Heaven or Las Vegas - Gogol Bordello Interview

Having brought Gypsy culture in from the cold and wowed crowds from here to there and back again with their remarkable live show Gogol Bordello’s Tommy Gobena speaks to HOLV.

HOLV: Where are you right now?

TG: In Newcastle.

HOLV: How’s the tour going?

TG: Just got off a big US tour, and that went well, we feel like athletes, the more we do the better we are. It’s like training. By staying busy we get better at what we do. It’s like sharpening up tools. Everything’s getter bigger, crowds are doubling in size.

HOLV: Will we be seeing you at any festivals this summer, Glastonbury again maybe?

TG: Off the top of my head I don’t know about Glastonbury, but we’ll definitely be doing festivals in the UK and Europe this summer. Last year was a beautiful moment. To see all of those faces was a beautiful thing, apart from all of the rain, but we had a lot of fun.

HOLV: Let’s talk about your last album, Super Taranta, what does that name mean to you?

TG: Well, in the old times Taranta was a dance designed to cure a woman of hysteria. And we felt that fits our vibe, this album is a way to cure people of their crazyness.

HOLV: And how do you go about writing a Gogol Bordello album?

TG: Eugene writes all of the songs then we all play around with them. Each member brings something to the song. And we work on it, song by song. We all have such different influences.

HOLV: Are you still recording entirely analogue?

TG: Not entirely analogue now, protocols as well. We like to record live and normally that has meant needing to record analogue, but now the gap in quality between analogue and digital is bearable. Digital is very nearly as good. But we like to use both, whatever makes it easiest.

HOLV: Anything new underway?

TG: We’re preparing for a new album right now. We have all our instruments and our energy with us, and a mobile studio. So even on tour we are crafting things. Eugene has written many songs, and we’re working on about 30 of them now. They’re taking shape, everyday we work on them. And we’re even playing 1 or 2 live at the mo.

HOLV: What’s the next step for you and your cultural revolution? Are you finalising it all?

TG: I wouldn’t say “finalising”, it will go on until we die. It’s never going to be over. That’s not how it is. We travel all of the time and we are very inspired by the things we see all over the world. Eugene in particular has been very inspired by his time in South America, so who knows there could be some Latin influences on the next record. It keeps it interesting for us to keep adding new things. It will never be finished.

HOLV: How much do Eugene’s film roles, or connections with the fashion industry play a part?

TG: We, Gogol Bordello, are just about the music. Everything else is nice, it helps us, but we are about the band. At the moment we are just counting our blessings.

HOLV: How have things changed since you guys started out?

TG: I feel a lot of changes, we reach more and more people. It’s easy to see, when the crowds are getting bigger, the tours are longer. Eugene writes great lyrics. They’re funny, sometimes political, but mainly social. And it’s understandable that some people might not get it straight away. They might not have an understanding of things in Eastern Europe, of Gypsy culture. But we are trying to show people what we’re about, and bring them into the family.

HOLV: Do you manage to keep in touch with the people who were with you at the start?

TG: Yeah, we see the same faces at gigs. All the people from back in the day come up and speak to us about how they were there at this or that show from years back. So it’s the same people we’ve always had, just now there’s a whole lot more of them. All ages, I have seen everything at our gigs.

HOLV: Thanks for your time.

TG: No problem.