a lot of people would want to live, but it’s where the best parties are: the places where living in the moment and giving yourself over to the music and dancing are a defiant, glorious act of resistance.

Circus Tricks (Part 3)

A far better alternative to sitting on the sofa snarfing chocolate eggs this Easter was being offered them – and quails’ eggs, and wine – in Leeds' deconsecrated Holy Trinity Church, as part of Urban Angels’ installation A Wing And A Prayer.
In preparation for the performance, the grimly splendid baroque church was littered with egg shells, copper coins and feathers. A magical glass ball on the altar showed aerialist Deborah Sanderson, ice-bound, skating in on ice in a costume of bleached linen that made her look part bird, part-sprite – but you had to wear 3-D glasses before her tiny figure came into focus.
The performance itself was mesmerising: spooked, strange and oddly gorgeous. Angela Carter would have approved of Sanderson’s rag-clad figure in its birds-nest hairdo and a frock-coat that trailed, like a bridal train or peacock’s feathers. Sanderson twisted herself round the pillars before progressing slowly through the church, tightrope-walking along the tops of pews. Then she handed her white boots to an entranced audience member and climbed up the lengths of white fabric attached to the hoop of her trapeze. There, suspended over the church without a safety net, she was an unlikely, astonishing spectacle, part-bird, part-angel, fearlessly turning herself this way and that with thrilling grace and strength.
You can only hope that such an otherworldly being sleeps in a nest made from rags and feathers. It was noted that when Sanderson re-appeared after her performance, she may have been in civilian clothes, but her vast, speckled feathery eyelashes were still in place.