Tom Wilson's online emporium of fun

Urban Renewal

It isn’t a part of the city that I recognise. This is real urban wasteland, huge open tracks of land punctuated by occasional still-lived-in houses and cavernous, deserted factories of some kind. “They’d make great ‘Yuppie’ flats I tell my friend, and we both start to imagine how different the city would look if the people with money could be persuaded to invest in the city centre instead of deserting it for the disastrous villas and multi-million dollar housing projects – half suburban America, half refugee camp – that have changed the face of northern Bucharest.

As we make our way round the back of the vast building with ‘ Romanian Academy ’ written on it, we can hear our designation tonight, but we can’t see it. The sound plays tricks with us, bouncing echoes off the huge empty buildings and making us think that the concert is taking place in buildings that it isn’t. Eventually we make our way there – to Piata George Cosbuc – where a huge stage has been erected in front of yet another spectacular deserted red-brick building. Opposite sits a ‘ piata de flori’, a few stall-owners still stood by their goods and trying to take advantage of the passing trade, for a crowd has already gathered in front of the stage.

We’re here to see the group Hot Chip, undoubtedly one of the most exciting bands at the moment. The concert is part of the ‘Va Urma’ project for urban regeneration, a noble cause indeed. A British Council, Headvertising and DC Communication joint project, ‘Va Urma’ hopes to begin by changing peoples perceptions of Rahova – hence the concert, and hence our discovery of this wonderful, forgotten part of the city. The audience is made up of a number of locals, and a crowd of gypsy kids gather at the front of the stage, swinging on the safely railings erected by the Gendarmerie. The idea of having a concert at this location was a stroke of genius, showing a real commitment to bringing music to those who are the last to be considered when it comes to culture in general – the socially excluded.

However, the kind of people who usually turn up to events organised, like this one, by the British Council – the infuriatingly fashionable kids wearing expensive trainers – are conspicuous by their absence. Surveying the assembled audience, I can tell the first name of literally every spectator here who knows who Hot Chip are, and by that I don’t mean to say that I’m a tremendously popular person: I mean that attendance is disastrously low.

After a disappointing performance by Timpuri Noi (a thousand times less engaging than their genuinely exciting Partizan incarnation), the boys from Hot Chip prepare to take to the stage. First, however, we have to endure having our intelligence insulted by our host ‘MC’ for the evening, who chastises the boys for ‘not arriving on stage promptly’. He evidently isn’t aware that Hot Chip still have a tonne of equipment to set up. Typical of a number of new bands at the moment, they’re not your average guitar group, and instead manage to perfectly straddle the indie-electro division in a way that would have seemed impossible a number of years ago. They use guitars, but don’t adhere to rock conventions. They use synthesisers, but don’t make typical ‘dance music’. “And they’re not very well known in their own country,” the MC shouts. Rather rude, I thought, given that the five-piece have toured Europe and the US , performing alongside big-name acts like LCD Soundsystem. The inexcusably patronising faux pas on his part continue until a thoroughly enraged girl next to me quite rightly yells “Da-te jos, bai, tsaranule!’*. He looked suitably embarrassed, and then thankfully shut up. I think he got the point.

*"Oi, get down, you peasant!" She also added an expletive, but I left it out of the printed article.

Hot Chip live were without exaggeration the best live act I’ve seen in the last five years. Their stage presence was extraordinary. Five boys who look like the kids who got beaten up at school for not liking football suddenly turned into ‘Price’ incarnate – dancing, swapping instruments, hitting cow-bells, dancing some more and demonstrating a inescapable, infectious passion for their music.

Thank god for the gypsy kids. They screamed after each song as if it were 50 Cent on stage, and not an indie-electro act that they’d never heard of, even crying out for more once the show was over. I spent the rest of the night dancing to the Hot Chip DJs along with a gang of around fifteen local kids, including a boy of no more than 11 who raised cheers from everybody present on account of his spectacular dance moves. I’ve not had so much fun in a long time.

Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the enthusiasm of these young fans, who shared the front row with us along with our food and drink, the gig could have been disastrous. Poor publicity meant that most people only found out about the event hours before, and almost everyone I spoke to received word-of-mouth promotion on the part of friends. It’s going to be a long time before we get an act so exciting, so genuinely ground-breaking, coming to Romania and the real tragedy is that so few people knew about it. If we’re serious about urban regeneration, something this city needs so badly, then we need to be sure to bring onboard as many people as possible.