Moby Dick concert at Barba Negra Music Club – November 4th, 7pm
THE BAND: With its name equally inspired by Herman Melville’s masterpiece and the eponymous Led Zeppelin song, Moby Dick first breached the Hungarian thrash-metal scene in 1980, but it wasn’t until the early ’90s that the band could release its first album (coinciding with Hungary’s regime change of 1989, not coincidentally). Founded in Sopron, western Hungary, by second cousins Tamás Schmiedl and Norbert Mentes – who still form the group’s steel backbone with their pounding-paced guitar work – Moby Dick had such a headbanger’s ball while touring clubs and appearing at festivals throughout their grunge-era heyday that the band decided to break up in 1998 out of pure exhaustion. However, with the heavy-metal resurgence a few years later, Moby Dick resurfaced to make a splash again in 2002, and have continued rocking Magyar concertgoers ever since.
THE VENUE: Appropriately tucked within an industrial zone, south Buda’s Barba Negra Music Club is one of the city’s biggest venues for live music, usually of the hard-rocking variety. Here many living-legend Hungarian bands perform shows proving that rock ’n’ roll will never die – though this is also a nightspot where almost-famous groups can have breakthrough gigs. Barba Negra Music Club closes temporarily during warmer months, when the venue’s sister club Barba Negra Track is a popular open-air mini-festival spanning late spring through early fall.
THE SHOW: Anyone who attends this concert should prepare their eardrums for a workout: along with Moby Dick, Kalapács – another longtime Hungarian heavy-metal group fronted by black-leather aficionado József Kalapács – takes the stage to send rock fans into Magyar-metal mania, while warm-up acts get things going at 7pm. For more details, check out the Barba Negra Music Club website.
