An interview with Barry Phillips, author of “In Search of Tito’s Punks”
Cover of Barry’s book published by intellect in the UK and USA in 2023.
In 1981, Demob, a young multiracial punk rock band from a stagnating provincial English city, recorded ‘No Room For You’, a song that sold a few thousand copies. The band’s bass player, Barry Phillips, was eighteen years old at the time and thirty years later in 2011 he received a Facebook message telling him that the song was famous throughout the Balkans and had been covered by notable Yugoslavian punk bands. In the hope to learn about the punk scene that emerged in the waning years of Josip B. Tito’s rule Barry travelled to the region. Unknown to the wider world and sadly many punk rock fans, Yugoslavia boasted one of the most dynamic punk rock and new wave scenes in the world. Unlike other former Eastern bloc countries like GDR, Romania, Bulgaria et al. Yugoslavia played an interesting buffer role between the two opposing blocks, NATO and Warsaw Pact in the sense that due to its geographic location it was able to maintain its independence without siding with either superpower. Under the highly popular Tito Yugoslavia maintained its role as an independent socialist state adhering strictly to the Marxist-Leninist principles. It must have been this somewhat geopolitically special status that made it possible for homegrown music to grow in popularity, including different types of underground rock.
Having been born in the former Czechoslovakia I have always had an interest in punk rock and other types of music having been created in the part of the world that is close to me. As a matter of fact when my parents fled communism in 1979 we had an official visa to visit Yugoslavia and stayed in the city of Dubrovnik before ending up in Switzerland, where we were granted political asylum.
After being in e-mail contact with Barry for a little while and having finished the book in no time I didn’t hesitate to ask him for an interview. So, here we go…:
Barry, thank you for taking your time in doing this interview and first and foremost congrats on a really well written and researched book with the title “In Search Of Tito’s Punks”. How has the book been received and what kind of reactions have you gotten so far?
You’re very welcome. Thanks for asking me. Well, you would expect me to say this but the reaction has been very good indeed. The reviews have been universally good and many of them very good indeed.
The legendary punk poet Attila The Stockbroker reviewed it for the national, daily Morning Star paper in the UK and could not have been more complimentary.
Louderthanwar was very complimentary, and Simon Harvey (Ugly Things) said:
“It’s a terrific read....In Search of Tito’s Punks is one of the more interesting and original rock books to come along in some time.”
So there is plenty to be positive about. There have also been some very good reviews from academic journals. The response from individuals and publications in ex Yugoslavia has been particularly heartening. It was always high-risk, being an outsider writing about a subject very close to the hearts of so many very knowledgeable people in the region. And I admit that I was living on my nerves when the book was first published and we were awaiting the feedback. But it has been terrific. I consider that to be fitting reward for all the years of research, and the incredibly rigorous double and treble fact checking process which involved a lot of people from across the ‘old punk’ community but particularly those in ex-Yu. Suffice to say that to be invited onto prime time national TV in Slovenia to talk about the book, and receiving reviews and coverage from some of the biggest national and regional newspapers in Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia is a huge vote of confidence.
What has been disappointing, if not surprising, has been the lack of coverage from more mainstream print media in the UK and US. It really doesn’t surprise me in the case of the UK where publishing, and the literary industry, is still very much a holdout for the privileged. It’s remarkably nepotistic. For ‘new’ content to get any attention it has to be very ‘zeitgeisty’ or sensational, and guaranteed clicks and views. Those people look after their own (after all, that’s how they have protected their privilege for this long) and I didn’t go to a private school, or an ‘Oxbridge’ University, and my parents were not famous authors or theatre directors. Can you tell I have a bit of chip on my shoulder?
Before we even get to Yugoslavia, let’s start off in the South-West of England where you grew up. Give us a window into your childhood and youth, and how you got into music and eventually punk rock in Gloucestershire.
I was raised in a corner shop in a former coal mining village in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. It’s a very rural and relatively isolated area by English standards, it’s a plateau between the rivers Severn and Wye on the border with Wales. Locals and visitors often compared it with that stretch of the Appalachians which was featured in ‘Deliverance’! It does have something of the mystical about it, it’s only famous cultural exports are the great, visionary (and necessarily controversial) screenwriter Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective etc.) and my old friends, those naughty lads ‘Unbelievable’ EMF. I was always very heavily into music.
