Following is a brief report of the November 2008 tour, that two Polish bands – Antidotum and czosnEk did mainly in Central Europe, having a chance to visit / play some places of a vast importance for European d.i.y. punk network.

Instead of boring you with „who smelled worst” stories, I'm gonna try to flash some light on the scenes not so often mentioned in US zines. Enjoy!

The idea of the tour had occured during my visits to punk festivals in Croatia and Slovenia during the summer of 2008. Namely – Monte Paradiso festival that has been taking place for 16 years now in Pula, ancient Roman city on Croatian coast, and Balkanika Core – the new idea of people connected to a squated swimming pool in Kranj, Slovenia. First of the events was a chance to see great performances of La Fraction, Pisschrist and Sotatila among other bands this year. The second one resulted in a clash between punx from more than 10 European countries and united forces of riot cops and security, I encourage everybody interested in details to read the story on their website (xxxxxxxxx). As a consequence, the last day of the event had to move to nearby capital city Ljubljana, to the ex-military complex of Yugoslavian army on Metelkova street, where alternative culture of all sorts had found its space in early 90s and which remains a vital place for different forms of activity till this day. As a result of meeting friends from different countries, the outline for the tour had been created, with 4 dates in ex-Yugoslavia, and perspectives of more shows in Austria and Italy. As the last Antidotum album was coreleased by NNNW – a Polish label I've been one of the runners for almost 20 years now, and German Skuld Releases, we asked some friends in Germany for help, and were quickly offered 4-5 shows. Everything looked brilliant, we had enough time to work on details. Almost the only result of writing tens of e-mails, posting myspace messages and similar efforts of some friends abroad, was... cancelling all German shows but one (in the famous Kopi squat in Berlin). As we've played in Vienna in October, and other places in Austria either showed no interest or were already booked, we decided for a Swiss date we have been offered (in Zurich) and then – got a message that Italian shows won't happen at all... We were close to cancelling the whole trip, but as Berlin gig's date was moved back one day we found a place to play in Poland on the way home and decided to go.

The fact is that all of the gigs have been booked by pesonal contacts, and none by fancy e-mail / myspace / „easier communication tools”. And from my experience I would admit that it was way easier to book a tour for 2 unknown bands from Poland in early 1990s using snail post taking 2 weeks to get to the addressed location (as it was too expensive to make phone calls for us those days, and fax machines were hard to find in this country), than to use all the possible power of „diy punk networking” for 2 bands going on for over 10 years each, maybe not especially „popular”, but recognizable, I think. I understand there are tens or hundreds of punk bands touring at any point, but that's no excuse to the fact that 3 out of each 4 people don't find time to write back one line message „sorry I can't help you” or even simple „fuck off”. Looks like the digital network is mainly a network of self-promotion, the real life still has its faces, smells, and a will to help fortunatelly.

A week before the tour we were told by our (czosnEk) singer that he's not able to go with us due to some kind of psychiatric treatment... That wasn't the first time his condition led to us going 3 piece with the guitarist trying to do all vocals, we could do nothing but support him with his case – but never before it was more than 3 concerts. Time was so short we couldn't even rehearse – and we had somewhat of 9 new tracks never screamed by our guitarist on his own... On top of that 2 days before a take-off a work-mate of our guitarist got sick and he wasn't able to leave his job before 4PM, and our first concert was to take place in Bratislava, Slovakia – mere 5-6 hours drive on East European quality roads – where we were told to show up by... 6PM, as Wednesday is not the best day for late gigs. After brief exchange of e-mails with Martina, who booked this show, we decided to take a risk and try to make it in as short time as possible. The risk was we would just arrive to have a decent vegan food and a place to crash, but what else could we do? We arrived to „Obluda” club (situated not far from the train station if you ever visit the capital of Slovakia) at 9PM, greeted Martina (who used to be Naive Fighters' singer if you had a chance to hear their record on Maloka / Malarie) and her recently married husband, met a small crew from Vienna (which is just 60km away) and some locals (sorry to another 20 people who gave up waiting and went home), and rushed on stage. Just to play a shitty gig (that goes for czosnEk) – like all the stress of previous days had to accumulate at this point. Hope Antidotum performance made coming there worthwile to those present. As both our hosts were to wake up early for their jobs, we've had just a short chat, watched pictures of their wedding party in the same club (where they made some famous Czech and Slovak diy punk scenesters wear suits and ties) and heard some nasty stories about nazis presence in the city. The club itself had been attacked in the past and is quite well fortified now. They have even had to set some cameras outside to be warned in time if those morons show up ever again.

