Idols and Konstructa are from the same streets

Consensus on the best music albums or movies is almost never a very durable commodity. From year to year, from decade to decade, the audience, just like professionals in the media, relentlessly and unconsciously relive the emotional inventory of their stored musical memories, and after each such inventory comes a revision of the old intimate order in our heads and hearts.

Such inventions are indeed exciting in themselves - after many years, from some dusty corner in the cluttered attic of our cerebral cortex, where our own biological imprints of all the countless songs we have ever heard grow, suddenly a song that we haven't heard in a little eternity pops out again, so divine warmth just flows from somewhere and we say to ourselves: gentlemen, this sounds even better than when I heard it for the first time 40 years ago. Of course, there are quite the opposite surprises, so we scratch our heads in great wonder if we haven't discovered why once upon a time we loved this song that now sounds so unbearably hollow, pretentious or pathetic.

As much as consensuses are by definition a perishable commodity, there are a small number of exceptions, which over time prove to be more durable and robust than the Egyptian pyramids. In global terms, the most brilliant such exception is certainly the Beatles.

In our country - how is it defined among people from these parts who happen to meet at an airport in the middle of America; that is, for those of us who lived in the SFRY - this status of exception has only a few rock 'n' roll albums from the era of the new wave. And then, among those albums, only one has an even more exceptional status.

Plate Defense and last days VIS Idola lasts like a supernova of pop culture – an explosion that never used up its cosmic fuel and there is no indication that the intensity of that brilliance could oscillate or weaken in the foreseeable future. The consensus about the unique and unrepeatable genius of this album flashed already in the first weeks after it was released on the market under the Jugoton label, and it continues to this day, when we see on the calendar that it has been full and round 40 years since the supernova Idol flashed above the pop the horizon of one (today, due to our own historical circumstances, we see and know this more clearly than then) by all accounts, a unique and fascinating place on the border of East and West, on the border of two of the world's largest religions, and with a wonderful view from the front row of the Iron Curtain.

Apart from cosmological metaphors, the sound of this album instinctively invokes an architectural metaphor about the spirit of the place. Apart from Laibach and today the architect of Konstructa, it is hard to imagine another musical name from the Balkans who sang our GENIUS LOCI so divinely and elegantly, as did the Idols of that long-ago winter '81/82. in Studio 6 of Radio Belgrade.

And as I type "spirit of the place" on the keyboard in capital letters in the dead language of the Roman Empire, I am tempted to, like countless others before me, begin to ponder on what is hidden in the deeper layers. Defense in the last days. And what that music had to say to us then, and what today. And it is not very easy to resist and not to swallow such a bait, because these are songs that inspire unconscious flows of emotions and thoughts from each repeated listening. This music is, therefore, unique in that it is already a huge pile of everything that has been written about it in the last 40 years.

Fortunately, this time it was more than easy to resist the siren call of writing deep thoughts because Siniša Škarica, then editor of Jugoton, wrote perhaps the most honest and precise lines about Idols and their creative epicenter embodied in the late Vlada Divljan.

That's how it happily coincided that there was a double occasion for a conversation with Sinisa. 40 years ago, he was the editor of Jugoton who, in the middle of the eco system of self-managing socialism and in an impossible mission, managed to ensure the group complete creative control in the release of the record we are talking about. Citing the ballad in the title Heavenly theme, recently published the text "Me and my Idols" on his Facebook forum. In some parallel reality, that post could be an epitaph on Vlad's grave, which would bring smiles both to us living and to those who live up there listening to how "the heavens sing of glory".

VLATKO FRAS: Sinisa, I read your Facebook post with great pleasure. What touched me the most was how fresh your memories are still. It is clear that private and professional are always intertwined, but this time you put it all in a global context.

PORINI AND ME

BLUE SCISSORS: First of all, it's nice that it touched you, that text is about Idols, actually about Vlada Divljan. In it it also reflects my attitude towards Defence. And you saw, I am not one of those who exalt Defense to the very top of Yugoslav rock production. I see at least ten albums above that record: if I can be selfish, theirs too Mini LP. Of course, that album is handicapped by the lack of minutes and a few more songs to enter the competition for "the best LP of all time".

As far as I remember, criticism at that time was not in unison on the issue of range either Odbrane, and the market decline was evident. For example, Belgrade's "Rock" voted Azrine as the convincing champion for "rock album 82" in a traditional poll of music critics and journalists. Filigree pavements.

