Kralevi Termiti at Vintage Industrial in Zagreb on October 30 - the Rijeka punks who took on the militia and the school system

Rijeka punk veterans Kralevi Termiti play Zagreb's Vintage Industrial Bar on October 30, with guests, the Karlovac band Lorelej. The concert is billed as "Ljubljana-Rijeka-Zagreb 1976-2026" and starts at 8pm.

Termiti were the Rijeka punk outfit that defined the city's music scene in the late seventies and the first half of the eighties. Their first gig was at Rijeka's Modra club on October 23, 1978. The band broke up in 1982 and was reactivated in 1996. Plenty of people name them as one of the most important punk bands in Croatia and in Yugoslavia, and four decades on Dallas Records put out the vinyl "Vjeran pas", the first collection of everything they ever recorded.

Kralevi Termiti are the band's new incarnation, and the concert title covers fifty years, from 1976 to 2026. That is one of the things that makes the Balkan scene different from the Western one: bands here do not retire, they rename themselves and carry on. The question is whether the audience at a punk band's show fifty years later comes for the music or for confirmation that those years actually happened, and the answer is usually both.

Termiti were known for going after the church, the family, the militia and the school - which, in the context of the time, meant considerably more than a stylistic choice. Tickets via entrio.hr run up to 20 euros, roughly 1,232 denars. The same concert also plays Rijeka's Klub Palač on October 24.