The next morning we woke up so early that all the vegie shops in the city were closed, we drove Martina close to her university and went shopping in some supermarket. Slovakia and Czech remain a place where East European vegetarians / vegans have always had access to the cheapest and biggest selection of food. To our surprise this shop carried only expensive stock, so we lost our chance to get stuffed with smoked tofu for the next few days. We had a relatively short way to go to Zagreb (Croatia), so we decided to go through Hungary, not to pay highway tools and to drive 100 km less...

This is a place to bring some facts – big part of Europe is now „fortified” as European Union. Most of the countries have signed Schengen agreement, which means there are no checkpoints on the borders (but you may be checked by customs or police in any place in the country, which is nothing new, but in some areas it happens a lot – sometimes with really nasty effects for touring bands). Croatia is one of the countries that's not accepted to EU, and one of the reasons is their „disability” to get some mass murderers (called „war heroes”, as other deadly army generals in the past – that was so shocking to see ourselves that we've even done a song about that) in front of the international court. And Slovenia is the only ex-Yugoslavian country that's in EU and they have even made euro their official currency. For us it meant possible problems on Croatian border – and we had to cross it... 4 times. The other thing was that going through Hungary we had no money (as they still have their own forints). And we ended up driving through those tiny roads, the distance was not so long, but it took us 7 hours.

When we left Poland we were surprised how warm and sunny it is. And we were all pretty excited that we were going south – imagining even more sun. November is usually a rainy, shitty cold and depressive month in Poland – in my area that means also ice and snow, but that was none of the case. As soon as we entered Balkans, where we expected the weather to be even more friendly - it started to rain. We found a space – Medika squat in the center of Zagreb just to be told they've just had electrocity cut out. The space is enormous – it's a huge complex of buildings that used to be a pharmacological company (hence the name). We've seen only a small part of it. It's situated 5 minutes walk from the main train station, just next to some university buildings and yuppie filled cafes (as we were to discover the next morning). The place was squatted some months ago, and evicted the day after the forementioned riots with police in Slovenia (the eviction was part of cleaning the city by police due to George W. Bush visit in Zagreb). Then, it was squatted again and keeps going slowly, however you could see that's quite a new space – with lots of things to be fixed, just basic functionality at the moment. The electrocity was connected again, we've had some cold food and prepared for a show. It went quite OK, but there wasn't really an „atmosphere” there, if you know what I mean. Nothing to complain about really, but being a huge fan of Croatian d.i.y. punk scene, that I got to know a bit travelling there for almost a decade now, I somehow expected more. Still, meeting some friends was great, but seeing the scene getting more and more divided is a bit painfull. You know that, I witnessed the same process in Poland, I doubt the kind of unity in saying „fuck off” to society's values, to the commercial market, to bloody Croatian nationalism that I experienced visiting Croatian events will be ever back again. Just before the show started there was even a small fight between some poeple living there, that somehow went back as a topic of conversations over the night, so maybe that was the destructive agent. Anyway – contact Fistra of AK47 (RIP) / DHP distro if you want to see for yourself, let's keep our fingers crossed that they menage to keep the place

In the morning our guitarist and wanna-be singer lost his voice... Cool. He was unable to produce a single word. As the weather was doing all its tricks to keep us depressed, and there was not a chance to boil water, we had to find a space for what we've seen as morning tea / coffee (beer in Antidotum drummer case), but somehow it turned out to be a lunch time in yuppie schedule. If it wasn't raining it would be even funny, when we entered one cafe after another and in most of them there was no place to stand, not to mention a table.

This day's drive was even shorter, but we had to cross the border again so we decided to say goodbye to this wet city (as we had no chance to say it to any of the living creatures) and leave. The border passed with no trouble – the day before we were warned by Croatian customs that we're going to have problems entering EU with that whole equipment. They suggested us preparing a special kind of customs declaration called „ATA carnet”, which sometimes happens to the bands, but basically is sort of a hassle, and a waste of time and money. When we showed them some rusty piece of drumset hardware, they laughed and let us go. We didn't have to show them our broken cimbals... Slovenian customs are one of the least friendly creatures but sometimes it's useful to smile to them and just tell them what they want to hear.

