Máté Palágyi: The Music of Bohemian Betyars Transcends Both Genre Boundaries and National Borders

Genre Discovery organized by HOTS takes place on February 14! The world music event will also feature Bohemian Betyars. On this occasion, we spoke with Palágyi Máté — the singer and violinist who also manages the band’s international affairs — about international success, concert organization, and the support they have received from HOTS. The band creates a genre cocktail blending world music, punk, and ska.

As a Hungarian band working within the world music genre, how are you received abroad, and what kind of international success have you experienced?

We’ve been received very well, despite the fact that our style is actually quite difficult to categorize. We exist on the borderlines between genres. For the clean, classic sound of traditional world music, we’re too “punk” because of our distorted guitars and hybrid style. But within punk and rock and roll, we stand out because of the violin. Our success in Spain is probably also due to the fact that almost every rock band there has a trumpet — a bit of world music gets mixed into nearly every genre.

Covid arrived at a terrible moment — just when we were starting to break through internationally — and the shutdown caused a major disruption in that process. But by now we’ve managed to catch up. Audiences abroad love both our musicality and the unique sound of Hungarian lyrics. Even so, we recently wrote a Spanish-language song specifically for our Spanish audience.

What have been the most defining and motivating international experiences and feedback so far?

For me, one such experience was collaborating with the highly respected Catalan stadium band La Pegatina from Spain. It felt great to see that their singer genuinely liked what we were doing. Later he even came to Budapest and performed with us at our birthday concert.

Another defining experience is connected to Japan, where we’ve already toured five times. During our third visit — which was a full tour — we met a man who attended several of our concerts. On one occasion he traveled two hundred kilometers just to see us live. He knew all of our lyrics by heart. Before one of the shows he came up to us and told us that our song Csavargó was his favorite and that he desperately wanted to hear it live. We told him we unfortunately couldn’t play it because we hadn’t brought the tambura used in the song. He became terribly disappointed, and when we saw that, we decided to perform it anyway without the tambura. The moment the song started, the guy began shouting the title at the top of his lungs and nearly cried with happiness.

As the band’s international manager and concert organizer, how do you build and maintain your international professional network, and how do you organize concerts abroad?
 

I work country by country. In every country, I try to find a local professional with whom we can collaborate long term. With their help, I organize our international concerts into tours that connect multiple countries. In places where we don’t yet have local contacts — Portugal is currently one example — I organize the shows myself. At the moment, we mainly work with concert organizers and a few agencies. The next step is to build an international label and PR network for ourselves.

How has HOTS been able to help you?

HOTS has already organized international performances for us and connected us with industry professionals. Overall, they’ve helped us build our international network by getting us into showcases — music conferences — and festivals.

Although Hungarian music, from folk and classical to jazz, is internationally respected and highly regarded, festivals and agencies are much more open toward a band if there’s an export office backing them, because they like building relationships with those organizations.

At the same time, HOTS also invites us to domestic world music workshops and events, which I’m extremely satisfied with. They bring in truly excellent professionals and provide both the space and the time needed for meaningful communication with them. For example, thanks to one of last year’s HOTS events, we met our manager, who works at the well-respected British agency Midnight Mango Agency, and who has since also found us an English promoter.

So essentially, thanks to HOTS, we built a British professional network out of nothing.

That’s also why I’m really looking forward to the February Genre Discovery event. I’m especially excited that I’ll have the opportunity to connect with international journalists and PR professionals — they’re exactly what the band needs right now. Alongside them, all we’re missing is a foreign record label. Once we have that, the holy trinity will be complete.

Cover photo: Gábor Bátori “sinco”

This article was originally published on kultura.hu.