Rock ‘n’ rollers and filmmakers have appropriated Romany chic for decades. Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards revelled in a flamboyantly earringed outlaw gypsy cool throughout the late 60s. Dylan’s ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’ dripped images of psychic knife-throwing tarot-dealing renegades. The Waterboys’ embarked on their raggle taggle adventures in the late 80s, just as the Gypsy Kings, the most notable successors to Belgian pioneer Django Reinhardt, established flamenco as a major force in the World Music pantheon, and Emir Kusturica’s ‘Time Of The Gypsies’ (whose soundtrack was recently pilfered for the Borat travesty) was acclaimed as an arthouse masterpiece. Johnny Depp played brooding gypsy performers onscreen in ‘Chocolat’ and ‘The Man Who Cried’ and flew Romania’s Taraf de Haidouks into Hollywood to play at the imprinting of his palms on Sunset Boulevard. The Roma people may have suffered genocide, persecution, poverty and social pariahdom over the past millennium, but the image of the honourable gypsy brigand has remained an enduring symbol of romantic bohemia, from DH Lawrence through Lorca’s ‘Gypsy Ballads’ to ‘Carmen’ and ‘The Barefoot Contessa’.

Until relatively recently though, the actual source music so integral to Roma culture has remained a minority interest to all but the most intrepid music devotees. Award-winning New Zealand journalist Garth Cartwright is one such pilgrim. Published in 2005 by Serpent’s Tail, his book ‘Princes Amongst Thieves’ was part Beat escapade, part musical travelogue, and provided vivid insight into the history and culture of the Balkan states, eloquently conveying the untamed spirit of the region’s brass and string ensembles, and featuring empathic interviews conducted with many of the leading exponents of the music. It was undoubtedly one of the finest music books of recent years, and a worthy successor to musical odysseys such as Robert Palmer’s ‘Deep Blues’, Stanley Booth’s ‘True Adventures Of the Rolling Stones’ and Alan Lomax’s ‘The Land Where Blues Began’. Indeed, ‘Princes Amongst Men’ proved such a cult item amongst musicans, documentarians and writers that it earned a much deserved paperback reprinting this month.

This reissue coincides with the increasing popularity of Gypsy sound system club nights and live shows by Balkan acts such as Fanfare Ciocarlia and the Kocani Orkestar, not to mention Balkan and klezmer-influenced acts like Albuquerque’s A Hawk And A Hacksaw. Just last month at Live Earth, Madonna – a zeitgeist magpie if ever there was one – invited Eugene and Sergey from Gogol Bordello, the mongrel Ukrainian/Russian/Israeli/Ethopian/American gypsy-punk outfit based in New York, onstage for a souped up ‘La Isla Bonita’.

“She’s been directing some film about them just around where I live in Peckham, and it’s going to be an absolute turkey I’m sure!” Cartwright chuckles. “Eugene (Hütz) and Madonna are similar in that they’ve got style over substance, all trousers and mouth. They’re both from the New York Soho arts scene, which is I’m sure what the connection is. She’s always looking for an angle; she’ll namedrop and forget it like she did with vogue-ing and everything else.”

Roma musicians, Cartwright says, are somewhat bemused about the newfound chic this centuries-old music has acquired.

“All this time they’ve been made to feel second class and they’re suddenly fashionable,” he says. “They’re kind of aware of it, but these people are not fashion conscious; they’re musicians who’ve trained from childhood to entertain people and do it well. In certain parts of Romania, if they’re not happy with your composition or you can’t play a certain song, you’ll get beaten up on the spot. The Balkans are wild. Before you go out there, you think Kusturica was making up all this stuff, but when you’re there you realise it’s this heightened realism.”

Cartwright’s crackling descriptions of the music (accompanied by an exhaustive discography, bilbiography and filmography) evoke the raw energy of regional musical dialects the world over, from the Tuareg players of Mali, the deep dub of Trenchtown, the flying horsehair of after-hours Connemara bars, or the jazz devilry of New Orleans in the late 1800s. In fact, some of the most tantalising passages in the book speculate about the influence of Roma brass ensembles on Big Easy big bands.

“It’s odd, American-gypsy culture is really under-researched,” Cartwright says. “Definitely the Eastern European Jewish musicans played in jazz bands, and there definitely were Roma communities in Louisiana – all those Willie Dixon songs like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and ‘Gypsy Woman’ talking about fortune telling and stuff. And I know there was a Roma presence in Chicago, so there is a connection there. I’m sure the gypsies would have adapted in the same way as the African-Americans did. Jelly Roll Morton always made a big deal about the degrees of colour in New Orleans, and obviously the gypsies weren’t white, they could have been part of the Creole thing. So it’s out there, it’s a secret history.” It’s also social music, by turns joyous, funky, melancholic and unruly. The raw power of indigenous Roma sounds (as opposed to the technoed up turbo-folk variation) exposes the homogenised, digitalised, Pro-Tooled nature of most radio-friendly modern rock for the joke it is. Exponents of MOR-indie, squeaky clean emo and commercial hip-hop have forsaken the dark stuff of love and death for the dollar dangled by the leisure industries. The majority of western musicians are willing to pimp their songs as jingles, ringtones, ad-soundtracks and fad gadget-bait; the medium has become the message, the focus no longer the music itself but the technology it’s played on. i-Tunes sells music as the in-flight earphones soundtrack to your own solipsistic film, and the upshot is, where once there was convenience food, there is now convenience music. By contrast, the rowdy Balkan combos documented in ‘Princes Amongst Men’ make their money from weddings, christenings, funerals and bacchanals.

“Like Ireland was, I suppose it’s very much a community thing,” Cartwright says. “It’s hard work learning to play an instrument well, the struggle to master your instrument. But you’re right, there is this thing of your i-Pod allowing you to choose the soundtrack to your environment. I’d rather hear what’s going on around me: people making noise on the street, a sound system playing Jamaican tunes or a brass band or whatever. These days in the west it’s like designer clothes, it’s just part of our consumption and doesn’t seem to have any greater meaning, which is why it’s so connected with celebrity culture, especially in the UK. (Legendary cartoonist and blues/folk aficionado) Robert Crumb says what has happened to music in the west is a cultural crime on a par with the rainforest. It’s like an epidemic. Think of the regional music culture of the US – a lot of it’s gone now. But certainly in the Balkans, music is about communication and celebration. It’s so powerful, the soul of human culture.”

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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

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© 2008 Laura Hird All rights reserved.