After mere 3 hours we arrived to Kranj – a small city 20km away from Ljubljana, capital city of this small country (since joining EU more people have left Poland to work in old EU countries than Slovenian population encounters). There's a small island not far from the city centre with a shopping centre on one side, and an old swimming pool on the other. AKD Izbruh is the name of the squatted pool – nobody lives there, but they organise a lot of events during the year, all the „big names” (Discharge, Extreme Noise Terror, Total Chaos) and a lot of smaller concerts. We've played there with Klinika a couple years ago and were excited to be there again. It started to rain (again) and we arrived 3 hours early (!!!) so we went for a short walk through the „old town”, met some crazy local punx („yeah, we want to fight the cops tonight!”), had some rakija (grape distilled spirit, almost 70%) with neighbouring junkie crew and finally shook hands with Darci – whom we owe gratitude for making this show possible. I had met him through his Bum Records and as a guitarist of Aktivna Propaganda – the icon of political hard core punk in this country.

Maciek, our voiceless singer has menaged to articulate a few words during the day, so he decided to try doing another show. Crazy as it sounds, but fighting fire with fire worked on him. A little bit of walnut liquor from Vesna, a couple of crazy jokes from friends who showed up, and he made it through the set somehow. The only „novelty” being that they made me talk between the songs, as he could produce just growls and no single sentence (PA check was to be quite funny from this day on). Finally there was some local band (K.A.O.S.) playing as well, angry and raging as a young band should be. The party continued for some time but all of a sudden we were left alone (again!) in this huge building with power generator turned off, barricaded from inside (and having to pee outside). Morning coffee was a chance to talk about consequences of the summer riots at the festival. But surprisingly, apart from not being served in one of the places, nothing major happened luckily. They haven't even been fined, nor a court case had been risen – which is quite unusual, as we've witnessed the real over the top reaction from the cops back then. Well, good for them. Enough that they are in trouble caused by Slovenian copyright agency that asked for some ridiculous amount of money for past concerts. Don't be surprised when you come there one day, and even if the place is a squat you may have to sign some papers (which are in fact a polite way to say „fuck off” to the copyright agents).

Saturday and another short trip to Pula, another border. This time we are laughed at for our „GPS” beeing a 17-year-old European road atlas in a miserable state. A few years ago, while touring with Klinika, our van had been smashed by a truck on a way to some crazy d.i.y. punk festival in the valley in French mountains (xxxnazwaxxx). Several injuries and total destruction of the van was our fate. When we came to collect our belongings from the van, we've picked quite a few pages of this atlas from the side of the road. All in all, some pages are missing, but it still serves us well – what could those hopeless uniformed wankers know about life...

„Monte Paradiso” is the name of the place, years ago situated in a castle, and then moved to another location - in post-army buildings. It hosts yearly festival I've mentioned before, but serves also as a space for numerous activities – from rehearsal rooms, through linux workshops, to social and ecological NGOs. We've played there twice already, once in a club, and on one of the festivals, The punk crew has been organising „Antifa Fest” for last 5 years. It started as an answer to a violence of Croatian nazis (they stabbed 2 people with knifes), and offers a chance to meet, take part in workshops, discussions, see movies and finally – enjoy the bands and party...

It lasts 2 days, both in Zagreb and Kranj we've heard about people going to Pula (and missing our show) – and we were happy to discover that was the case. The place was full, people friendly, rain being the only destructive agent again. I haven't managed to see all the bands as I was busy with the stall, but I liked Dislike crazy grinders. That night was a high point of the last few days. Seeing a whole crew of people working together on that event, others taking part in the program, not just consuming the entertainment – and apart from meeting friends who seem to be there for ever, seeing a whole lot of new faces (including Zagreb Antifa crew) – that really makes that whole punk (as it is to us at least) a big thing. I don't know if a threat really, but for sure – something that matters. We had such a good time that we were the last three people to be kicked out when they finally decided to lock the club door in the morning. Be warned! We will be back one day!

The next „morning” (meaning 4PM) we went to the seaside... Adriatic was warmer than Polish Baltic Sea in the summer, but it was a bit too cold outside to swim... Enjoyed the sun for a while and we went to see Disfear in Slovenia. We've had a day off, somehow hoped to be able to be added to the bill on that gig, but it didn't work. We were invited to a post-festival party by the Pula crew, but decided to go to Nova Gorica for that show. I regret in a way – I'd rather listen to great Disfear albums from time to time, than see the band that had only 2 things to say – whether the next song is from the new or the previous album, and cheesy „Slovenia, you are great!”. I've never been a metalhead, I'm never gonna understand this sort of attitude from the band. But the set was great, the sound superb, just after the previous night spent in an asylum from harsh reality, we din't really feel well in that place. We were invited by local squatters to spend a night there – no water, no electrocity – who cares.

