Fire in the fingers

You too will succumb to the sounds of Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks - if your CD player doesn't go up in smoke first, writes Arminta Wallace.

Wild is the only word for it. As the fiddles swirl and swoop, the accordions add elaborate embroidered curlicues, underpinned by the weird, metallic, unmistakeably Balkan sound of the plucked stringed instrument known as the cembalom. And then - then - the pace heats up. Faster and faster, until you find yourself casting covert glances at the CD player to see if steam is billowing out anywhere.

If they can create a vibe like this on CD, what must a live gig by the Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks be like? Their Belgian manager, Michel Winter, thinks for a moment. It's a rhetorical question, but he answers it anyway. "People fall in love with them after the first song," he says.

Of course, he would say that. On the other hand, it's true. People do fall in love with Taraf de Haïdouks: including classical super-fiddlers the Kronos Quartet and the late Yehudi Menuhin, both of whom invited the band to play with them; Johnny Depp, with whom they appeared in the film The Man Who Couldn't Cry, and who is said to be fond of flying them to Hollywood to play at private parties; and the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, who swathed them in hi-tech black and had them walk the walk at Paris Fashion Week. Not bad for a wedding band, huh?

But as Winter explains from his office in Brussels, Taraf de Haïdouks are the real deal. "They are absolutely authentic, both as people and as musicians, and audiences know that immediately. On stage, they behave exactly as they do in real life - completely crazy. In fact we cannot really say that it is a band - it is 13 different people, each one with his own personality. There is no chief, no leader. That's why the music is so great. It's completely chaotic. Anarchic. But it works."

So why does a Romanian gypsy band have a Belgian manager? It's a long story, but Winter loves to tell it. Once upon a time, the story goes, he and his friend Stéphane Karo played in a band together. In 1989, Karo came across a recording of gypsy musicians from Clejani, a village in Romania, and was so entranced that - despite being almost impossible to get in or out of the country then under the thumb of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu - he decided to go and hear them for himself. When he got to Bucharest, the difficulties were only beginning. For a start, gypsies had been "disappeared"; according to official statements, they no longer existed in Romania. Into the bargain, in an effort to stop people from wandering around the countryside unsupervised, maps had been banned. Most serious of all, Romanians - especially Romanians who didn't officially exist - were forbidden to speak to foreigners.

Undeterred, Karo went from village to village asking for directions - and eventually arrived in Clejani, where some of the locals staged an impromptu concert for him. He realised he had discovered a hidden musical treasure, and returned to Belgium determined to spread the word. "At that time," Winter recalls, "I had a small café club in Brussels, and Stéphane said: 'Oh, we must do something with these people'. And I said: 'Yeah - but what?' " Six months later, Ceausescu was toppled and the borders opened.

"We took my car and arrived in Bucharest in early January," says Winter. "It was quite funny because all the international press were there, covering this huge media story about the revolution - and here we were, looking for gypsy musicians." In Clejani, they were welcomed with open arms. "It was a village of 3,000 people, 10 per cent of whom were gypsies, and almost all the gypsies were professional musicians. We were very impressed. We shot a documentary for Belgian TV and said we would try to do a tour.

But we did not know what to do - where to start. From 300 people with passports, we had to put together a band." Winter and Karo spent three months in Clejani doing just that, listening to whole families of gypsy musicians, pairing older musicians with younger ones. They named the group Taraf de Haïdouks: taraf being the traditional wedding band, haidouk a kind of Romanian Robin Hood, an outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor.

Some 13 years and four albums later, the band is busily acquiring legendary status of its own. Last year, they won a BBC Radio 3 World Music Award and played a series of five sell-out concerts at London's Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. Its most recent album, Band of Gypsies, was recorded live in Bucharest and features stunning performances, not just from Taraf de Haïdouks, but also from a trio of guests from neighbouring Balkan countries - Kocani Orkestar, a brass band from Macedonia, Bulgarian clarinettist Filip Simenov and Turkish percussionist Tarik Tuysuzoglu.

What, then, can the audience at Dublin's Vicar Street expect when Taraf de Haïdouks - accompanied by Simenov - roll in for the gig on May 16th? Having started life as a wedding band, the group's songs are new compositions based on traditional dance rhythms. "In Romania, people would recognise these rhythms at once and get up to dance right away," says Winter. "Taraf de Haïdouks begin with these dance rhythms - breu, silbu, whatever - and then they improvise and arrange, so that it ends up as a new melody."

Thus the delightful title A Stork Crosses The Danube In The Company Of A Raven (Barza nachlea a pai, arachlieape la Ciorai) is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the song's jazz influences; I'm A Gambling Man (Barbugiu) features a witty down-home bass line, and as for Absinth I Drink You, Absinth I Eat You, (Pelin bau, pelin maninc) with its glorious lopsided rhythm and otherworldly vocal . . . well. It's enough to make you long to attend a Romanian wedding, that's for sure.

"Ah," says Michael Winter. "But, you know, each generation is not asking for the same music. And in the last years, since Romania is open to MTV and to all kinds of musical cultures, it's changing very fast. In Romania now, bands like Taraf de Haïdouks do not exist any more. They are playing whatever - Turkish pop, Italian pop, American. And maybe from this something good will sort itself out one day. But for the moment . . ." He doesn't need to finish the sentence. Catch these guys while you can, is the gist of it.

Taraf de Haïdouks play at Vicar Street on Friday May 16th. Band of Gypsies is available on the Crammed Discs label.