Kalapács have announced the death of Sárközi Lajos, their guitarist since the band began, at the age of fifty nine after a long illness.
He came up through Légió and Sámán and joined Omen in 1994, where alongside Nagyfi László he wrote the greater part of Jelek, the record that remains the band's most widely heard, and songs including Pokoli évek and Fagyott világ carry his name. When Omen went quiet in 2000 he and the singer Kalapács József started the band that took the singer's name, and he stayed in it for the rest of his life.
Twelve albums followed over those twenty six years. In recent seasons his health kept him away from concerts more often than not, and his bandmates have said they kept hoping to have him back on a stage.
The band asked that he be remembered through the songs rather than through the illness. The funeral is on 25 November at the Új köztemető in the Hungarian capital and is open to anyone who wants to be there, which for a musician whose work stayed inside one language is a larger gesture than it sounds.