Monday gig was to take place in Ilirska Bistrica. We've had plenty of time so we decided to go to the seaside again, spent relaxing afternoon in surprisingly empty Koper, and went to a village called Kozina to get some fresh beer. Slovenia has got only 5 or 6 brands of beer in the whole country, and they're not heavily missed whenever you leave the country, if you know what I mean. But they have this small brewery / restaurant that doesn't sell its beer anywhere else. You can't get it in the shops, only fresh from the tap or in 2 litre bottles at their location. As that's not pasterised, we were eager to load some B12 vitamine into our veins. The waiter told us he used to go to hard core gigs when he was „young” (and he wasn't older than most of us), praised Nomeansno and Victims Family and we were off to another gig. MKNZ club is famous for live recordings – we've released live tapes / records by Aus Rotten, Harum Scarum, there was famous Doom 7”, the final show of first Tragedy Euro-tour took place at that club (that's the one when they play a lot of covers in the end) and I heard people download it from the web en masse. This club has been running for over 40 years and shamefully I have never been there before. We came early (again!), had food, made a soundcheck, set up the stall, felt great and waited for the people. And waited... and waited... and waited... We played the show for the club crew + 2 people. That's the biggest regret of the tour for sure. They told us the same thing happened to some other bands in the past months, but as the feeling was gone, the sets were not the premium quality, to put it in a modest way – as a punishment we got the recording afterwards. Simon, who took the risk of inviting us, told us that they're likely to move to another location (as the bulding is in a miserable state), but to keep this unique spirit they plan to move every single piece of wood to the new place, somebody is even going to repeat the same graffiti on the walls. All in all – that's another highly recommended place to visit. They've started to do a festival in August and I think I'm not gonna miss it. We've had a small accident that night – we broke the key of the place while locking it (sleeping room is upstairs) and made poor Simon sleep even shorter as he had to leave to Ljubljana early morning. And we were to go to Zurich. The show was to take place next day, so we decided to go during the day, as we had to go around Alps – we decided to go through Germany making the distance longer, but avoiding almost all hign passes (we were close to exploding the cooler passing from Slovenia to Austria), Italian road tolls and most of all – Italian customs. There is a law in Italy that every CD / record in this country has to have a copyright sticker – and they happen to stop the bands on the road and confiscate the distro, We were in no way interested in trying to get them back through the court. Although Mila of Agipunk claims you need to have really bad luck to experience that, unfortunatelly there are the bands who did.

We were scared of Swiss border – apart from looking for drugs, and fining for the distro, they are also likely to make you buy the Swiss highway sticker, which is quite expensive (as it's for a whole year). So on our „GPS” that wasn't missing the pages on Swiss / Austrian / German border (what a mess!) we found some small checkpoint where we could tell them we go to the town in 5km and we were not going to use the highway. We came there and there was nobody! Switzerland joins Schengen in 2009 (even if they're not in EU) but that empty border was the first sweet surprise in this country. In 2 minutes we were on a highway (we were adviced to simply avoid petrol stations on the highway, being the only place apart from the border where cops check the stickers) and made it to Zurich pretty quick. For all the past visits in Switzerland this strategy worked well, we had a sticker only once, while crossing the whole country – even then we tried to skip it, but the officers on the border were alert.

Kalki squat (Kalkbreitsrasse) should be a synonym for „hospitality”. We arrived a day (well, night in fact) before the gig, were greeted by Vale, whom I met before when he booked Klinika in the same place. That was a silent Tuesday night, no events in the squat that night, we brought some wine with us, just sat in the bar, chatted with Vale and some locals, played table football, went to sleep. Zurich seems to be a city where a lot of activities take place, the list of squats was enormous, I was especially moved when Vale complained that only „about 20” people are active in this squat (finding it hard to recollect an example of more that 5-10 people working together back in my hometown Poland, in fact in both my „hometowns”). The squat is not just the bar / concert place, there's also a cinema, screen printing and computer rooms, an info shop. The idea I enjoyed a lot was the „Squat gourmet” thing. There was a whole lot of past posters on the kitchen wall – it's a weekly squat kitchen, hosted by the active squats one by one (and the dates and places were on the posters). I've no idea what's (or if there's) the connection, but the food we had before the concert was the mastership in all its five courses! Yum...

Before the food we went for a short walk through cold Zurich, made it to another relatively new squatted place (enormously huge, with tens of people working there on transforming the place). However rich, and full of banks that city is, that's not a common view for us, Poles, to see a clean river in the centre of a big city. Or the highway running high over the columns standing in the river (meaning they didn't have to demolish whole quarters of the city to build it). We weren't surprised to see a crew of Polish punx there making a „soli bar” with the booze „set free” from one of the supermarkets. You could see the cultural difference in a way they behaved, still being obvious to have come from the „East”.