The truth, Defense took second place, but with a big gap of 40 points. If you remember, each of the 29 respondents - from Peca Popović to Darko Glavan - chose five favorites, and the ranking list was designed so that each first place earned five points, second place four, etc. So, Filigree got 90 points, Defense 50. The fifth was Zana i Touch my knees with 20, with the sixth being Azrin Straight to the bottom with 17, which means that Johnny and Azra enjoyed overwhelming popularity.

But what is more interesting is that among the 29 respondents, even 16 did not see it Defense among the top five! For those 13, however, she was in the first or second position, which brought the album the place of runner-up.

What could be the conclusion of such an epilogue?

Yes Defense experienced in extremes.

If we go back in time to 1982. year, Can you start by telling me if you remember the first time you heard the material from Odbrane?

I think I visited the Idols twice then, at the end of '81, during the filming in "Sestica". There in the studio I realized that they were struggling with something quite different from what they had recorded for Mini LP, which is after them A package deal brought all-Yugoslav popularity. I would say, first of all, Zagreb, Croatia, which then - let's not forget, thanks to the cooperation with Film - spread in concentric circles in the former state.

Did you have any doubts about the commercial side of such a radical sound?

I didn't! Right away, even during the recording, everything was clear to me. I knew that Defense it will not even come close to the commercial success it previously achieved.

Is it fascinating to you with what ease and intelligence the Savage has its primal nature singer songwriter incorporated into an extremely conceptual album?

Vlada was inspired by music, good music. We know about his very different early sources of inspiration: Dubrovnik troubadours, Zvonko Bogdan, Black Sabbath... Furthermore, Zdenko Kolar and he were the only active musicians of that group. Divljan fit in Defense because after all, they were Idols, their striving for something different, important, which, as we said, can be heard from the beginning. In the beginning, they were designed as a band of diversity, a band campa. It was playing with kitsch, flirting with the ridiculous, making the album both funny and attractive. Idols are an intelligent team and they looked for a place where their musical skills would suffer the least. Vlada was part of the team: the most important, but still a part.

VLADA, GILE, KRLE AND ME

Actually, I want to say yes regarding that dimension Defense it feels like an imaginary Kraftwerk record recorded with Cohen, or as the place where Laibach and Arsen Dedić crossed paths...

If by some chance Arsen and Laibach had found themselves together, I am convinced that it would have worked. And I also know that Arsene would dominate.

And can you think of any other musical name that created music with such ease in two such completely opposite universes?

Didn't Dylan become Dylan by merging opposite universes? Couldn't the same be said for the rise of David Bowie? After all, rock 'n' roll itself was born as a kind of bastard of country, blues and European musical heritage. Elvis built his kingdom on opposing universes.

Although I know all the lyrics by heart, even today I don't fully understand them, as no dictionary has the answer to what the Ramones actually mean by Gabba Gabba Hey. How did you experience them then??

Yes, the lyrics are enigmatic, but for me, the first impression of a vocal work was always about the experience through music, through melody and harmony, through voice, rhythm or riff, and not through the text. From He only kisses once do Like A Rolling Stone...

That's easy to explain. When we listened to the first records of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day or Sinatra as nine- or ten-year-old kids, we didn't understand the lyrics. The same happened soon after with Elvis, Little Richard, Cliff Richard, then Johnny Hallyday or Celentan and Peter Kraus - English, French, Italian, German, we were not interested, we did not understand them. But we were fascinated with A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom, Tutti Frutti, Good golly miss molly, ReadyTeddy, Long tall sally... that was enough for us. Those were the codes of our music.

Therefore, the lyrics were not important?

I once talked about it with guitarist legend Vedran Božić and we came to the same conclusion: no, the lyrics were not important to us. And that's how we learned to listen to music. Of course, afterwards, especially at home, we discovered the texts. Without good lyrics, there is no good pop music, but in my deciphering of good music, the habit of first impression through music remained.

It is impossible to speculate about the extent of whose personal authorial contribution to Defence... It is clear that it would then be impossible for Srđan Šaper and Nebojša Krstić to find any government-caliber replacement for their eventual conceptual projects.. On the other hand, it is obvious that Divljan also liked collaborations outside of his own singer songwriter domains. What is your impression??

Strength and weakness Odbrane are reflected in the Government's role. During the preparation and recording of that album, the idols tried desperately to create something new again. To take a step further, a step away from their little masterpiece, the camp one Mini album. As I said, they struggled for a couple of months in the studios of Radio Belgrade, recording, erasing, recording. You can hear everything there.