Even at primary (elementary) school I was listening to music. But it was all informal. My parents were given a second-hand upright piano so (being typically working-class and wanting me to be ‘respectable’) they tried to channel me down that route. Unfortunately, I enjoyed hammering the keys but hated lessons and practicing the usual stuff. I do remember learning ‘Angel Fingers’ by Wizzard though (a glam-pop classic which I don’t think ever successfully crossed the Atlantic). I loved Dave Edmunds and Mott The Hoople and I was being drawn into my older brother’s Led Zeppelin collection.
Then one night, I must have been 14 years old, in December 1976 I heard the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on Radio Luxembourg and it totally tilted my horizons. It will sound odd to some people and completely natural to others but everything just fell into place. It was as if I had been waiting for this for my whole (rather short and sheltered) life. That night I went into my brother’s room and offered to sell him all of my Bad Company etc. albums, and everything except Edmunds and Mott. He has always been much better with money than me and he got them all for a bargain price. But I didn’t care, all I wanted was to get enough money together to start buying this new punk thing. I knew The Damned had an album out, I knew about the Pistols single and I had to have them, and anything else I could get my hands on. The next day I set out on the bus to the nearest record store, in the city of Gloucester. A hugely consequential, and lifelong, personal journey had begun in a rather inauspicious way.
By mid-June of 1977, still aged 14, I was organising mini-bus trips to gigs for we-few rural-renegade teenage punks. The nearest venues were 40 miles and more away – it seems (sadly?) unimaginable today for such young kids to take themselves to such controversial and boisterous punk gigs at licensed premises. There was quite a lot of deceit required on our part to be able to pull it off week-after-week. But there we were, unaccompanied 14 and 15 year olds at The Jam, The Stranglers, The Clash, Siouxsie, The Undertones, Johnny Thunders, Penetration X-Ray Spex etc.
Before you ended up in Demob, you were in Blitz Boys, a band that released one great EP and disappeared into obscurity. Please share some stories about Blitz Boys.
The Blitz Boys was my first ‘proper’ band. But I’m not sure many people would recognise it as having such gravitas! We were 5 school friends who did the usual things of borrowing money from parents, buying terrible instruments from catalogues etc. until we had enough gear to begin a band. Then we tried to learn to play. We did that pretty much in public really. Some of our early gigs were supporting Demob, it was terrifying! It wasn’t so much the reputation of the band and their quite notorious fans, it was more the absolute terror of having to stand up on a stage and play.
Anyway, callow as we were we had an ear for a tune and, if we concentrated REALLY HARD, we could almost play the ones we wrote. We were all massive fans of The Undertones because they (and the whole Northern Ireland scene) seemed to be a little more analogous to our situation. I don’t mean the politics and the ‘Troubles’, I mean being the provincial, uncool, kids without the Kings Road fashions. It also gave us/them a little more leeway to be irreverent and not quite so po-faced. We recorded an E.P. with the title track ‘Eddie’s New Shoes’ and the great John Peel played it, liked it, and said how much he enjoyed bands who created their own cartoon world. It was our comment on societal ills . . . Eddie was a boy from a poor family who was terribly lacking in confidence, he thought that he might be able to ensnare the girl of his dreams if only he had some new shoes. I’ll not reveal the rest of the plot, but I warn your readers it’s pretty hard hitting stuff.
The E.P. has since been re-released (and has sold out) by the excellent New York label Sing Sing Records.
Blitz Boys live in 1980 (From Barry’s personal collection)
In 1981 you became the bass player in a reshuffled line up of Demob and part of UK punk history contributing to ‘No Room For You’. What are your memories of those days?
Demob’s bass player left, and I got a call from my old school friend Miff (who was by then the front man of the band) asking if I wanted to join. I wasn’t really a bassist but the offer was just too good to pass up. Their first single ‘Anti Police’ had created quite a storm – particularly in the South West – and they were also quite creative about maximising the PR opportunities presented by the frequent outbreaks of violence surrounding the band.
Pretty soon we were recording the ‘No Room For You E.P.’ and then setting out on a tour with the Angelic Upstarts. Thrown in were a few headline gigs and also odd dates with the likes of The Exploited and Discharge. There was no way I could refuse, some of these gigs were at the exact venues I had been going to see my (anti) heroes. These were pretty substantial (1,500 standing) halls and were almost always near to capacity.