The late concert went great (we started playing well after midnight, when most other concerts had finished earlier), following party with weird music (no, luckily not mostly disco) went crazy, first time we were happy to have a day off the next day... Got up early, or exactly speaking – early afternoon to leave to Berlin. We went through some small border checkpoint again, where we surprised a German officer a lot. He glazed at our worn out tires as he had never seen anything similar before. Too shocked to ask questions he checked all the passports in the computer and let us go! We've been advised by German punx to avoid stopping on the highway parking places in rich, southern part of Germany, as the cops there love to start conversation with alcohol and drug tests. We weren't hassled (yet we stopped only whenever necessary) and the trip was luckily boring, long and cold. The distance would take a whole day in Poland, but on German highways we were quick enough to arrive at 2 AM. We were happy to fall asleep at Sabrina's flat.

Berlin, or its Kreuzberg district seems another planet. Before the fall of Berlin Wall it used to be an alternative and relatively cheap district, next to the Wall itself. Then, all of a sudden, when the Wall fell down, it found itself almost in the centre of one of the biggest European cities. The gentrification process that had started in 90s was backed up by city policy to get rid of all the freaks from the centres. That doesn't work as fast as they'd like it to, but you can see the changes. Punk clubs, punk houses neighbour concrete and steel towers. SO36 – a club that remembers 70s punk shows is still there, as is Kopi squat, despite facing serious eviction threats during past years. Most of bands toring and people travelling through punk Europe know that place. I've met some people active in that place when they used to organise punk shows in East Berlin under „communist” rule. The crew is quite international with a huge Polish section, so that's all time place for hugs and greetings... As we arrived way too early to the venue, we went for a walk through the neighbourhood. I was amazed to see that children books are bilingual – in German and... Turkish (that's another huge population in Berlin; some years ago after Germany lost a football match to Turkey in Berlin there were street riots all over the city). Far from a traditional media created Polish view on „racist” Germans. The neighbourhood is really special, it amazing to see straight looking citizens in a minority on the streets. Well, I do idealise at this point. I'm aware that German cops got even nastier these days. A while ago they started to check so mamy buses with Polish registration plates, that some reports said that's every second vehicle and there were calls for Polish governemt to take legal action – which they never did of course. Not even a month later, a friend was stopped on a highway, checked, and the cops were seriously examining CDs from the car stereo if they contain any „terrorist propaganda” - that included searching through their databases, radio calls etc. I've witnessed such sheer stupidity only in 1980s when Polish police got written instructions how to interpret circled A's, studded belts, and how to tell a punk from a skinhead (by their shoelacess colour of course). Living in such reality, places like Kopi remain asylums, where we charge our batteries for the upcoming days of harsh existence. We soaked into the atmosphere and the concert itself was a blast for us, I hope people enjoyed it as well. We played together with Ukrainian psychobilly combo Hellfire Sox, which seemed to us like they were from yet another universe, but that says a lot about openess of Kopi crew. And the audience got wild during their set of course. The night didn't want to end, minimalist break dance shows were over the top, somehow we ened up in the same friendly flat...

In the morning (which means around the time I finish work on some days) after the greatest breakfast of the trip we forced ourselves to get into the van and go to play the last concert of the tour – in a small Polish village. That was an almost last minute deal, and we were happy Goska was brave enough to make it happen. Another set of excellent food, meeting with our singer (better late then never) and we were ready for a culture shock. The audience were some punk crew from a city nearby and locals. Imagine Saturday night event in a village. People wearing suits and ties. Testosteron fights. Broken glass. Crying drunk teenage barbies. And finally – a hole in some tough guy's head. We had it all. Survived, packed the equipment and went home...

*

There were better and worse days, sometimes we argued about bullshit, but all in all it worked. No big names, no big deals, and we didn't lose money on the trip! We met some old friends and met new ones – I think that matters a lot to people in both bands, as I was the only one who knew Antidotum crew before, and now they contact each other and we plan to tour together again in April 2009. We've visited some places that create an alternative not just to the mainstream showbiz, but to the society as we know it. There are obvious proofs that there are meaningful things in life, that a rat race is not the only way and the financial crisis doesn't have to be a topic of every conversation. It's true we came back and went back to our jobs, but for us touring with a punk band is not a 10-day-vacation. It seemed the time spent at work is the one off the reality. And getting used to it has been a painful process.

In December 2008 czosnEk started to record new stuff – 9 songs in 17 minutes... Antidotum prepares to record their next album – they hope to be in studio this year. Meanwhile – see both bands live, meet Antidotum crew when visiting Elba squat in Warsaw, get in touch through NNNW website with both bands.