The Honor of the Decorator
Ah, the age-old tale of how we all just “stumbled” into our careers, right? You know, like that time you accidentally walked into a Starbucks and, boom! You’re a barista. Kati Kovács has quite the story, too. An established singer, she claims—like so many before her—that singing wasn’t her first choice; instead, she just wanted to drive fast cars or act in an Oscar-winning drama, but life, like a clumsy waiter at a cafe, just didn’t give her the respect she thought she deserved.
“I would start by saying that I didn’t want to be a singer. The waiter in the cafe had no respect for us.”
Well, Kati, if only the waiter had known you’d become a national treasure, perhaps he’d have put down the coffee pot and given you a standing ovation instead!
She spent her youth performing in talent shows—much like a young contestant on “American Idol,” minus the glittering lights and Simon Cowell’s brutal honesty. Back then, in her small-town milieu, being a singer had about as much honor as being part of a mime troupe at a children’s party. Suddenly, she was less a diva and more a delicate flower. Yet, Kati kept returning to her first love, singing, even while working as a medical scribe. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she wasn’t so much a “medical scribe” as she was a “why-on-earth-did-I-not-just-focus-on-singing” scribe.
“At that time, I was already a serious medical scribe who, when necessary, not only wrote prescriptions, but also measured blood pressure and gave injections.”
Imagine the panic on her patients’ faces: “Oh no, I’ve got an appointment with the doctor! Oh wait, is that Kati Kovács singing in the background? Never mind, let’s take our chances!”
Life at the Peak of the Charts
Fast forward to her chart-topping days. Kati’s life at the forefront of Hungarian music was no fairy tale—think more like a spaghetti western, minus the horses and with a lot of emotional cowboys.
“Maybe I never lived really well until I was twenty!”
While her peers were busy dressing in sequins and chugging champagne, she was grinding away, balancing the harshness of her upbringing with the dizzying highs of sudden fame. Imagine Kati at the top of the industry sweating bullets, thinking, “Is this what they meant by ‘the grind’?”
“What is life like at the top of the charts? I would put it in one word: tiring.”
And yet, amidst the relentless pressure and the lack of traditional employment benefits—no maternity leave, no sick pay—Kati Kovács somehow managed to present herself as one of us. She was the working-class hero with rock star dreams!
Yelling is Not Easy Either!
Ah, let’s talk about her vocal style for a moment. Kati dove into rock and roll with the gusto of a swimmer jumping into a freezing lake. Initially, her powerful, husky voice and dynamic performances were met with skepticism, leading one judge to chastise her. They referred to it as “yelling,” but look where that shouting got her!
“When, at the urging of my school, I first started in the Ki mit tud? competition, the jury advised against going on, saying that it was screaming, yelling, and not singing.”
Who knew yelling could be so cathartic? Not only did she redefine what it meant to be a female singer, she also took the term “belting” to new heights, bulging veins and all. Now that’s a performance!
The Self-Identified Woman
Filmmakers caught wind of Kati’s charisma, and just like that, she found herself stepping into the realm of movie-making—where she soon decided that acting was just a hobby. “Singing’s where the action is, darling!” she must have thought. While her film roles earned her rave reviews, singing remained her forte.
“I wanted to sing, because filming was just a game for me.”
And let’s be honest; the real star of the show was her singing career—a career that glittered like the best sequins money can buy.
Italian Syrup and American Confection
In the midst of the male-dominated rock scene, women like Kati and her contemporaries flourished. The competition was fierce, and yes, their rivalries could rival that of a high school prom court. But Kati remained versatile, singing everything from emotional Italian ballads to upbeat pop tunes. Critics might have rolled their eyes at her “tingli-tangli” hits, but GASP! She still drew a fanbase thicker than the plot of an average soap opera!
One must wonder, though: did she ever sit back, coffee in hand, and think, “Well, I could’ve been an international star if only I had defected?” But then would she have made Kati Kovács the mecca of music in Hungary? Probably not!
The Final Note
In her six-decade career, Kati Kovács has stormed the charts and stolen our hearts, winning awards and recognition along the way—more than enough for a grand trophy room! Yet behind her smile lies the story of hard work and dedication. And in the end, when she belts out a tune, no one can hear those salty almonds being munched on in the bar. Now that’s the real magic!
“The majority drank, talked, courted, and munched on salted almonds, as is customary. That pissed me off! I don’t like being overheard.”
Today, she commands the stage like royalty, proving that Kati Kovács isn’t just a name; it’s a legacy. So here’s to her—may her music always echo through the ages, honouring the road less travelled and the decorator of dreams.
The honor of the decorator
It is a very common topos that established actors (singers, directors, etc.) reveal that they never really wanted to be actors (singers, directors) and that blind chance led them to this field. Kati Kovács is no exception, just as in the fact that although he didn’t plan to sing full-time, he did a lot at a young age to end up in this field: he practiced regularly, participated in talent shows, sang with an amateur band, but he didn’t hide that in the small-town milieu from which she came, in the sixties there was no honor in being a singer. There were no independent, independent female performers who could assert themselves not only as a soloist in a band (they only appeared with Kati Kovács’ generation), and as she herself once stated:
I would start by saying that I didn’t want to be a singer. The waiter in the cafe had no respect for us.
