‘Brigitta’s death upset him a great deal. If Balázs had any friend in high school, it was Brigitta. She told him a lot of stories about the shows she had seen, the parties she had been to. I was at those parties too, that’s why I married her and he didn’t. But now, all these years later, he wanted to live through those times in retrospect. Especially the concerts. But he knew it wasn’t possible anymore. The city is not the same.’ (Shouldn’t we mention the UFO story here? – the Editor.)

Finally, János Egér, partly out of curiosity, partly to satisfy his friend’s desires, offered to publish his book through his publishing house. Balázs wanted to write about the city’s underground music scene. He had already amassed a considerable amount of background research by then.

Why and how? We can find the answer in Balázs Peterfy’s half-finished introduction to his own book:

I found the first box at a local Sunday flea market. The one right next to the cemetery, by the — housing complex. It was a cold day, the coldest of the year by far. My fingers were red and completely frozen as I searched through the selection. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Skimming through flea markets became a habit of mine. Finally I found what I had been searching for, even if I didn’t know I was searching for it. It was a black shoebox, Nike, size 11. It was full of cassette tapes; all made of white, red, and blue molded plastic. Some had labels handwritten in blue or red ink marking the content; others didn’t. I greedily bought up the entire selection. I also bought a cassette player and a Walkman.

Much of the collection was worthless; tape copies of LPs, everything from Iron Maiden to Tiamat to Ossian. But a small portion consisted of demos, mainly from the ’90s and early 2000s: amateur or semi-professional recordings of local bands, which no one had ever really listened to aside from a couple of high school students, the proud parents, and maybe the sweaty critics of rock magazines. These were the bands that played at high school parties, nameless pubs, the clubs that were always popping up as something new and exciting and then quickly rebranded into cheap watering holes. All of these places, all of this music, all of these people, had since been eradicated by time. None of them existed anymore, or not in the relevant form. The walls of the buildings remained the same, but not the inhabitants.