Today marks 20 years since the Soviet army began withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Plus ça change, you could say. It’s not an anniversary I’m seeing flagged up in the media today. But then, we’re used to wandering the road less travelled over here at the Knackered Hack – if not completely untravelled.

Crucial to the mounting tide of pressure that led to Soviet withdrawal was an opening up of the culture that started in early Spring 1986 when I visited Leningrad and met Kino‘s Viktor Tsoi (whom I snapped this picture of while he tuned up at a small concert in April ’86).

The song Peremen (or Changes) was an important anthem for that period, and perhaps Tsoi’s most recognized contribution to the tectonic shift in our geo-politics of the past two decades. It appeared to help mobilize Soviet youth culture toward a more democratic and uncertain future, even though accounts suggest that this was not Tsoi’s direct intention.

I’ve been very much taken with the following video of the song. The visuals aren’t of Viktor, of course, but this is nonetheless a powerful interpretation. I don’t know if he is using any recognised sign language (can anybody illuminate me?) but it certainly conveys something forcefully, whatever that something is. This was, incidentally, used as the soundtrack for a DIY, low-budget yet critically-acclaimed Russian film Dust (2005). I’ve not seen it, but this review sounds compelling if you are an art-house type.

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For those anxious for more Kino to justify my pathetic plea to help recover that lost guitar, something to keep you going till I get more of a handle on all that material.

This was about as close as I got to Viktor Tsoi: too close, as you can see, for my camera to focus on him properly. As Iwan pointed out a good resource that archives a lot of the tracks online, here is some music to finish off the long Easter weekend (in the UK at least). Ironically entitled Poslednyi Geroi (The Last Hero), it was my favourite track from the album Noch’ (Night), released shortly after I met Viktor, Yuri etc.

I have not had time to select a good translation — that will remain a work-in-progress. As there is a lot of music I enjoy in English without understanding the words (even as a native English speaker) and I was singing uncomprehendingly in Latin over the weekend, I hope you won’t mind too much.

The Last Hero, Kino – Press Play

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This is a quick post to highlight, for the statisticians among you, two tails of fame.

My pictures below show an informal but nervous event in which a few hundred people fought and crammed their way in to see Viktor Tsoi and Yuri Kasparyan play a few songs. Their fame was clandestine. The video at the end shows what had happened to them (as Kino) in four short but tumultuous years in the late stages of the Soviet empire. It’s the difference between The Cavern and Shea Stadium, Russian style.

Things used to take a long time to set up in the Soviet Union. And that was as true of an underground concert as anything else. As I recall, there were a few technical problems before and during that 1986 concert; had there not been, I doubt I would have felt comfortable getting up and snapping. The artist is on the stage getting the unreliable equipment working, while the audience mills around after a very un-Soviet crush to get in. I don’t know if anybody had to pay – I certainly didn’t because Viktor and Yuri had invited me and the language-course crowd along as their guests.

The contrast with the later footage could not be more stark. There was a distinct absence of anything official in spring 1986, given how many people there were congregating in such an enclosed space. There’s a polite restraint amongst the audience, as if they’ve come to a favourite author’s signing session at the local bookstore. Nobody wants to embarrass themselves by looking too enthusiastic once through the door! But by 1990 a real hysteria has set in. As Viktor arrives for his last concert at Moscow’s huge Luzhniki Grand Sports Arena*, just a couple of months prior to his death, the streets leading up to the Olympic stadium are lined with scores of Russian police.

A little translation for the video: the titles about halfway through, as a hand menacingly covers the lens, read “Luzhniki Grand Sports Arena 24 June 1990″ and then “The Last Concert of Viktor Tsoi”.

Boy, would I fight to get into a room with them now!

*For soccer fans, the stadium is due to host the 2008 UEFA Champions League Final on May 21.

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I hope that this’ll be a first on the internet.

As previously reported, I sold a blonde Fender Telecaster to fund my 1986 language trip to Leningrad. How sensible of me! I came back with a huge weight of Russian poetry (books and records), iconography reference works, and some opera records — the glue in those record sleeves emitting some of the worst smells I’ve ever owned.

Oh, and I came back with lots of pictures of Viktor Tsoi, thanks to my Nikon FM and the fact that I’d loaded up with a decent amount of cheap, quality film courtesy of the geeks in the university Photography Society.

