As part of a sponsored content collaboration with the folks at Jagerhaus – the best festival-based house you’ve ever been in – we asked Jågerhaus headliners NZCA Lines to tell us about their strangest festival experience. Lead singer Michael Lovett responded with a tale of drama and intrigue set in the Slovakian wilderness. Enjoy.- - -A few years ago, around the time our first album came out, we were offered a few shows in Eastern Europe. That’s how we ended up making our live debut in Slovakia.The show was a festival appearance; the organiser had decided he wanted to honour his grandma by putting on a big musical event in her hometown, a place called Medzilaborce (population 6,616). The festival site itself, though, wasn’t in the town – it was on a playing field that had been commandeered in a village on the rural outskirts.We flew into the Slovakian capital, Košice, on a standard commercial jet, then changed into a little propeller plane for the next leg on to the festival. When we landed, we were picked up by this very friendly Medzilaborce local and soon found ourselves travelling towards the town through beautiful green countryside. Gradually, you saw fewer and fewer cars and more and more people travelling by horse and cart.I can’t remember what model the car was, but it was totally knackered, really battered. The driver didn’t speak any English whatsoever but we were getting on quite well, until about halfway there, when, in the middle of the Slovakian wilderness, the car just stopped and ground to a halt. We had no way of communicating so we were completely stuck. The two of us got out and pushed this old car for about 2 miles until he could get it jump-started again.When we eventually arrived it was eerily quiet. The festival site was planned for 3,000 people but only 200 or so actually turned up. We immediately felt like complete outsiders but at least it was easy to get served at the bar. The hotel they put us in felt like something out of The Shining – there was no one else in there.Weirdly, Medzilaborce is the town where Andy Warhol’s parents were from; they were Slovakian immigrants. There’s an Andy Warhol museum there. That was the main selling point of the whole place. It contains some art, but it’s mostly B-stock; prints, no original pieces. But what it did have was a lot of his personal belongings – a pair of gloves that he wore once, his birth certificate, old family photographs. As well as that – and this seemed very strange – they had clothes that were never actually owned by Warhol, they were just copies of outfits that the museum bosses thought he might have worn at some stage. We were the only people in the museum the whole time we were there.We went for a drink with one of the girls who works for the festival, a liaison girl, in the town – which is basically just one road, that is the town. When she left, she said, “I’ve gotta go but I don’t wanna leave you guys here,” because she was worried about our safety. It’s quite rural and I think she thought someone was going to beat us up.There were definitely a few times in Medzilaborce where I felt like I could get abducted. I got a feeling that it was a very small world. Our bass player at the time, his family heritage was Ghanaian, and he was basically like a celebrity while we were there, people were having their photo taken with him and stuff. Not because they were being aggressive at all – just because a lot of the people there weren’t used to seeing anyone who looked any different, ethnically, to themselves.Not many of the local villagers came to the actual festival. Not many horses, either. It was mainly people who’d come down from Kosice, the capital. But a group of local kids from the village gave us a bottle of what they said was traditional Slovakian alcohol. Its name transliterates as “Revenge of the Forest”, which probably tells you everything you need to know about its effects.I think the guy who organised the festival hoped it would galvanise the area, his grandma’s hometown, home to Slovakia’s only Andy Warhol museum; that people from the village would come along and end up getting excited about and interested in us and the type of music we were playing. Maybe even start bands of their own. Whenever we met anyone local, though, they were stupidly nice to us. And that’s why one day I’d like to go back to Medzilaborce. It was a fun, weird adventure.NCZA Lines will be playing at Field Day this Saturday to kick off The Jågerhaus 2016 Festival Tour. Come and grab an ice cold shot!
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