Great desire and great uncertainty turned into experimentation with guests, with sounds, dirty chords and dissonant effects.

Surrealist verses, which you say you don't understand even today, left room for different interpretations, speculations about transgender and androgynous - which is still talked about today - then about the religious aspect, then about Orthodoxy - which is relevant today - about the Cyrillic alphabet ( and that, of course), about Russia, about Titus, about Jesus, the story about Borislav Pekić, a suspicious intellectual and his novel, whose title they took over, seemed only prophetic at the time, today and ominous.

All this made that "heavy" record lose the market race with their previous drinkable, likable, humorous and romantic, at the same time turning into a cult album, in the true sense of the word.

It seems to me that it was more motivated by the government's character as a person who really loves people, but purely for career reasons.

Regarding Divljan's role on Defence, I will answer with a counter-question: what if they were purely his songs The last days, Heavenly theme, Rusija, The only, Come on, dream of me., dream on, Where are you now, kitty? maco were an integral part of that earlier record - Mini album!? Which of the two would compete for the Yu-rock album title of all time today?

Otherwise, for Where are you now, kitty? maco Srđan, possibly the main ideologue of the album, said that if they felt that they were gone somewhere too far, included songs like hers, which was like the "Crazy card in the tarot".

Clearly it is Defense flew so high early on that it was impossible to imagine what the next album would sound like. Can you think of anyone else on the world stage who has suffered such a tragic curse "too early" remek works? The ones that come to mind have not had wars like us.

You don't have to go that far. Foliage covers Lisbon Electric Orgasm is a forgotten masterpiece. In the mentioned ranking, it shared the 10th and 11th places with Balasevic Pub. But it had the misfortune that its creators Gile and the band went on to a successful life mainstream rock attractions and 40 years after its publication, so in such a long career they are more acceptable to a wider audience Distortion or As the drum says left a stronger mark. Its curse is that it remains their least noticed album, almost completely forgotten.

By the way, I don't believe that the war had anything to do with the fact that the Idols did not repeat such a record. Perhaps the "war between them", which began to simmer after they did not repeat the success of the early works, was more important.

Are they, means, Idols tried to improve the market situation?

They did, so Chocolate really achieved great commercial success. But constructions and Odbrane and Chocolates compared to the spontaneity of the early works were fatal for the band's life. Chocolate was their epitaph, because Six Days of June, the last thing signed with the name of Idol, is actually a Government plaque.

We mentioned Arsene. If you look at everything he did after Idol, it is clear how close Vlada was to him in his sensibility. Ili, npr, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey... I talked to some musicians with whom he collaborated, and one of their first associations with him was Arsen Dedić.. You knew both of them, so I'm certainly interested in your insight into those parallels?

This is what Mladen Matičević, the director, is about Heavenly themes, a film dedication to Vlad Divljan, talked a lot as admirers of the character and works of both. Both Arsena as the father of the singer-songwriter or singer-songwriter guild, as well as Vlade, as someone whose premature departure did not allow him to fully realize that role.

He was person A in front of Idol in discussions and agreements regarding their record status. In our contacts, I saw him as firm, determined in the need to fight for better working conditions and their precise implementation. He strove for the perfection of performance and tonal recording, so that is also the reason why the recording was done Odbrane dragged on. Arsene was the same, often hard and unyielding.

At the same time, both of them, as you suggest, were extremely witty and warm people, ready to accept advice and return thanks.

Looking at today, could it be said that Constructa could only be created on the same streets where the Idols walked?

You said it nicely! At Konstructa, you can hear the "art dimension", the "intelligence" that the Idols were playing with A package deal over Mini album to especially Odbrane. There it is strongly felt that the song was created on a riff, on a rhythm or a textual idea. That they constructed it. In this mode, there is not much room for rich harmonies and melodic cantilenas. Most great pop composers have a melody that they harmonize and then add lyrics to. Remember McCartney and Yesterday.

If we were to deal with the comparison with the Beatles and the gift for a shifted melodic line, unexpected harmonies or a discrete rhythmic leap, come to mind Sandcarrier or My city?

And then, in a conversation with Matičević, I compared him to the compositional talent of a Beatle. Not only Paul, but also John, who made up for his lack of formal musical education with unexpected solutions. In any case, the government is among those who start from music. I would say that like me, and that's where we found ourselves, as Nick Cohn once said about himself, he was a "sucker for a fine pop tune". In that sense, although we haven't discussed it, I think he would have liked Brian Wilson better than Frank Zappa.