Obviously, they were horrible demos. Most of them were recorded in rehearsal spaces or the cheapest studios. The drums sounded like someone beating on a cardboard box, the guitars only squeaked, the bass was so overdriven that it almost blew the speakers. The songs ranged from no good to terrible. Nevertheless, I have never been happier than when I listened to all these tapes. They were pieces of a past that awaited further exploration. This put me on the path at the end of which I had to write this book. The story of the unknown bands of the city, bands that never released a single record.

He had a passion for collecting, and now this passion slowly grew into an obsession. He attempted to catalog the garage bands that were once active in the city, even if they hadn’t played a single show. He had taken notes on their members, potential concert venues, bar owners. He hunted for photocopied posters, searched for tapes online and at flea markets. By the time he met János Egér, he had gotten hold of hundreds of demos and had also filled up three notebooks with the names of since-disbanded groups and the contact information for their members. He was trying to draw a map of a time and place that he had co-existed with but never felt a part of. Now, retroactively, he tried to find a place in this past for himself. He wanted to belong. It was only live music that he cared about: metal bands, alternative rock groups, cover bands. He never made any notes on the local techno and house scene, wasn’t interested in the history of illegal rave parties. That was a part of the past he erased from his notes by way of omission.

The publishing offer from János Egér only fueled his obsession even more and focused it in such a way that his desires reached a flashpoint. Now he had to write the book.

The idea was to reach out to all the band members, the fans, the promoters and groupies (a big word for teenage girls hanging out with their boyfriends) and do interviews with them all.

In several ways Balázs’ thinking was disturbing. Judging from his friends’ recollections of his behavior, especially in the later phases, he treated the present as a tomb, as if real life existed only in the past and the present was just suspended animation, a trance-like state of drawn-out death. To him the ‘relevant form’ of the people he interviewed was ‘back then’. He looked at them as records of a sort, interesting only because they could talk about the past; in the present they were no more than ghosts wandering in search of their resting place.