Published on June 23rd, 2014 | by Martin Aston
0“The Party Is Over”: Russia’s rock underground before Perestroika
In 2003, I interviewed Natasha Hull, a Russian photographer, living in London whose exhibition in London’s East End told the story of a real underground, where rock’n’roll was banned or heavily policed and your only civil liberties were threatened, but your physical safety…
“Here,” Natasha Hull points to a photo of Russian rock icons Victor Tsoi and Kostyu Kinchev, “this was politically incorrect.” Yet both men, with happy drunken eyes, can be seen sharing a bottle of wine. “It was 1987, the time of prohibition,” Hull recalls. “To see this bottle is a political statement. Even a glass, the authorities wanted me to hide.”
But it was a very popular photo of mine, I printed up literally thousands.”
In the world of the real Big Brother, before Perestroika, the luminaries of the USSR’s underground rock scene and self-appointed scene photographer Hull did battle with the “absolute” (Hull’s word) censorship of the Soviet system, which believed rock to be “a rotten Western influence and therefore forbidden.” At the start, though, before the KGB had wind of the scene, she’d befriended some musical types who hung out at St. Petersburg’s Sphinx café – “they didn’t call themselves bands then, they were just guys with guitars”. She started snapping slides of them, who’d all gather in her kitchen to watch the slides of themselves. The gatherings outgrow her kitchen, so she switched to shooting black-and-whites, and in the absence of a rock media, sell prints to fans at gigs. Her friends became Russia’s underground rock superstars, especially the Lennonesque, statuesque figure of Boris Grebenshikov, leader of the revered Aquarium.
Grebenshikov features prominently in Hull’s photo exhibition in London’s East End last month (part of the celebrations surrounding St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary). Her photos eschew simple imagery: they constitute a secret history of rock’n’roll and an awareness of rock as a rebellious force that went much deeper than it ever had to in the west. Hull captures the protaganists’ beautiful resistance – a wine bottle here, a man in eyeshadow and lipstick there, even a T-shirt printed with a band’s name on it, as modelled backstage one night in 1986 by vulnerably moody quintet Arisa. A similar no-no was an audience with the audacity to stand in their seats. “Nobody could think this is a party conference!” she grins. The transgressive thrill, so long absent from western rock, is profound. “The official Soviet attitude was that we didn’t have rock, sex and drugs. But if I have a photo that proves that you have rock music, I’m permitting a crime against communism.”
With no actual written law against rock music, long hair or jeans (which KGB agents would take scissors to in the street). Hull was frequently arrested (“for my short skirt, for my wild hair, for just being there!”) but always let go. Eventually, the numbers of Russian hippies got too many. “They couldn’t arrest everyone! In the end, you cannot possibly control what people are listening to in their homes, or what they read, or want.”
To Hull, who married a Brit and has lived in London since 1995, rock music didn’t just perform the same liberating function in the East as it had in the West two decades earlier, it was behind “the actual collapse of communism. That is my deep conviction. The generation that heard this music was the first in Soviet history that actually had a voice, to say aloud what they thought. As soon as people stop being afraid of saying what you think, that’s it. They can’t kill or imprison everybody who speaks the truth. This is what I wanted to show in my pictures.”