The E.P. was pressed up in the few thousands and sold out, so it was re-pressed. But it was all very much a cottage industry thing. The label was based out of a record shop/stall in the market town of Monmouth in South Wales, and Miff did most of the sales and deliveries to record shops personally. He drove around the Midlands and the South West in his battered car with these boxes of records. It wasn’t universally well-received either, I think it was Melody Maker who really slated it. As it happens Gary Bushell of Sounds championed the band. There were competing theories about why, as there are competing views about Bushell. But things were taking a turn in a direction I (and some others in the band) didn’t like.
There were not many multi-racial punk bands in the UK in the early days so Demob was something of a focus. Our fans were a truly diverse bunch of kids from the city streets, black, white, Asian,punks and skins, straight and gay. But they were also a streetwise and ‘resilient’ bunch. Often racist skins would come looking to bust up our gigs but there was increasingly a kind of postcode rivalry between groups from different cities. At first the possibility of ‘a skirmish’ simply added a level jeopardy which teenagers (and young men in particular) all too often find quite attractive. But then it became something rather more routine, predictable, and ultimately depressing. And we were growing up too! So I left the band.
Demob continued for a bit, but Miff’s heart was no longer in it either – he deals with this very well in the book. They split after a year or so and didn’t reform for quite some time. When they did it was with the original singer Andy K and guitarist Terry plus other original members and they’ve done well for sure. Andy now lives in California and has a new incarnation of his Noise Agents about to hit the boards.
After Demob disbanded you continued with music and being in bands. I am sure that including myself there are lots of people out there not very familiar with your output from those years. Can you give us a brief summary as to what you were up to during said time?
I headed north to the glorious Steel City of Sheffield, at the time a real unknown to many people down south . . . but it was actually England’s 4th or 5th biggest city with a population of over 500,000. I loved it there and (with an interlude of 3-4 years)remained for more than 30 years. I formed a post-punk kind of twangy guitar Theatre of Hate band and we played with some greats acts like Big Country, Angelic Upstarts (again), and most memorably the Sisters of Mercy who were absolutely mind-blowingly good. I’d never heard of them when we turned up but, even just sound-checking, you could see they were really, special – this was early 1983 just as the ‘Alice’ 12” was released.
Forced back south for a while I hooked up with a very talented old school friend Ollie Cherer and we went through a few reincarnations from Kiss The Blade to The Wheel, where we signed a small record deal and started to pick up some good reviews. And also the video which accompanied the second or third single ‘The World’s A Cruel Mistress’ was aired on MTV (in the early days when getting a video played was incredibly exciting). A young upstart called James Aitken was one of our guitarists and you can see him briefly on the video. After a year or so he said he had to leave the band because his other band was getting bit of interest. We’d not taken it very seriously because we were older than him and thought we really were the rock’n’roll stars. A few months later EMF were #1 in the US Top 100 Billboard charts and #3 in the UK singles charts with ‘Unbelievable’. And you couldn’t escape that bloody wonderful slab of hooligan-pop/dance music anywhere!
James, and his EMF bandmates, have gone on to have stellar careers. Ollie has been prolific and highly successful as an underground solo artist (check out Dollboy and Gilroy Mere). And is now fronting his own Aircooled a superb (and uber cool) outfit with ex members of Wedding Present, JAMC, Elastica, who are really making a reputation for themselves. Along with that he is one-third of the Miki Berenyi Trio (ex-Lush) and is just about to set out on a US tour – check them out if you get thechance.
In the late 1980s I moved back to Sheffield again and formed the band which I think probably represented my most satisfying of that flimsy musical career, The Rainsaints. We put out an album and a single on the legendary Good Vibrations records of Belfast and we spent a lot of time – probably my happiest – playing over in Northern Ireland whilst ‘The Troubles’ were still a very real thing. Various personal ‘tragedies’ forced me to accept defeat and quit the dream of being a rock star. So I blagged my way on a History degree course as a mature student (history being one of my lifelong passions) and ultimately reinvented myself just a little.
Let us fast forward to 2011 when almost exactly thirty years after Demob’s final gig you received a Facebook message and friend request from a certain Sasa from a country that no longer existed. At that point did you ever think that you’ll become part of an international collaboration leading you to discover the history of ‘No Room For You’ in the former Yugoslavia? In your interview for the excellent Remembering Yugoslavia podcast (Episode 77 w/ Barry Phillips: In Search of Tito’s Punks) you said that initially you had thought it was an exaggeration that Demob’s song had achieved such high popularity in ex-Yugoslavia.