Well, there comes a time in every blog’s gestation that it attempts to monetise, and here is mine. In a lot of other blogs you’ll see the option to leave a tip, buy a coffee, a beer or a cocktail. I can take care of those on my own, thank-you. But what I really need is to get my Fender Telecaster back.

This is more than a simple loss. The guitar I sold in 1985-6 for £190 was an early ’70s vintage maple-necked beauty, and quite possibly older, though definitely not pre-CBS (if you know what I mean).

Where I live, there is a problem for the middle-aged man, and it is a shop called Vintage & Rare Guitars. I’m finding genes are switching on that I thought I either did not contain or that were well under the control of some higher moral fibre. But I know myself too well. I also know that ownership of a Fender Telecaster is probably going to mean not playing it much. So, yes, this is an entirely materialistic vanity project. Rather than keep it to myself, like a sensible mid-lifer should do, I thought I’d share it and engage you all, my small readership, in my quiet, hopeful quest.

Crowdsourcing is the new new thing. And while I’m not expecting you, my readers, to give me anything, by six degrees of separation I think some of you might know someone who might know someone who knows a Russian hedge fund millionaire, metals/oil oligarch or football club owner of a similar age who would have been a Kino fan in his youth, who owes his non-linear wealth in no small part to the freedoms that Tsoy and friends struggled for. Or, better still, some young Russian who owns a search engine, assuming using such a term won’t lose me friends or credibility . If we can just prevail on their guilt for long enough to get their wallet out, they might toss a small sop into my PayPal begging hat that, for a little while, I’m going to embed in the posts and in the sidebar of the blog. It’s an experiment, you know.

It’s good to have an excuse to present an iconic image, and the Fender Telecaster (like my Nikon FM) is an iconic object. It was the first solid-bodied electric guitar. Launched in 1950-1 as the Broadcaster, it was the AK47 of the garage musician. When Chris Anderson talks in his book The Long Tail about the electric guitar democratising music for the pop revolution, and in effect randomising the path from musical obscurity to fame and success, I imagine it is the Telecaster more than any other guitar — even Fender’s possibly more iconic Stratocaster — that he is thinking about.

Now, mine originally cost me £210, on which I made a loss. If I wander into Vintage & Rare Guitars today I can find one similar, although in rougher condition, for just short of £4,000. Ouch. If I indulge in a little fantasy and think mine was really a late ’60s model (possible, though less likely) I’m out of pocket more than £6k; the one below sold recently from an advertised price of £6,850.

What’s more, I made the mistake (due to lack of funds and too much homework) of not buying a real amp for the thing, which is why I never really got round to playing it much. Vintage & Rare have an extraordinary find which I must ask them about: a 1966 Fender Deluxe Reverb amp that has never been used, so the website says. As you can imagine, you have to inquire for the price on that one.

Well my current ambitions are somewhat more modest. The top pictured guitar can be had for less than £500. And I was surprised to learn that on a discount at my favourite tech store, Digital Village, a Standard Tele retails new for £275. That’s less than they were when I was growing up, I think. (Don’t worry, I know only too well that they are not the same.)

As anyone who has ever sent a cow or an African school or other gift through Oxfam etc will know, anchoring is important as a cognitive bias, so I’ll start small:-

34p buys a plectrum

£4 buys a set of strings

£10 buys a strap

£20 buys a stand

£22 buys a guitar lead

£55 buys a case

£279 buys a Standard Telecaster

£479 buys a Highway 1 Telecaster (top picture)

£549 buys a Vox AC-30 (but not the one below. Again, I could not dream of what that is worth.)

Of course, if you bought a Fender Telecaster in 1985-6 in Kettering for around £210 — blonde, white scratch plate with a slightly loose G-string — I’ll give you £210 for it. Do the right thing, won’t you?

I’m feeling rather guilty about this conspicuous begging, even though it happens to be my birthday today. Still, at least there are three links in this post to genuinely good causes. And you can’t blame a guy for not wanting another set of G-clamps.

Photo credits: Top Digital Village Rest: Vintage and Rare Guitars

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This was the sign frequently displayed on numerous public buildings in the Soviet Union. You might have expected to visit a particular museum on your journey of a lifetime, but within the planned economy, things would just break without prior announcement or expectation. The excess need to control created all sorts of chaos.

