Kispál és a Borz, fre­quently referred to as just Kispál (pro­nounced kish­pal) were Hungary’s largest altern­at­ive rock band, foun­ded just before the fall of com­mun­ism in Hun­gary in the country’s fifth largest city, Pécs (pro­nounced paytch), which rep­res­ents a hot­bed of cul­tural and artistic activ­ity within Hun­gary. Their per­form­ance on Day –1 at Szi­get is per­haps even more hotly anti­cip­ated within Hun­gary than the rest of the fest­ival, not least because the band are split­ting up, and this is to be their final concert.

Over the course of the day, people have been flow­ing through the entrance to the fest­ival, and when we get to the main stage, the num­ber of people stand­ing around is stag­ger­ing — from a ten mil­lion pop­u­la­tion coun­try a huge num­ber of people have made the jour­ney to be here for Kispál’s final con­cert. There seem to be no iden­ti­fi­able char­ac­ter­ist­ics that the audi­ence share, they’re pretty much evenly dis­trib­uted across ages, genders, and dif­fer­ent types of people, a test­a­ment to Kispál’s music. The band’s front­man, András Lovasi, reminds me of an older, goofier, and slightly chub­bier Rivers Cuomo, and although my grasp of Hun­garian is nem jól, the audi­ence love his pat­ter, and the con­nec­tion between band and fans seems to be very strong.

The set itself las­ted an impress­ive three hours, ran­ging from ska/reggae all the way through to dark grungy rock. My Hun­garian friend assures me that the lyr­ics to the Kispál songs are the most import­ant part of their music, which is a shame, because it means a lot of the music went over my head. How­ever, the music that they played was excit­ing and enga­ging, and they played it like the old hands that they are. Unfor­tu­nately, today is the wrong day for them to be mak­ing new fans.