Yes, I really had no idea. I always use the word ‘surreal’ which I think is generally overused, often inappropriately. But to be sat alone at my home in Sheffield, having long since quit as a ‘professional musician’, and to find out via a Facebook message that ‘No Room For You’ was famous in Yugoslavia was definitely surreal. How could we possibly know? The Demob version had perhaps 30,000 Youtube views. But the first ex-Yu cover version (To nije mjesto za nas by KUD Idijoti - the definitive one) already had 150,000 views then, and now has more than half-a-million. The thing is that it is rewritten lyrically and translated. So it did not show up on any search for ‘No Room For You’.
Sale Veruda of Kud Idijoti and Barry in front of the Uljanik Rock Club in Pula, 2017 (Credit: Tomislav ‘Tompa’ Zebić)
Your book provides the reader with a glimpse into Yugoslavia's more recent history. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe you were initially strongly discouraged to touch on the wars that shook the country from 1991 to 1999. As a historian that also lived in the Netherlands, and to be precise in The Hague, you were in a position to be an educated voice from the outside. Please explain the process of including the wars in your book.
More than one person in ex-Yu advised me not to touch the wars. I totally understand the reasoning. Firstly, it was always likely that whatever I said would be divisive. Secondly, whatever I said was certainly going to be insufficiently informed.
But since I was writing initially for a non ex-Yu audience, AND my main aim was to inspire a rather richer and more nuanced understanding of the Balkans, I felt I had to make some reference. At the time I lived within a few hundred yards of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague. So I thought it would be interesting to look at the war through the lens of those court proceedings . . . I was not so concerned with who was being tried, my concern was how it all worked, what was its place in history, and who were all of these people inside and outside of the court security barriers and fences.
You have to remember, until then I had walked by this place almost every day for two or three years, and the historian in me was fascinated. So it was also, very much, an opportunity for me to better educate myself about an incredibly complex and contentious subject . . . and one where the received ‘western’ or NATO orthodoxy isn’t necessarily as incontrovertible as we recipients might be led to believe. I must add, that doesn’t mean I am judging it as wrong or right!
I was confident that if the people I interviewed wanted to discuss the wars, then their own stories could be far more enlightening than the hack analysis of a failed musician/struggling historian. In that, at least, I turned out to be correct.
Yugoslavia and its successor states.
The book reads like a mix between ethnology and punk history and I often felt like I was not just being educated about the history of Yugoslavian Punk and Post-Punk, but about the history of Yugoslavia itself. What did you learn about the country and its people?
There genuinely is too much to document here. It’s fair to say that anyone from the US or western Europe who reads the book will get a very good idea of what I learned because they will (largely) be learning the same for themselves. I had an outline understanding of the geo-politics, the chronology, and an abstract awareness of the brutality. But I had little idea how that impacted on people who were (are?) very similar to myself and my personal ‘community’.
BUT, and it is a HUGE but . . . firstly there was all of this incredible music. Of course, the starting point for the book is that I was initially unaware of the whole Yu punk and post punk scene but there is also amazing ‘Dark Wave’ stuff like Mizar and Anastasia, and then the Balkan folk of Sevdah, Klapa, Tamburitza. I found everyone was also keen to talk much more widely about Yugoslav culture. For example, I have become a massive fan of Yugoslav (and post Yu) movies – particularly the Black Wave movies. If that sounds a bit pretentious then I urge people to go out and find the ones available with subtitles. I think ‘Ko to tamo peva?’ (Who Is Singing Over There?) is available on Youtube with subtitles and it’s a good starting point. So too is ‘Skupljači perja’ (I Even Met Happy Gypsies). The later movie output is also tremendous. ‘The Marathon Family’ (Maratonci trče počasni krug) is another of my favourites. They are so dark but so funny.
And then there is the literature (Alexandar Tisma’s Book of Blam is now in my Top Ten) and painters like the great Serbian,Sava Šumanović. To someone who is only moderately ‘cultured’ this was like being introduced to a whole new world, and one which, for me, came without any preconceived judgements as to its merits.
Novi Sad punks – centre is the late Dragan Radosavljević aka ‘Dragus’ of the band Van Kontrole, also fanzine maker (Courtesy of Ljiljana Čenejac)
I think it’s fair to say that the book is the result of your 2017 trip to ex-Yugoslavia. Tomislav ’Tompa’ Zebic plays an integral role throughout the book as being your host and companion during said trip. If I remember correctly he was unable to enter the Serbian part of your trip, and honestly I missed him as I had gotten so used to his input. Give us an idea as to how important his role was for the book to take shape.