Well, I’m a little bit offline with some technology problems of my own, so updates may be not as frequent or long as last week . The man from Dell is coming today with a hard drive or two. Don’t worry, everything (almost everything) is supposed to be well backed up so the Kino archive should be safe.

Back soon.

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As I’ve touched on before, I’ve a self-justifying preference for the intermittent, irregular, and the archive in my blog-reading and -writing.

A while ago, I heard a claim from a New York Times executive that half their traffic came from Google, and that, therefore, they loved Google. Despite suggestions to the contrary, they did not see the search-engine-cum-advertising-vehicle as a threat. But that traffic dynamic is the same for everyone, I think. So what you have done in the past resonates today with 50% of your readers. Better make sure it’s reasonably good because today’s story is no longer tomorrow’s chip-wrappers. At the very least, make sure it is useful to you.

Vicki Baker’s new blog, while republishing one of my more regrettable drunken episodes, nevertheless inspired me with how blogs can be used in a way that the great humanist and empiricist thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have approved. She quotes Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books:-

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it… The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks.”

In the end, that is more than enough justification to blog, and it was certainly partly how I conceived my first blog Not that I’m Biased (lost temporarily in a Blogspot vortex), and archived at the back end of this blog, for safety’s sake. I need to index those posts into a category and tag them perhaps, as they documented my thinking from 2004 to 2006-ish. By the way, I blushed a bit when I looked again at some of them last year. But they read now much better after the credit crunch .

Vicki’s a bit of a Kino fan too. And has blogged here more extensively than I have yet on the phenomenon that was Viktor Tsoi. I invite other bloggers to join the meme. Together we can defeat those evil machines!

As a footnote, Milton’s commonplace journal is currently on display at the British Library.

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It’s funny why we recollect things. Grief triggers lots of odd-assorted memories, as I’m now re-discovering (sadly, not for the first time). But it seemed entirely random that Kino and my meeting with Viktor Tsoi were called back to mind after laying dormant for so many years.

Last autumn, as I was shuttling across Wessex to visit my dying father, I discovered the Flaming Lips. In particular, this lyric from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots stuck in my mind:-

Her name is Yoshimi. She’s a black belt in karate.
Working for the city, she has to discipline her body. Cause she knows that it’s demanding to defeat these
evil machines. I know she can beat them.”

I think it was the concept of working for the state (as, in effect, most Soviet citizens did in 1986) that conjured up memories of Viktor; he was a specialist in martial arts too. He clearly possessed a particular sense of purpose when I met him; yet, despite USSR-wide fame by the time of his death in 1990, he continued with his job as a boiler-worker in a Leningrad apartment building. Check out the documentary footage below for a flavour of that.

For those awaiting more of my Kino pictures, or some more detailed explanation of my acquaintanceship with Russia’s most iconic rock star, I’ll start with the latter. I met him for only a few weeks in one of those weird moments of Russian history when things were thawing and it was both safe and dangerous at the same time. From this vast distance of a couple of decades, it feels a little over-the-top to describe what occurred over those few days as a friendship, but I don’t have a better word for it.

It was April 1986. I was on Easter vacation from history studies at Oxford and had taken advantage of a Russian language course. Just a month earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had delivered his first glasnost‘ speech to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party. Even though there was some expectation in the air that things were changing, at the centre of the state apparatus was the KGB still, and even for the casual visitor they didn’t appear too far away; one or two of our Soviet friends were arrested late one night for mixing with us.

Some of my fellow-travellers on the course were Russophiles who already knew a group of Leningrad beatniks from previous visits. This group included Tsoi, members of his band (Kino), and other artists and players in the Leningrad underground. I was privileged to meet and hang out with some of the most talented and experimental members of that society, without any of the mental impediments that proximity to fame and celebrity might normally entail. These were people of my age and a little older who would go on to play significant roles in the epoch-making changes affecting Soviet society. And it was transformational for me too.

Looking back, I guess I was a bit naive. Falling in with the underground had never been my intention. It was altogether accidental. But this is the age when you do go adventuring. For someone who was generally abstemious in matters alcoholic I shared a fair few bottles of vodka and papirosi with my friend, the wood sculptor, Roman.

