Gogol Bordello & Forro in the Dark @ Webster Hall in NYC (night 2) - pics

photos by Vincent Cornelli

Eugene Hutz on stage w/ Forro in the Dark

Rick Rubin, Madonna, world tours - it's a long way from Eugene arriving in New York City as a refugee with no money and very few contacts, apart from his kinfolk who had always made him part of a micro community in every town in the world he visited.

Just being in New York was enough after a tangled upbringing in the Ukraine and several years schlepping around East Europe as a refugee: "It would be pretty funny to imagine that a punk rock kid in the Ukraine would listen to folk music at that time. When you discover punk rock you go to the most far away thing possible. You get a musical wanderlust. I was listening to the Clash, Joy Division, Mano Negra, The Fall. It was right around glasnost. Music was cassette driven, word of mouth, hand to hand driven. It was so under the radar that if you would see somebody on the subway in Kiev who had a remotely funny kind of funky haircut you would walk up and start talking to them - 'Yeah man wanna go to my house and listen to the Sex Pistols?', 'Fuck yeah! Let's go!'. There were a couple of places where sub cultural kids would hang out. It was so tight in a city of 3 million - we would have a couple of hundred of us punks - then there would be a couple of thousand of kids who would specialise in beating us up! We were outnumbered by everybody." [The Quietus interview w/ Eugene Hutz, 11/09]