I didn’t know Tompa prior to beginning the research on the book. And it was actually quite late in the initial research process that we made contact through a mutual friend. I was beginning to plan the trip at that stage and Tomislav volunteered to help me with translations and logistics when required. He is a very talented photographer and I asked him if he would like to come along with me on the trip. He could help translate but also perhaps make a photographic record.
The reality was that he was considerably more than that, of course. On first meeting we struck it off and became very good friends. He has been a longtime fan of most of the people I was interviewing so his wide-eyed enthusiasm for the whole thing was visibly contagious! When you travel together by public transport you are in each other’s company pretty much 24/7 so I had access to his observations, reflections and anecdotes in real time.
We did the Slovenia and Croatia legs together but then Tomislav was prevented from travelling as planned with me to Serbia. I’ll not drop a spoiler here . . . the readers will find out for themselves why that was.
Tomislav ‘Tompa’ Zebić and Pero Lovšin (Pankrti) in Ljubljana (Photo by Barry)
The book was published through Intellect Books in collaboration with Punk Scholars Network. While it is not strictly an academic book, I imagine the way you had to approach your research and the writing itself for the book must have entailed different processes compared to working with more traditional publishing houses. Please expand on your experiences.
You’re right. I was writing the book I would want to read. So I wanted it to be beyond reproach with regards to standards of academic rigour, but also accessible . . . more than that I wanted people to actually enjoy reading it. But it must not be didactic.
That chip on my shoulder extends to hating being told what to think! So I approached it with all the rigour demanded of a PhD but without the constraints. That meant that everything had to be treble-checked by me, then by people in ex-Yu, and ultimately by fact checkers in the UK. But (unlike a PhD) it meant that the interviewees had considerable leeway to take the conversation down a route which they thought valuable. I used a semi-structured approach to the interviews – basically, I set out with the scaffolding of the same set of questions. But interviewees were at liberty to take them off at a tangent or to introduce different topics, just as long as the initial questions were tabled.
For this to work, the interviewees very generously gave up very considerable chunks of their time. I think the average interview was around 4 hours. The hardest part was probably some of the negotiations with Intellect (who are after all an academic publisher), very bravely accepting our challenge of breaking down some of the barriers between academic and mainstream. For example, I was insistent that, as far as possible, the interviews would be transcribed absolutely faithfully – with all the idiosyncrasies and quirks which come when an interviewee is speaking in a second language to an ignorant monoglot. I felt this was vital to retain their true ‘voice’. Intellect were very good to be fair (thanks to the co-editors and the people who made this happen – Russ Bestley and Mike Dines from the Punk Scholars Network) and even accepted my own, somewhat bastardised, accessible versions of footnoting and referencing.
Pero Lovšin (Pankrti) and Barry in Ljubljana (Credit: Tomislav ‘Tompa’ Zebić, 2017)
Unbeknownst to many people Yugoslavia had a really thriving punk rock, hardcore punk as well post-punk scene divided over the whole country. It is often mentioned in the book that each region had a different sound as the bands were often influenced by regional folklore music. Could you delve a little bit into the history of ex-Yugoslavian punk and why people should seek out the vast variety of music on offer. It also needs to be said that women played a quite important role in many ways.
A very brief run through in the words of a cultural tourist then! Bands began appearing very quickly after the UK-US punk scenes rocked our teenage worlds. But there were only a few bands initially and they were dispersed across what is now known as the ‘punk triangle’ of Yugoslavia – Ljubljana, Rijeka, and Zagreb – and key amongst them were Pankrti, Paraf, Prljavo Kazalište and Azra. Soon after this, Pekinška Patka from Novi Sad raised the flag for Serbian punk. There were of course others, too many to mention but I cannot omit Kuzle (from Idrija in Slovenia) who were also amongst the ‘early adopters’ and who I consider essential listening.
And, of course, a little later, the magnificent KUD Idijoti, without who this book would never have existed. Just as with John Peel in the UK, there were some crucial (courageous) radio DJs and stations who championed the new music – Igor Vidmar at Radio Student in Ljubljana is perhaps the Peel equivalent. But the heyday of Yugoslav punk is generally considered to be 1979 to 1984 and not 1977 to 1981. In terms of being accurate with the chronology, it is also important to stress that Tito died in 1980, but that this first wave of punks had grown up knowing no leader other than Tito.