To add to the poignancy and memory-forging qualities of the time, a few days after I returned from the USSR, Chernobyl went up, stranding some of my fellow students under a radioactive cloud in Kiev. This will, I’m sure, come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following my penchant for black swan near-misses.

Tsoi’s inexorable rise as the leading rock musician of glasnost’ Russia culminated in an acting career and major Soviet fame, with the distinct promise of it breaking the boundaries of the USSR. But then, returning from Latvia after a recording session, he died in a car accident. Such was Tsoi’s impact on desperate Soviet youth that (as previously noted) there were 65 suicides reportedly tied to his own tragic departure.

I did not spend a vast amount of time with Tsoi himself; after all, he had a day job. But he did play guitar at our leaving party (more of that another time). He was clearly a most charismatic presence. He was only a couple of years older than I, the same age as my brother. His emerging fame was of a subterranean type that could not really be meaningful to me – a non-Russian. He was clearly recognized, but not mobbed in the way a western star might be; it was probably still too dangerous for that. Although spreading music through magnitizdat (self-published and copied) tapes was probably easier than samizdat books, public appearances were relatively few. And expressions of independent pop culture were only permitted, I guess, as some kind of safety valve for the most restless of Soviet youth.

I had never heard of Kino when we met, let alone listened to their music. Viktor was a young musician trying to pursue his art and keep out of trouble as much as possible. He’d recently married, and was now a father. He was dignified, self-contained, mature, noble. He had a brotherly way toward me and those around him. Compared with later images — which are so much more readily available on the internet — the pictures I have show a more private, relaxed, and ironically freer young man. While his struggle was to escape the shackles of an all-powerful state, it’s clear that fame brought its own pressures and new risks.

My own risk-taking by comparison was slight. It’s true that I ended up taking a trip outside Leningrad city limits without a visa for a spring visit to Roman’s parents’ dacha — and one of the most generous meals I’ve probably ever eaten. We were quite a spectacle to the other passengers on the tram ride out there, and we were nervous of being stopped. And then, more dangerously still, I attended an artist’s garret where, quite naturally, illegal substances were consumed. It’s ironic that the only time in my student days that I came anywhere near anything illicit, I was with personae non gratae inside a police state.

Coming away from the Soviet Union, I’m not sure what the full cost to me was, aside from the already-mentioned loss of one Fender Telecaster (blonde, white scratch plate). It reshaped what I wanted to do in life, but it’s also possible that it may have meant the closure of some avenues. I was told by someone who could reasonably have access to the information that my name had ended up on some Foreign Office black-list. It’s a romantic notion which I find laughable. But these were stupid times, and mixing up the good guys and the bad guys was perhaps the best strategy for those whose stock-in-trade was paranoia and conspiracy.

Anyway, it is now several months and two bereavements since I woke up to the fact that I had a whole bunch of not-too-bad photos of Tsoi and friends gathering dust in the basement. It has taken longer than expected, and I’m hopeful that together (Dear Reader) we can make these photos a bit more of an event than the blogging of a few tourist snaps. Something is gnawing at me saying that Tsoi should be a cult figure in the West too. If 12 million Brits can watch a bunch of no-brain celebrities dance the cha-cha-cha on a Saturday evening, a good number of global ears and eyeballs should really learn about this Russian icon, even if the language is beyond all but 280 million of us.

Well, here is Viktor going about his daily business tending a boiler. Some concert footage of the song ‘Spakoynaya Noch’ (Peaceful Night) and a little bit of post-concert footage is also included. At least, in those days, they fully enjoyed their freedom to smoke!

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The following clip found on YouTube gives an idea of the Kino concert at which my pictures were taken. This is a different concert, obviously, because Yuri is not using the Yamaha SG but a Fender Stratocaster, as far as I can see. However, they appear to be from about the same time.

Since the the kids burned their own CD of Eto Ne Lyubov’ (This is not Love) not much else has been heard in the house. As neither of them understands Russian, it is rather interesting that they should be so taken with it. It could be that they are doing what all kids will do at times of particular stress ie try to please their parents. Beautiful language as it is, liking incomprehensible Russian song lyrics seems a stretch. But the title song here is lovely. Enjoy the vid in all its amateur graininess.

