Memories of the Soviet Invasion

Many readers have asked me to tell more stories about my years in the Soviet music industry. It was a long time ago, but I’ve managed to come up with a few old photos to spur the memories. Unfortunately, the memories aren’t all pleasant, but then, neither is the music industry.
As I’ve said before, my first band, pictured above, was the Grostinkas, and we played Moscow cabarets and less fancy dives during the late 1960s. We quarreled often, mostly over creative direction.
I was unable to hide my disdain for the lyre players, but the band’s founder, former cosomonaut and national hero Yuri Gagarin, squatting opposite me on the left of the photo, was insistent, and he claimed to have the support of the Politburo. “Besides, those aren’t lyres,” Yuri insisted, “they’re chairs.”
As soon as the drugs wore off, of course, I could see his point, but by then I’d realised that my bandmates were way too serious anyway, and quit the group. I’d been invited to join Igor Granov’s Synthy Troupe, which was making good money at the time in Balkan nightclubs.

Igor had a five-man synthesiser outfit that specialised in very zippy renditions of Tchaikovsky, but he needed something to fill out the sound, quite apart from the constant barking of his father’s Great Dane. I suggested a bicycle bell, it added just the right touch, and a whole new career opened up to me.
We put out two albums and played something like 5,000 wedding receptions in the year and a half I was with the troupe, but in the end my bell-ringing thumb simply gave way, and a state doctor advised me to try a different instrument or risk permanent damage. I struggled on for a few more months, using my toes, but it was hopeless, and I gave up performing altogether for a full decade.
I turned my throbbing hand instead to designing album covers for other artists. Below are a couple of the ones of which I’m most proud.

Debytuka C Odrodseku was Georgian chanteuse of Hungarian descent who sang a wicked version of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” that was a huge hit in the midst of the sex scandal involving Brezhnev’s gay son.
I think the fact that I depicted Deby holding her own photo makes for a clever trompe l’oeil. There’s more!

I redis- covered that, for the price of my £1 ticket, I got to hear “Train Kept a-Rollin’”, “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, “Dazed and Confused”, “As Long as I Have You”, “Killing Floor”, “White Summer / Black Mountainside”, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, “You Shook Me”, “How Many More Times”, “Communication Breakdown” and “Pat’s Delight”.
Manchester was the third night on a seven-stop English tour for the recently fledged supergroup, after Newcastle and Birmingham. Bristol, Portsmouth and Bath followed, and then they finished things off at London’s Royal Albert Hall on the 29th.
Wonder what I did with my own ticket? 




