The state music magazine Džuboks, and youth magazine Polet, rather surprisingly saw the punk light of day reasonably early and began to give Yugoslav and western punk bands very reasonable coverage. The role of the state is fascinating and contradictory, at times supporting bands as an important element of youth culture whilst at others attempting to rein in some of the messages and imposing a ‘morality’ tax on lyrics deemed offensive for any reason. For all of that, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, there was remarkably little material negative impact on the scene. It has to be remembered that these were Yugoslav state record labels releasing both the homegrown punk and the licensed versions of the US and UK stuff. That whole thing is far too nuanced to be covered here but anyone looking at the lists of records licensed might be surprised by the sophistication of the selection – some of my favorite, really cool, ‘cult’ US bands such as Real Kids and The Blasters are in there!
From Džuboks magazine #043, Feb 1978
Many bands were torn apart by members having to go on national service to the army and the book is full of some wonderful stories about that – dark and funny. Then the wars came and the country itself was torn apart, and with it any national scene. Those bands who stayed together were confined to their own country or even their own town. Of course, for some it was much worse as they sheltered under bombardment or became refugees. Many renowned artists left the country, some permanently.
During the 1980s and 1990s great bands emerged and several have survived until today and are still producing great music and shows – Partibrejkers, KBO! Obojeni Program, and Atheist Rap to just mention a few. Whilst there is no unified ex-Yu scene now (the legacy of the wars runs deep and the ramifications of some countries being welcomed into the EU whilst others are not are still playing out) there are still some terrific punk, post-punk and new wave bands who have developed long after the dissolution: Repetitor, M.O.R.T., Pogonbgd, Tito’s Bojs, Goribor, Erotic Biljan & his Heretics come to mind as some personal favourites.
I think most of the women who were part of the scene would say that women were initially very much under-represented, much more so than in the UK or US for example. There were of course exceptions, most obviously Vim Cola of Paraf, but I think it would be wrong to attribute any misogyny to ‘punk’ itself. Rujana Jeger said something along the lines of “I am thankful to punk because it released my sexuality, without making me a slave to it the way girls seem to be today.” It’s interesting that Rujana was raised partly in Rijeka and it was mentioned by others that Rijeka was the one place where female and male punks were equal. I can’t comment but it is possible that Rijeka (as a historically cosmopolitan harbour city on the Istrian coast) was something of an outlier in the relatively ‘traditional’ Balkan culture?
Women were far from excluded though – and the history of ex-Yu new wave would be so much poorer without Mira and Maja Mijatović, Rujana Jeger, Matija Vuica,Vesna Vrandečić, Vim Cola etc. What is true though is that women pushed their way to the front by the second wave and there were some very notable female bands – Novi Sad’s Boye for one and Tožibabe from Ljubljana for another.
Termiti, Ljubljana (Credit: Matija Praznik, 1981)
Touching on the subject of records, one chapter in particular comes to mind in which you interviewed Zdenko Franjic, the man behind Slusaj Najglasnije, a record label with literally hundreds of releases under its belt. What do people need to know about Zdenko and his music empire?
That’s a very interesting question. I honestly do not think it is possible to do justice to, or even to overstate, the role of Zdenko in Yugoslav punk, post-punk and new wave. I mean, the man is a force of nature. Imagine the UK scene without Rough Trade, Stiff and Small Wonder and you’ll get a fraction of Zdenko’s impact. Or the Northern Ireland scene without Terri Hooley and Good Vibrations. The man is indefatigable, he has released over a thousand records! Seriously. And then there are all the books. Nobody I know of anywhere on earth comes close to that kind of output.
When I told Tompa that Zdenko would be one of our first interviewees he was so excited. Zdenko was, and still is, his hero. The easiest way to explain it is that countless bands and acts I have come across – from the 1990s until quite recently –have turned out to have been discovered by Zdenko, who then ‘walked the walk’ by releasing their first records and giving them their break. Overflow, Goribor, Protektori, Majke, The Spoons, M.O.R.T, Messerschmitts, and the whole ‘Bombing of New York’ compilations. Not only that but he contacted (by old fashioned ‘mail’) some brilliant US garage bands like The Humpers, The Morlocks, Suicide Kings and released them in ex-Yu, which meant some followed up with tours. And his legacy is wider much than that, Ante Čikara and Sale Dragaš said that Zdenko showed them what was possible for independent labels and promoters in Yugoslavia. They then booked the likes of Mega City Four and Carter USM, and were cruelly thwarted by the war in their attempt to stage Nirvana in Croatia. But the world owes them (and Zdenko before) for bringing us the greatest surf-punk outfit there will ever be, The Bambi Molesters . . . from the inland river-port of Sisak. All five of their albums are worthy of legend, but ‘Sonic Bullets: 13 from the Hip’ deserves to be in any, and every, Top 100 of all time.
