Hańba! / Poland

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The group comprises four musicians with considerable experience in folk, punk, indie-rock and even electronic groups. Together they decided to form a band as a musical provocation, and also a kind of time machine, carrying listeners back to interwar Poland.

They hide behind pseudonyms. Their clothes, style and lyrical subject matter all refer to the 1930s.

Hańba! were among the finalists at the Tuwim Competition, organised by the House of Literature in Łódź, and last year’s New Tradition festival, when they won the Czesław Niemen special prize. The band, using the traditional instruments of strolling groups, play energetic, simple punk, inspired by Polish folklore and by contemporary achievements. The band members use the works of interwar poets (Tuwim, Brzechwa, Broniewski) and also write their own lyrics.

They write of themselves: “From 1926 our Poland was to be healed and repaired. In the political sphere there was supposed to be order, and in the social sphere a new, dignified life. It’s been seven years, and still the honest working man can hardly afford a loaf of bread, even worse if his dependents are a hungry family. The law is violated, the constitution ridiculed. Infrastructure developments and technologies are used to cover up problems of the average Joe – Poland is slowly starting to resemble fascist Italy.

In 1931, several musicians decided to set up a joint Rebellious Orchestra, whose music openly rebukes the rape of democracy and comforts the victims of said rape. Whose music is a shrieking criticism of the faulty system, which points a finger at its absurdities and, above all things – raise a fist in the face of the Sanacja.”

Members:
Andrzej Zamenoff - banjo, vocals
Wiesław Król - accordion
Ignacy Woland - tuba, vocals
Adam Sobolewski - drum, comb, vocals

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The concert took place in 2015.