As a child, she wanted to be a driver or an actress, and after graduating from high school, she started working as a medical scribe and planned to go to medical school. Meanwhile, however, he kept returning to singing, after the first, which ended in disappointment Who knows what?-after his performance, his mother re-introduced him to the show, where he went despite his profession:
At that time, I was already a serious medical scribe who, when necessary, not only wrote prescriptions, but also measured blood pressure and gave injections. I loved to sing, but don’t think I wanted to be a singer. I tried to offer myself at the Eger Hotel, I even added that I would perform for free, but I didn’t have to.
Of course, he won the new Ki mit tud?, and a year later, in 1966, the first Dance Song Festival I will not be your toydel, and from then on no one could seriously think that Kati Kovács was not a real singer.
Life at the top of the charts
The first stage of Kati Kovács’ life is accompanied by struggle, whether it is the difficult childhood or the early years of her singing career. Due to the divorce of his parents, his mother is raising him and his two brothers alone, which entails a lot of deprivation:
Maybe I never lived really well until I was twenty!
he once told Pesti Műsor.
However, don’t let anyone think that life was suddenly easy for a budding Hungarian singer in the 1960s after her successes:
Since he’s not an amateur, he doesn’t have half an hour, he hasn’t gotten used to the chase, the constant strain. Tired, nervous, unsmiling. He wants to stand still
– Esti Hírlap wrote about him, while in another contemporary interview he himself highlighted the difficulties of his career:
What is life like at the top of the charts? I would put it in one word: tiring. And behind the attractive glamor from afar – no matter how surprising – there are also everyday problems. That the singer doesn’t have SZTK, if she gets sick – she doesn’t get sick money from anywhere, if she gives birth to a child – she doesn’t get maternity benefits. If you request an OTP – you do not have an employer. And since there is no eight-hour working day in this field, he has even less free time than others.
Later on, you hear less of this from Kati Kovács, perhaps she also learned that from the outside, despite everything, hers still seems to be an enviable situation, but it is certain that it played a role in her popularity, that people could feel that she was one of them, who later tried to be a successful singer as well stay approachable.
Main photo / Fortepan Kati Kovács sings at the Dance Song Festival organized in the Erkel Theater.
Yelling is not easy either
Although she later distanced herself from the genre, in the case of Kati Kovács, the fact that she played rock and roll, which was still considered new in our country, also plays a central role. Little Richardot she sang, but her performance was greatly influenced by one of the genre’s first female stars, Wanda Jackson too. This raw, husky, instinctual singing was completely new and understandably not to everyone’s liking at the time:
When, at the urging of my school, I first started the Ki mit tude? competition, then the jury advised against going on, saying that it was screaming, yelling, and not singing. I thought it might be yelling, but how difficult
– he told later. It is a fact that until then Hungarian female singers sang in a more restrained, innocent humming voice, so of course Kati Kovács, “screaming” with bulging veins on her neck, caused a stir when she first sang the I will not be your toyet, which was perfect for him to show what he can do.
Compared to the style of the time, it looked unusual and had a modern effect. His orchestration is great and his melodic lead is so negro. It was possible to put emotion into his interpretation and to sing recalling a complete destiny
he declared almost a decade later.
In vain did he scandalize the older generation (Peter Veresthe politician and writer from the peasant party also went after the “screaming girl” in a note), she quickly conquered the younger ones, and then she didn’t even stop there to Janis Joplin or Tina Turner be a worthy domestic interpreter. It quickly became clear that Kati Kovács has a good sense for other styles, and by the end of the sixties she was undoubtedly one of the most popular female singers. And although he sang songs in a rockier style later on, his really popular songs came from traditional, often Italian hits.
The self-identified woman
Not long after Katira Kovács made her debut as a singer, filmmakers also took notice. In a short period of time, he played in six films, several of which were straight leading roles, and although the films received a mixed reception, his talent as a film actor was praised even by the strictest critics.
However, there was no continuation, mainly because Kovács himself did not really like filming: “I wanted to sing, because filming was just a game for me,” he said about this. Because of this, her career as an actress has also been pushed into the background, she is only remembered as a kind of footnote, even though Kati Kovács’ film acting period is much more important than a footnote, she believes András Beckwho recently appeared in Filmworld praised him his formations. In this, he emphasizes that, on the one hand, he played in major films by major creators (Miklós Jancsó, Márta Mészáros, Péter Bacsó), on the other hand, argues that these films show Kati Kovács at her best, who was also at her peak as a singer at the time.