Zdenko Franjić, Zagreb (Credit: Tomislav Tompa Zebić, 2017)
Barry, with the release of the book and your trips to the former Yugoslavia I can imagine you have made a lot of friends and contacts, hence I am wondering whether there are more projects in the works?
For sure. From early in the initial research it became obvious that to do this thing justice was going to take more than one book. So the plan has always been to follow up with a similar (but different) exploration of the more southerly states of Yugoslavia. We are keen to be loyal to the concept and format, adhering to the same modes of transport and extended interview protocols. And for Tompa to document the entire thing photographically.
But that is more logistically challenging for a journey through Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Montenegro, and will require more time in transit and on the ground. So it will be a little more costly (and then there’s the additional issue of Kosovo). Everything first time around was self-funded as a labour of love and, as I’m sure you will know, the return on such an undertaking doesn’t come close to matching the time spent or the financial outlay. I have never fully put this aside to get on with other projects, it is always there nagging at me. The working title is ‘In Search of Goths, New Primitives and Spomeniks’. I am accumulating research and contacts as I go. I had hoped to be much further down the line by now but the lack of mainstream coverage has made it difficult to attract a publisher willing to commit to publication and putting in the (relatively small) funds necessary to make it happen.
However, on a MUCH more positive note . . . the Croatian translation of ‘In Search of Tito’s Punks’ is now complete and publication (by Rockmark in Zagreb) is thrillingly imminent! We are – right now – planning some ‘promotional events’ in Croatia later in the year (November). It’s all incredibly exciting on a personal level because translation to a native language for the domestic ex-Yu market is the biggest vote of confidence in the quality of the research. They can put that on my headstone.
Ljubljana punks Lila, Aina and Maćka (The Cat – rear) (Credit: Matija Praznik, 1981)
In conclusion I would like to end the interview coming full circle with the chapter in which you visit Gloucestershire interviewing former Demob guitarist and friend Robert ’Miff’ Smith. How surprised was he that a song that was written in 1981 took you on such a journey leading to a book?
Ha ha! Well Miff has continued his musical career (nowadays more as a ‘side project’) for 40 years since then. He and I have been through some ‘interesting times’ together and apart. We have played in bands together, and we have split to form our own bands, we have worked together on building sites, we once spent a few weeks sleeping in the boot of his car as we worked on an air force base, we’ve seen each other get married and divorced, but this is one scenario neither of us could ever have foreseen! Miff was pretty blown away by the whole thing.
As he says, it’s a great thing to find that something you created has touched all of these people in towns and cities you barely knew existed, and that it will live on long after you go. It’s like the very essence of ‘folk tradition’, isn’t it?Before the whole corona virus thing intervened, I had made plans with some excellent musicians (all of whom appear in the book) in ex-Yu for Miff and me to travel over and spend a couple of days in the studio recording a truly Anglo-Yu version of ‘No Room For You/To nije mjesto za nas’ and perhaps even a one-off gig. We have someone interested in making a documentary about it and, of course, Tompa would be there to shed some of his photographic magic-dust on the whole thing and make us look young and cool again.
I still have a dream that my lottery ticket will come up (or this book will be turned into a Hollywood movie) and we can make it happen.
Thanks again. Good luck with the zine. Step lightly!
Discharge, Ljubljana (Credit: Matija Praznik, 1981)
Personally I could have asked Barry another twenty questions, and the good man would have answered them, but the goal was to not write another book, but for you readers out there to buy “In Search of Tito’s Punks”. Up until reading Barry’s book I had a fair knowledge of some ex-Yugoslavian punk, mainly through records. Now equipped with more in-depth knowledge I too have caught the virus and promise you and myself that this interview is just the beginning of more writing about underground music made in ex-Yugoslavia. Stay tuned and Hvala Barry!