The video was made using what I can only assume was a cine camera. The poster on YouTube was not the originator, telling me he was not even born at the time. But a close examination of my own pics revealed that there was a cine camera operator taking footage of the gig that I photographed too. I wonder where that footage is now and what became of the film-maker?One should not forget that in 1986 the Russian campaign in Afghanistan was in full swing, and it’s possible that not a few members of the audience were later victims of their military conscription.

More pictures are on their way…

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I try not to write on events in anything like real time. Think of it as a contrarian posture of a blogger who spent 15 years in newswires. But yesterday’s reporting on the intimidation of British Council officials in Russia cuts conveniently into my current Russian reveries. It also highlights, in a small way, what I learned at a seminar I attended on Wednesday at University College London.

The kind people at UCL let unaffiliated roughnecks like me in for free at the London Judgement and Decision Making Group meetings. Terry Connolly, Eller Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Arizona, was talking about Regret and the Perils of Decisional Improvement. His themes are some that I’ll return to in coming weeks, I hope, because regrets (you guessed it), I’ve had a few.

When I was a student (and briefly after) I confess that I did occasionally wear bow ties. Once I’d figured out how to tie the pesky things, it was a badge of honour. With someone of my social background it represented a bit of cheap sophistication. But bow ties don’t really work in the rough and tumble of a Fleet Street newsroom. So pretty soon after I started work I stopped wearing them. I still have most of the tweedy garb from that period, and it allows me to go to fancy dress parties and pretend to be Mr Toad. There are some bow-tie-wearing journalists around still, and you can learn more about their bad temper here, and how they hacked off the hack (though not really) here.

This is the story of the first bow tie I ever owned and how I parted company with it, overcoming the kind of “regret salience” that Prof Connolly describes. His research shows that this can all too easily (but not universally) be at the heart of bad decision-making.

I was in Leningrad, and my Russian language trip (during which I took the pictures of Viktor Tsoy) was coming to an end. I guess I got a little more dressed up than usual, as it was leaving day, and donned my only bow-tie. We made our way from hotel to train station. The station offered the last chance to meet our Russian friends and say good-bye before heading back to Moscow to catch a plane. Most of us were destined for London, the rest for Kiev where (little did we know it) Chernobyl would blow up just a few days later.

The Russian friends were an assortment of underground types, and I can’t remember now all who were there. But Viktor was definitely amongst them. Viktor — this time not Tsoy but a beatnik and member of the Pop Mechanics, an avant-garde group of improvisational jazz musicians-cum-artists — had been a mainstay of our acquaintanceship over the past month. Barely a day went by when we weren’t hanging out with him in the afternoon, once our morning lessons were dispensed with.

Viktor was a tall and dapper young man, with big floppy hair and a mischievous quality about him, and he wore an elegant old suit. One night, when we had a party in our hotel, he got arrested with one or two others in the wee small hours for what I believe is called an “involuntary conversation” with officials. But this was after he’d called me in the middle of the same night as part of an elaborate practical joke to rouse me from a regrettable vodka-induced semi-coma. The dialogue, reported to me the following day by my fellow travellers, went something like this (excuse my Russian transliterations, I’m a bit rusty):

Viktor: Mozhna Teem? (Can I speak to Tim?)

Knackered Hack: [sleepily] Da, eta Teem. (Yes, this is Tim)

Viktor: Teem, eta Viktor. Kak dela? (Tim, it’s Viktor. How are things?)

Knackered Hack: [In a moaning, evidently nauseous voice] Neechevo (So-so)

Viktor: Teem, u tebya seegareta? (Tim, do you have a cigarette?)

Knackered Hack: Nyet (No)

Viktor: Teem, ya ‘khochu seegareta. (Tim, I want a cigarette.)

Knackered Hack: Ya tozhe … Do sveedanye. (Me too … Goodbye.)

If this is true then it represents one of the more fluent conversations I ever had in Russian. So it’s sad that I wasn’t there to recall it. In vodka veritas, clearly.

Viktor was a charming man and could easily have freed us from the oppression of our capitalist goodies. But, in contrast to the black marketeers often encountered during my two visits, he and the other artists and musicians never pressed me for anything, despite the fact that their cultural needs must have been greater than most. However, on the station as we were ready to depart, in a rather sheepish and shy way for the man, Viktor sidled up to me and said (this time in English): “Teem, caan I haave your bow-tie?”

