Music Previews
Tragic Roundabout, Komedia, Brighton, August 15
Wednesday 13th August 2008
“When we first got together there were 15 of us,” says Tragic Roundabout clarinettist Pat Popov. “We went over to a busking competition in Ireland, near Cork. That was where it started from.
“We got put on a traffic roundabout right on the outskirts of the city, because we’d been billed as, if I recall correctly, 15 harmonicas and a banjo. They thought we were going to make a racket, so they put us by a main road on the edge of town.
“We thought b***** that and got ourselves disqualified by leaving the pitch and going up into town busking in all the pubs. We ended up making more than the prize money was anyway. It was a bit anarchic in those days. It still can be, actually.”
Tragic Roundabout had found their name, but were to undergo numerous personnel changes before settling on their current line-up of “five musicians and a drummer”. In addition to Popov’s clarinet, the band now consists of banjo, accordion, drums, bass, guitar and occasional brass parts. They play raucous gypsy punk of the kind made famous by Gogol Bordello, although Tragic Roundabout predate Eugene H¸tz’s group.
“We’ve been together for close to 20 years in different guises. It started off as a really rough, loose busking collective,” Popov explains. “We were just doing what the hell we wanted to really. We’d turn up at festivals without tickets and play on the gate until they let us in, that sort of thing.
“In the 1990s it gelled together as the outfit it is today. It’s sort of an Eastern European punky flavour with a bit of klezmer in there.”
The band’s debut release, Here Comes The Lino Man, came out in 1994 and they hope to record their sixth album in the near future. They’ve taken their uplifting, freewheeling live show across Europe many times and remain festival mainstays, having already appeared at Glastonbury and Hawkwind’s Hawkfest this year.
Popov is looking forward to seeing tonight’s co-headliners, Gadjo, play live for the first time. Their concerts have the same flamboyant energy of street entertainment and employ a dizzyingly broad array of instrumentation, including double bass, melodica and tuba.
The Barcelona-based group’s lyrics are written in French, Spanish and English and touch upon such unorthodox subjects as infatuated accordions, gold teeth and illegal living. The title of their most recent album, Para Yayas Y Gamberros, translates as “for grannies and hooligans”.
“They do a similar sort of thing,” says Popov. “Balkan rhythms and a gypsy vibe.”
