Only an extreme cynic would have failed to be cheered by the sights and sounds at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on November 5. Opening the 13th annual World Forum for Democracy, New York’s self-styled “gypsy punks”, Gogol Bordello, got suited and staid delegates incongruously dancing in the aisles of the austerely modernist council chamber.
“The entire audience was very seated and restrained for the first 20 seconds,” frontman Eugene Hütz said. “It’s something I thought I would never see in such a compartmentalised environment, where people are ready to dance on these pretty tables.” With just guitar, accordion, violin and drum, Gogol Bordello had created a completely infectious sense of abandon in the unlikeliest place. “It’s what we do – our main export is high-energy music that amplifies people’s wellbeing.”
The band are indeed notorious for their live shows characterised by inexhaustible energy and a carnival atmosphere. Nearly 20 years ago, I saw them at the late, lamented London Astoria in only their eighth-ever UK show, and it was a true gig of a lifetime, culminating in Hütz, a moustachioed beanpole of a man, doing his trademark move of crowd surfing on a bass drum.
But the similarly euphoric moment at the Palais de l’Europe was against a backdrop of existential seriousness. The theme for the 2025 Congress was “Democracy at risk”, and the band took part in a panel discussion on the role of music in championing democracy, human rights, and artistic freedom. It’s a topic they have a bona fide stake in.
Hütz was born in Boyarka, a small town near Kyiv, to a Ukrainian-Lithuanian father and half-Servitka Roma mother. The year he turned 14 was a pivotal one. He got, or rather made, his first guitar. Then, when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl just 65 miles away melted down, the family had to flee, travelling through Europe as refugees before settling in the US.
In New York, Hütz found both punk energy and a cultural melting pot, forming Gogol Bordello from immigrant musicians in the city (hence referring to themselves not as a band but as “a trans-global art syndicate family”), and playing the music of his mother’s people.
Hütz’s activism for Ukraine since the Russian invasion has been both unrelenting and ferocious. Just two weeks after the invasion, Gogol Bordello released Teroborona, a hymn of praise to the territorial defence forces. With shout-outs to units in towns across Ukraine, its video used footage of the country’s ordinary citizens donning camo and mobilising, weapons in hand.
While the music industry’s usual suspects have made bland calls for peace, Teroborona, based on the traditional Arkan circle dance of the western Ukrainian Hutsul people, was a brutal war cry – a call to unhesitatingly meet force with force.
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When the band put on a benefit gig in New York on just day 15 of the conflict featuring no less a figure of local musical royalty than Patti Smith, the proceeds went to the Come Back Alive Foundation, which directly arms the defence forces of Ukraine. It has supplied more than 43,000 drones and thousands of mortars, grenade launchers, and machine guns to date.
The fundraising never stopped. Hütz’s cover of the Pogues’ anti-colonial If I Should Fall from Grace with God (“This land was always ours/ Was the proud land of our fathers/ It belongs to us and them/ Not to any of the others”) for the US-Ukraine Foundation was swiftly followed by surely the most irreverent charity single of all time, Zelensky: The Man With the Iron Balls.
This collaboration between Hütz and Les Claypool of legendary experimental rockers Primus was inspired by the moment that the Ukrainian president turned down the US’s offer of evacuation from Kyiv, saying “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Hütz and Claypool lugubriously sing in chorus: “When the big bear comes a-prowling/ Seeking more than his share/ Will you protect all you cherish/ Or come out with your hands in the air?”
More benefit gigs and singles followed, including 2023’s United Strike Back, featuring a line-up of hardcore punk legends and raising money for prosthetics for amputee veterans.
The band have been accused by some of exploiting Romani culture, and there have been similar criticisms around their approach to the crisis in Ukraine. But their impact has been real, and goes far beyond matters of money. Live performance is their raison d’être and every one of their over 200 gigs since the invasion has been an act of defiance against the diminution of humanity that Putin’s regime represents – a levelling and cathartic experience that Hütz calls “joycore”, and a manifestation of their “neo-optimistic communal movement”.
As they toured Europe this Autumn, culminating in a run of UK dates last month, the band proved once again that they have a live energy that has an almost alchemic power. This is a large part of the reason why Hütz has become, rather by accident, Ukraine’s greatest ambassador after Zelensky himself.
Having ceaselessly tried to keep Ukraine in the international consciousness over the past nearly four years, Hütz’s message is more important than ever. “Now’s the time to be focussed,” Hütz said on Wednesday, “because the people’s attention is broken and divided,” adding “Insanity is not a psychological term. It’s a political term.”
While insanity has become a daily norm in Ukraine (on the very day of the Congress – day 1,350 of the war – there was a massive Russian drone attack on Odesa), we are yet to fully understand it here in the UK. But as the RAF deployed at the weekend to help defend Belgian airspace from suspected Russian drone incursions, the realities Hütz has fought to highlight are knocking at our door. His life-affirming defiance is an urgent lesson.
Sophia Deboick is a music journalist and writer
