Three of the five musicians work at the Donders Institute and half of their songs are about pizza. On Saturday, the brainy punk band Porco Dios played their last concert in their current line-up. Singer Elie El Rassi: ‘We don't yet know how we will continue.’

‘Here’s a list with some shit pizza places in town…’ Lead singer Elie El Rassi shouts the names into the microphone. ‘Pizza Hut! Domino’s!’ As he mentions the latter, he sticks out his tongue, followed by a ‘hey hey’ and a ‘woo woo woo’. The audience in the dark basement dances along to the music.

Tomatoes from the greenhouse

Brain researcher El Rassi is lead singer of punk band Porco Dios. Three of their songs on this Saturday night at club De Onderbroek are about pizza. This may seem superficial, he explains over a beer a few hours before the gig, but underneath the mozzarella and pepperoni there is indeed a deeper layer. The songs he writes are about life as an international postdoc. And food is an important aspect of that.

‘Dutch vegetables lack flavour’

‘The Netherlands doesn’t have a great food culture’, says Lebanese El Rassi. ‘I don’t want to come across as all negative, because what you guys are obviously good at is producing vegetables all year round. But those vegetables, unfortunately, have little flavour.’

French guitarist and saxophonist Hugo Weissbart joins the conversation. ‘The tomatoes here all come from the greenhouse’, says the postdoc who, like El Rassi, is a brain researcher, ‘so it’s hardly surprising that they taste watery, is it?’

Donders house band

Porco Dios’ music is also known as ‘pizzapunk’. You could call them the house band of the Donders Institute: three of the five members work in the Trigon building on Kapittelweg and the other two are partners of Radboud scientists. At the farewell party of director Peter Hagoort last year, Porco Dios was responsible for the music. ‘And we also performed at other Donders events,’ says El Rassi.

‘We performed at the director’s farewell party’

The five musicians hail from Lebanon, France, Italy, Mexico, and Canada. The name Porco Dios is a derivative of the curse ‘porco Dio’, which the Italian guitarist Marco Gandolfo uses too often. El Rassi finds it inappropriate to translate the words verbatim during our interview, but a quick search reveals that it is a power term invoking Our Lord. ‘By adding an ‘s’ at the end, we made it plural, and gave it a different meaning. Together we are Porco Dios.’

The foundations for the band were laid during the Covid-19 pandemic. The three brain scientists from the Donders Institute – two of whom were also roommates – jammed together, and were later joined by the Canadian and the Mexican.

‘Frikandel fuck Israel’

Tonight has a sad note to it, as it is the band’s last performance with a complete line-up for now. Guitarist and saxophonist Weissbart is moving to the Spanish Basque Country next week. That too is part of life as an international postdoc: friends come and go, because work takes you here one moment, and there the next. Weissbart’s girlfriend is pregnant and the couple is settling down in the region she comes from. ‘I will give it all one last time’, the Frenchman promises with a grin.

‘We don’t yet know how we will continue as Porco Diost’, says El Rassi. Ideally, the pizza punks would like to find a new saxophonist to take Weissbart’s place, but they are not that far yet.

As promised, later that night, after the men have had dinner together, Weissbart gives it his all on the stage of De Onderbroek. His guitar suffers a bit in the process. Also during the songs that are not about food, but about Israel. The men are angry about the country’s actions. ‘Frikandel fuck Israel’, the Lebanese lead shouts to his audience.

In the front row, with earplugs in, is Andrea Mora. He deserves an honourable mention in this article, as the chef who, according to Porco Dios, undeniably bakes the best pizzas in Nijmegen. Mora runs the popular Italian restaurant at the Donders Institute. One of the pizza songs is dedicated to him.