Now, that should have been an easy transaction, you’d think: a man with next to nothing but his art, living in a police state, and me a student not short of much materially (although as mentioned here, down one Fender Telecaster). Ostensibly an easy life lay ahead of me, weather permitting.

But Terry Connolly’s regret salience reared its ugly head, for the bow tie carried sentimental value. It was bought for the Knackered Hack, by the Knackered Hackette. I liked the tie. It had been hard to pick out such a nice one. Those small paisleys were really something else. Something about the way the silk fell made for a much more stable knot — it was easy to tie.

You’ll be glad to know that Teemofei Gordonovich did the right thing. Viktor’s need of artistic expression would be better served by my humble bow-tie. It would set him apart in his culture in a much better way than it was setting me apart in mine. And I could handle the potential 20-years of explaining to the Knackered Hackette why it was nothing personal.

As I discussed with Prof Connolly, it seems we are hard-wired to reciprocate. Viktor had brought along a Russian army belt, so ubiquitously given as gifts to westerners that I’d already acquired one from my previous trip to Leningrad during my only unsupervised encounter with an ordinary Russian (also a professor) next to the statue of Peter the Great, where I’d exchanged it for a 50p piece commemorating the formation of the European Common Market. I wonder if he still has it in his coin collection? Or if he ever had a coin collection at all?

Viktor need not have bothered. In terms of memories, I’m sure I did much better from the exchange. However, I’m sure too that when added together with so many other students, and particularly those more regular visitors who introduced me to these fantastic people, such meagre cultural exchanges mattered disproportionately in keeping the hopes of these cultural cold warriors alive.

And I guess that is why institutions like the British Council are important. Their intimidation now should not be taken lightly, for the sake of all the Tsoys, the Pop Mechanics, their friends and followers who have given others the kind of freedom the rest of us enjoy as a birthright.

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I’ve noticed bloggers apologise when talking about Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values. To quote him is to give him the publicity his faux-contrarian defence of mainstream, professional media is designed to elicit. But I’ll take this opportunity to say that Keen’s attack on the amateur and self-published is, in my view, a little bit Stalinistic.

I’d like to contrast the world he defends, where what we watch, hear and experience should be mediated by professionals, with one still in the recent memory where to self-publish was a political and democratic act and a gesture of defiance. Of course, there are some places still like that.

This thought came to me as I have been working on a pet project to archive some photos of Russian rock god Viktor Tsoy of the 1980s band Kino, who my Twitter followers may already be bored with me mentioning. What I have is an old hand-made cassette and a bunch of photos I took when hanging out with Tsoy in 1986.

I need to come back to my knowledge of Tsoy in much more detail, but just as Yuri Kasparyan is tuning up in this picture, this post can be a small, note-bending taster of what I will aim to put up in the coming weeks.

Tsoy and Kino are noteworthy for a number of reasons in the history of 20th century culture, and arguably much more iconic than all those indie bands that we neurotic boy-outsiders modelled ourselves after in our youths — those that were invariably selling out while pretending not to. [I'm fine with that, by the way.]

Tsoy died in a car accident in 1990. So deep was his influence on the culture, 65 Soviet youth reportedly committed suicide after his death, thus compounding the individual tragedy. As an icon, Tsoy was one of those rare agencies who was breathing life back into a society that had suffered from seven decades of some of the worst repression in human history.

My most recent research on the band suggests that little if any of their material is copyright. This is not surprising because you could say that the Soviet Russian concept of self-publishing ( “samizdat” or, in the case of the cassette of their songs that I own, “magnitizdat“), was the original creative commons: copy and pass along.

What makes Tsoy the definitive amateur though was that, despite a burgeoning career as Russia’s leading rock musician in the late ’80s, when he was finally signed to the state record company, he reportedly maintained his employment as a boiler operator.

Well my own efforts are steadfastly amateur in so many respects that I too won’t be giving up the day job . But I must admit to some professional help in the form of my friend the artist Grahame Baker Smith, who helped me scan the first few images and saved me a lot of time by pointing me in the direction of the right technology. Grahame’s work for that other rock god Robert Plant can be seen and commissioned here.

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