Russian New Romantics — Rock in 80s Leningrad
A rock band plays in front of a group of men, some tap along to the music, while others look bemused. The men wear caps and overalls, while the band are more unconventionally dressed. In particular, one man sticks out. He is tall, gangly with a slightly over-sized head and fish eyes. He wears an ill-fitting suit (which he is sometimes known to pimp with everyday objects) and white gloves, like a circus master of ceremonies. His hair is spiked up, punk like. His pallid face is enlivened with whitened theatrical grease paint, garish red lipstick, and kohled crow’s feet. He wouldn’t have looked out of place in Blitz, the New Romantics’ favourite London club. But this striking, charismatic man is Oleg Garkusha, a key member of Auktsyon, a Leningrad band that emerged during the 80s. And they are playing to a prison colony. It’s like a Soviet version of Johnny Cash at Fulsom Prison.
The performance is captured in Alexei Uchitel’s fascinating Glasnost’-era documentary, ‘Rock’ (1987) which also features Boris Grebenshchikov’s Akvarium, Aviia, DDT and Kino. For many Russians, it was the first time they had seen these rock bands.
The verite-like film blends live performance and interviews with key band members with fly-on-the wall scenes from a dreary-looking, mid-to-late 80s, Leningrad.
Leningrad was the epicentre of the Soviet rock scene. The Leningrad scene consisted of bands from Leningrad itself and attracted musicians from around Soviet Union — DDT, for example, came from far-flung Bashkir Autonomous Republic. Perhaps they were better able to find like-minded individuals in Leningrad, or Russia’s second ‘European’ city was more accommodating to the non-conformist individual, or it was easier to keep a low profile, when necessary, in the big city.
The rock musicians were bohemian underground figures. Banned from making official careers as musicians they often did lowly jobs to get by. Former art teacher, Yurii Shevchuk of DDT, is interviewed while sweeping up outside a Leningrad shop on the corner of sparsely-populated Nevskii Prospekt. Viktor Tsoi is shown shovelling coal into a furnace (he had worked as a stoker). They also endured low-level harassment from the KGB. Cultural critic, Alexander Kan says they knew who their minders were by name though it’s not clear whether the movement was infiltrated by informers.
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The film also shows scenes of everyday life in Leningrad and its environs. Boris Grebenshchikov is nowadays a bona-fide rock star, and Russian rock royalty, often labelled the Russian Eric Clapton. In the film, he is shown in humbler surroundings. He carries his young son in his arms, trudging up the seemingly never-ending staircase, no lift of course, to his seventh floor, central Leningrad apartment. He passes typically bleak, unkempt stairwell and communal areas leading to the large padded doors you see in many city flats in Russian cities. The walls are occasionally adorned with graffiti and dotted with internal plumbing and astray electrical wiring. The flat has now been renovated into an exclusive apartment. This old Leningrad is disappearing.
The musicians’ real passion was to create and play music. They played live whenever they could, small gigs, rock festivals, and more intimate performances. In the film, members of DDT sing acapella in the woods outside the city with their partners and children. It is bucolic, traditionally Russian. The bands recorded onto cassette (known as magnetizdat, like samizdat — self publishing — in the literary world) which were copied and passed around.
Alexander Kan lived in Leningrad during this period. He was an active participant in the art and rock scene of the second capital. According to Kan, speaking at Pushkin House in 2016, the independent Russian cultural centre in London, ‘Rock’ captures a moment in time but in many ways it is a romanticised version of the time. The Leningrad rock scene had emerged properly in the late 60s and 70s and reached its apogee in the early 80s. But Kan said by the mid-to-late 80s the scene was fading, and fading fast, and the film is an attempt to recapture the essence of that earlier time.
Musically many bands of 1980s seem to me to be influenced by progressive rock, particularly at the pastoral end (Genesis, Jethro Tull), and also bear a resemblance to acts like Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Bowie, and the New Romantics in their camp theatricality. Quite often I feel 80s Russian rock bands like Auktsyon were more performance art than musicians. Alexander Kan believes they were influenced by Western music, including prog, to varying degrees. Some, like Grebenshchikov, he says, were well versed in musical history (somewhat ironically as Akvarium’s music in the film, and what I have listened to, is straight edged). But they were also influenced by Russian cultural history too. For example, Kan says, Auktsyon were influenced by Soviet agitprop of the 1920s. I thought their performances in ‘Rock’ were also reminiscent of the pre-World War I Futurists who used to walk up and down Nevskii with wooden spoons tucked into their suit lapels and performed poetry in halls with grand pianos suspended from the ceiling. Garkusha is the Maiakovskii of the 80s Russian rock scene.
Bands like DDT and Akvarium are big Russian bands to this day, playing large, full-scale concerts in London. Kino ended in 1990 when Viktor Tsoi was killed in a car crash. However, Kino’s music is influential and still popular. London-based no-wave band Manflu, featuring Azala Shade, from Kyrgyzstan, covered the Kino song ‘Хочу перемен’ (‘I want changes’) at gigs earlier this millenium. Others on the Leningrad scene have moved away from rock into jazz, avant garde and ambient, and some have moved into theatre and other art forms.