The writing is primarily Márta Mészáros Gone day (1968) because, according to Beck, “this is the richest and most complete incarnation of Kati Kovács on the screen”. According to this, the most respected film critics of the time, who were all middle-aged men, and who praised Kati Kovács’ performance in such a way that the film completely passed them by, have a major role in the fact that the film has not been given the place it deserves in Hungarian film history to this day:
And what is even more striking: while they measure the film’s theme and depth, their attention is completely ignored by its strong female theme. The fact that the main character of the first Hungarian feature film directed by a woman is a characterful, thinking woman – not a type, but someone who stands out from the crowd – who is sensitively observant and determined to find herself. Anyone who wants to live an independent, self-tailored life in the present – that’s why he tries to put an end to his past. Whose decisiveness, hardness and angularity do not cover emotional emptiness, nor mere sense of purpose, but also the defensive reflex of a wounded and vulnerable person.
Arcanum Newspapers / Filmvilág Filmvilág, 2021 (Volume 64, Issue 1-12)2021-02-01 / Issue 2 Scene from the film.
Kati Kovács plays Erzsébet Szőnyi, the textile factory worker, in such a way that the latter is completely tailored to Kovács’ individuality: “My Erzsébet Szőnyi is the type like Kati – who remains herself in all circumstances,” says Márta Mészáros in an interview. “She stays on her own, that is, she can’t play herself, she won’t be anyone’s toy,” adds András Beck, not by chance, since Mészáros also noticed the singer because of this song: “You could believe her that no, she wouldn’t be anyone’s toy. It’s not even a hit, it’s a symbol. The most exciting women’s topic of our time.”
Italian syrup and American confection
Although the sixties are mainly associated with the competition of Illés, Metro, Omega and all-male beat bands, it also brought a lot of female singers to the surface. Among them the ConcKovács, Zalatnay trio became so prominent that the – perceived or real – rivalry between them still preoccupies the public.
However, the careers of the three singers developed quite differently: Sarolta Zalatnay’s unbridled individuality best suited the spirit of the sixties and the beat era, while Zsuzsa Koncz built her career most consciously, who largely built the with János Bródy for creative partnership. Kati Kovács moved in a much wider style world, and in this case it also meant that she was the singer who also sang “tingli-tangli” songs that were looked down upon by the critics, thus building a huge fan base for the so-called. also in “parallel Hungary”, about which phenomenon more Azhariah it was mentioned before:
Since the appearance of rock (more precisely, beat) in Hungary, two parallel worlds have clearly been present: one was dominated by the admittedly Anglo-Saxon inspired pop-rock, and the other was the world of the so-called dance singers, in which the emotional, often Italian-inspired hits, whether operetta or Hungarian they were also mixed with elements of music.
Kati Kovács was thus in the exceptional position that, on the one hand, the Hungarian greats of the genre went out of their way to work with her, From Gábor Presser to Levente Szörényi (according to the latter, the first break in his relationship with Bródy was that after thirteen years, not with him, but Adamis with Anna wrote a record for Kati Kovács in 1978), on the other hand, he moved at home János Koós, György Korda, Pál Szécsi his hallmark “dance-song” medium as well.
This also meant that Kati Kovács was blamed by several people for fragmenting her career, even though she could have been an international star based on her talents: “Kati Kovács still hasn’t managed to find herself. During his career, he took on everything: be it Italian syrup, American ready-to-wear or dozens of hits by the Hungarian pop mafia, traditional tingli-tangli or jazz, chanson or pop kitsch. In this mass production, he only sometimes succeeds in performing a song of unforgettable artistic quality,” he wrote about it János Sebok.
Olajos Piroska Kati Kovács at the 50th anniversary of the Dance and Song Festival in 2018.
Kati Kovács herself he explainedthat he was simply forced to do other kinds of songs as well:
Fewer people understood the very rock and heavier songs, I couldn’t make a living from them. I was always shocked when a performer weaker than me sang a “tingli-tangli” song and it became much more successful. There were songs that I knew I didn’t have much to do with, but I was happy to sing them because they had an emotion, and the audience could easily identify with that.
Or as another in an interview he said that he himself prefers rockier songs, but the audience still prefers slow songs from him:
You should definitely sing songs that the audience asks for and likes. You cannot ignore them, because then the whole thing becomes meaningless and self-serving.
It was probably an unrealistic expectation anyway that anyone could have become a world star on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To do this, one would first have to move to the West (or even defect), and even then, an Eastern European pop star could face countless obstacles. And Kati Kovács was too attached to Hungary and her family for this to even be discussed – even so, she had an unprecedentedly successful international career in the domestic field.
However, Kati Kovács had to assert herself primarily at home, and the record amount of awards and recognition she received during her six-decade career shows that she succeeded: in addition to the Kossuth and Liszt awards, she won the most festival awards, and there may be quite a few more categories in which she belongs priority at home.
But even the awards do not return his ability, which he recounted in an interview ten years later, reviving his early years, about when he sang with his backing band as a beginner in the Arany Bika bar in Debrecen and felt bad because the audience did not pay attention to him:
The majority drank, talked, courted, and munched on salted almonds, as is customary. That pissed me off! I don’t like being overheard.
Csaba Schumy Kovács Kati Kossuth and Ferenc Liszt Prize-winning Hungarian performer, singer, songwriter.
If anything, later, as a professional singer, she surely achieved that when she stands on stage, there is no one who doesn’t pay attention to her, and this is probably the real recognition.
