Wolves and goosebumps – with the Bagossys, the song speaks on

Do you get on well together as brothers?

Norbert: “Very well would be a more precise formulation although Laci certainly remembers times when I didn’t let him play on the computer because as the older one, the keyboard was mine. In my defence, at 14 the two-year age gap appeared a lot but before or after this, we did virtually everything together.”

László: “We also started playing music together. I always looked up to Norbi and, with a slight delay, copied his hobbies. Roller-skating, too, in which he made it to the ‘escape from the backflip’ trick, and then quit while he was still ahead... Then we checked out dancing but even then he was not attracted to simple ballroom but rather break dance.”

When did music come into the picture?

Norbert: “I must have been around 15. To start off we tried to play familiar solos on acoustic guitar by ear. We were mainly influenced by English language music from the 2000s, from Linkin Park to Britney Spears.”

László:

“Then a friend showed us how to play chords and a new world opened up. We learnt eight or so a day from the internet, our fingers were all blistered but we felt we had to do it!

“We also went to a guitar class with philosophy teacher László György, where Bob Dylan, Bryan Adams and R.E.M. songs were played. This kind of musical upbringing defined our tastes”

What sort of kids were you?

Norbert: “As soon as we learnt to walk, we left home at sunrise and only returned home at sunset.”

László: “Whatever we started, we gave it 120%. At the beginning we were thinking of a band, we wanted to be international stars. With our own songs, calculatingly. When we got our first guitar from our mother and her sibling, Norbi also acquired a drum set. We installed them in the first floor apartment and to the delight of the neighbours we started rehearsing. We knew even then that I would be the bass guitarist, even though at the time we didn’t have a bass guitar.”

Norbert: “And even then we were writing our own songs at a time when we couldn’t play the music of other bands properly!”

László: “The first song Norbi wrote was titled Big Adventure. It was about life being a great journey.”

You have played together with Szilárd, the drummer, from the beginning, and the others in the band are locals, too.

László: “We thought that musical skills could be learnt so that ‘finding common ground’, that as people we should get on well, was more important. We thought that we would grow into everything else and this is how it worked out.”

Norbert:

“We chose friends to make music with, not musicians that we became friends with.

“This was important because we spent more time together than with our families, that is, we are ‘family’. We look after each other and back each other up.”

When you set out on a career, what ‘civil’ jobs did you have?

Norbert: “I taught dance, I made doors and windows, and both of us were storemen in a drinks depot. Our guitarist Ata is a real globetrotter, he has been a waiter on cruise ships and run a tourist office. Szilárd worked with Laci in a workshop making organ pipes. Zsombi, our accordionist, is the only one who has a paper saying he is a musician, and he still gives private lessons to students to this day. When we decided to invest even more energy into the band, I was the first to resign from my job on a now-or-never basis.”

You spent 18 month to two years in Transylvania picking up experience in music, let’s say.

Norbert: “We progressed gradually, living the real rock n’ roll life like you see in the films. The five of us travelled around in a packed estate car. We called up pubs and radio stations to see whether they would allow us to play or air our songs. Zsombi joined when we were looking for a keyboard player but his instrument wouldn’t fit in the car. ‘So then play violin’ we told him, but that resulted in audio feedback everywhere. This is how the accordion came about, which he learnt just for us, and it has now become the band’s trademark.”

Was moving to Hungary a big change?

Norbert: “We didn’t want to appear on the market without quality material so as part of the Cseh Tamás Programme we cut our first disc and arrived in Hungary with it, where we had to start everything all over again. It didn’t matter that we had played to 2000 people at home when here we had an audience of max. 50. True, we had more than 100 concerts under our belt by then. Virtually every week we drove the 750 km from Gyergyószentmiklós to Budapest in a way that the bass guitar lay like a table in the laps of the three people sitting in the back. The drums were packed into each other but as the car got bigger, so we carried more stuff around.”

What sort of reception did you get in the mother country as Transylvanians?

László: “We never did anything so as to be treated as Transylvanians.

“Obviously we bring musical things, things that are part of our system of values that we are proud to advocate, but we don’t want to make anything out of the fact that we come from beyond the border.

“It is particularly good that our first song didn’t get a great reception straight away, so a single hit didn’t place pressure on us.”

Where do you draw inspiration for Bagossy songs?

Norbert: “Generally I write the lyrics and melody by myself and if I consider it good enough I show Laci who puts together the scoring. Luckily we are on the same wavelength, he senses what the song needs and what else I conceived in it.”

László: “Obviously we draw inspiration from foreign productions because the British and American benchmark will always be the benchmark. Sometimes Norbi tells me to check out the solutions used in, for example, the latest number by Shawn Mendes and I understand what he is talking about, but our final result will still be completely different.

“Every song has its own little life. You can’t integrate something without making it specific.”

Norbert: “The Hungarian language itself is special. For example, prolongation of the vowels is not my thing therefore I pack more syllables into the lines than a foreign band. There is far more emotion in our songs than speculation, although we like experimenting and obviously our taste shifts as things go along.”

I suspect that after a while you had to relocate your base to Budapest, or at least in part.

Norbert: “We said about half a year, a year ago that it hadn’t even struck us that we were already living in Hungary. I reckon we will be dual residents for the rest of our lives.”

László: “At the beginning we didn’t think we could live in Budapest, after all we come from a small town and the contrast was huge. But now each corner here, too, has a memory or experience and this makes it feel like home. This is home here and that is home there as well.  When we go back home we value the silence, when we come back a whole ton of opportunities open up again. We are happy to come and happy to go.”

How are you treated in Szekler land?

Norbert:

“They are pleased about our success and in our case it is perhaps not true that you cannot be a prophet in your own land. We owe a debt of gratitude to those people there and the fact that we have only about 15% of our concerts there is how it worked out given the distribution of Hungarians.”

That said, you recently shot a clip in your homeland as part of the Road Movie project…

Norbert: “This is the first time we wrote a song to commission, I’m Coming Back, and the final result says a lot about us. Attila Árpa directed it. We show the country at home so that it is not in summer, nor winter like other videos, but in a part of the year when we receive a little warmth yet one can feel it is cold, too. As the lyrics put it: ‘winter is warm when heated from home’. It is possible to scratch one’s head about whether a man can become a wolf or not because we left the end of the clip open, giving space for the viewer and audience to think further.”

Where do you go to relax?

Norbert: “We were all brought up in the mountains, we are people close to nature, we can relax in nature as well. In Hungary, for example, close to the Balaton, or in Transylvania, of course. The point is to withdraw to an environment where we can hide a bit from the world.”

What has changed in you now that tens of thousands are following you?

László: “It places responsibility on our shoulders because it matters how we use the enormous attention that has been directed towards us.

“If you can communicate to twenty, thirty, forty thousand people, suddenly what you say carries weight.”

For instance, ecological awareness. Among your merchandise there are ‘green gifts’ and you will have a tree-planting scheme as well. How else would you like to influence people?

László: “Finally, environmentalism is a sensible fashion! We will never forget the musical evenings in our childhood which were followed by conversations frequently lasting late into the night. These stirred in us empathy towards the thoughts of others. We apparently talked philosophically about nothing but we still got closer to something through this. I believe that the songs are also like a conversation. You listen to them, they say something to you for two weeks, then you put them in your pocket and take them out later and they already say something different to you. These sorts of ‘conversations’ can bring about huge development emotionally. And this is not only relevant for our music but for music in general. If it makes you shiver, if you get goosebumps from just a part, that means the message has got home.”