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When we were kids, we spent a lot of time on the rickety walls of the house of culture, and there were several reasons for that. On the one hand, it had to be somewhere, but the house of culture always brought the world to us. Not the country, but the world. Because sometimes people would come bringing with them the aroma of books, theaters and music.
On such a sleepy afternoon, the choral ensemble arrived. Los Fecos gave a concert that day, and although there was no boy in town who felt like a black lamb (Choral’s first album includes the song Black Lamb), the song that the boys brought was as if it were about us. It would have been for kids who grew up in the air of the country.
The Feco people came, loosely, in leather jackets, treated us as if we had known each other for a thousand years, and that was essentially the case.
We know everything that the newspapers wrote about them, they understood exactly what lies deep within our souls. All his songs were for us and we learned them all, we blew them from outside. And if we could, we went to all the important Fecó concerts as adults.
We even sat where we were half married, and even stood where we had to move onto the stage to look like a crowd. Because, in fact, many people told Feco that after Zorán he was perhaps the saddest Hungarian musician, and perhaps even sadder than him, but Fecó was never sad, as he told me in an interview years later:
he always loved when his songs were about something. And, of course, it is not a problem if the musical foundations are not dragged through the air.
Balázs Fecó was born on March 2, 1951 in Budapest. His mother died early, at the age of four, so the IX. district lived in a gang block house with his grandmother. His love of music is fueled by this age, because if anyone, it really was a backyard kid. During the weekend, many traveling musicians performed there at noon, playing popular hits with tango accordion and violin.
For Christmas, Fecó asked for a tango accordion, he began to put music on it, only after listening to it. He tried to copy the songs. Then, once the musicians didn’t come, he took their place and played for the house.
So he also learned the basics of playing the piano because the house was inhabited by a piano teacher who started teaching. This also marked the direction of his musical interest, as he became a classical musician, first at Bakáts tér music general and then at the Conservatory. But like everything back then, the Beatles had such an impact on him that his attention turned to light and serious music.
His musical foundations were also significantly influenced by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Deep Purple.
He always confessed that he found himself through rock, but his “chronicler and friend”, Attila Horváth, also played an important role in this. Balázs Fecó has been a member of the Neoton ensemble since 1967, then in 1972 he founded the first Hungarian hard rock band, Taurus XT, with Som Lajos. After two years working abroad, he played in the Zsuzsa Koncz accompanying orchestra, and in 1978 he founded the Choir.
The great advance of the Choir had to wait until 1981, although it was already clear that its musical and lyrical world was unique. His song, Sand in the Wind, sung at the Dance Song Festival also attracted the attention of the Soviet Union at the time, and in the song’s lyrics (Attila Horváth) several people tried to search for a crosstalk that was never there:
Don’t ask me to promise you what I don’t know, / I love you and I’m by your side. / But you know very well that the sun will come, / And there will be nothing to stop you, / Because nowhere have I been able to calm down yet, / If I were not free, I could not live.
Balázs Fecó’s solo career began in 1986, and since then he has proven himself in many fields, including film music (Providence, Laura, In the blind world, Spiders, Eight seasons). At the time of the regime change, he turned more and more inward, and Sitke began renovating a chapel, which was completed in five years with proceeds from the concerts he organized.
In his musical sonic world, he increasingly traces back to classical music, although his songs, even the most popular ones, always have some kind of anthem power.
Today’s modern world seemed too fast for him, but it was one of those that called everyone when they searched, responding to messages as quickly as possible. He often expressed that success used to work hard, nowadays, in the internet age, fan camps can be put together much faster, although it is much easier to lose them. Perhaps more annoying about the futility, more precisely, the possibility that assertiveness is available even in the absence of it.
The writer of these lines, one of the peasants, spoke to him for the last time about things in the world when the epidemic broke out. Fecó remembered the house of culture and how much he loved playing for us boys. In 2020, he organized a works concert tour in Hungary, but Covid-19 intervened.
Sitting at the table, he said that life sometimes produces strange things. Because here you are, for example, who as a child played football so excellently that when Ferencváros racked up successes at the Fair Cities Cup in the 1960s, he even lost his grass as a member of the Fradi cubs team before one of the games at home. In the fifth minute of the game, however, he fell on his hand and broke his wrist. He would have had a piano exam the next day. Then he had to decide whether to choose the piano or football.
(The news of the death was first published on the Facebook page by the Apostol band).
(Cover image: Balázs Fecó. Photo: Czimbal Gyula / MTI)
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