a single year hasn’t passed when I didn’t come at least twice. I come for the Belgrade vitamin that I need to live, for a dose of Ser- bian humour, to eat and drink something good, to view the beauty it offers and re- turn home after three days, because that’s long enough for any guest. And I don’t ex- perience those visits as though I’m arriving in a foreign country, but rather as though I’m returning to the world I’ve been living in all this time with my soulmates. You’ve dedicated several songs to your soulmates – colleagues who are no longer with us. Who do you miss the most? - I miss most of my peers - those I start- ed my career with, those with whom I social- ised and created something new. Among them were Vlada Divljan, Margita Stefanović, Boško Petrović, Arsen Dedić, Darko Glavan, Dražen Vrdoljak, Istok Puci, Davor Ričl, Aljoša Buha et al. Unfortunately, I could continue listing for a long time. During the time of the new wave in Yugoslavia, music was created that still resonates today. I’m aware that we irritate new generations with the new wave,
but some new band always ends up paying tribute to those times and that music. Back then we were the third biggest power in world music, but we weren’t aware of that fact. Now, many years later, we can clearly see that that was the case. Everyone ideal- ises their own youth, myself included, but today I can see that, many times through- out history, it has happened that quality has been concentrated on a certain period and people who are otherwise close. In Amer- ica, those were the people who invented rock’n’roll - Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison... And our new wave was like that: from Pankrt to Idoli, Orgazam, Haustor, EKV, Lačni Franz... A dozen names marked that time, and when I remember those comrades who are no longer with us, I am overcome by some melancholy, which is in its own way justified and productive. Do you see bands on today’s music scene that could create some new ‘new wave’? - Some have already brought it. Dubioza Kolektiv and S.A.R.S. made a shift. There are perhaps lots of new bands that I don’t know,
so it would be unfair for me to say there aren’t any. They certainly exist, but everything else has changed. The media acts completely dif- ferently towards local music than it did in our time. We had more luck with that. We re- corded albums at a time when discotheques first started playing domestic stuff, when the media could hardly wait for new releases, competing to see who would discover an- other band. Today’s media companies are all owned by almost the same capital, they pro- duce their own stars, and have even started producingtheirownmusic.Until20yearsago, music was always a medium through which new ideas were spread, messages that they wanted to change the world. Today there’s none of that. Julian Assange is the new John- ny Rotten, Wikileaks is punk. And we need to be aware that this is just a phase and to build our own communication method, our own music, our own songs that will contain our attitude. Perhaps that doesn’t lead to an- ything, but rebelliousness has always been in my character. If someone had told you back in the 1980s that you would sing songs by Zdravko Čolić and Bijelo Dugme, what would you have said? - I’d probably have declared them cra- zy and argued with them. But that hap- pened, because at one point it represented a challenge to me. I like knocking my head through the wall, if I’m sure that I’m right. The idea for “Tragove u sjeti” [Traces in re- membering] was born while I was sitting on some hotel balcony listening to an or- chestra performing the Beatles’hit“Yester- day”, and I could clearly hear my own ver- sion. My colleagues gladly allowed me to do covers of songs. When we started per- forming them at concerts, what I predicted happened. People sing them from begin- ning to end; they know all the words, not just the choruses, and they bring everyone memories of some situation in life. You perform with guys whose fathers listened to Lačni Franz. What is that cooperation like? - Songs are beyond time and quality doesn’t age. They listened to them through their fathers and were close to those songs, and when they played them, they became theirs. They all fulfilled some of their de- sires by joining the band and visiting plac- es they probably wouldn’t have otherwise seen. On the other hand, I really learned a scary amount of things from them. This is a kind of symbiosis of different ages, ideas, upbringings... I’m just one of five. The guys were initially a little restrained, like schoolkids on a graduation excursion with their teach- er, but now, after three years, there are no more misunderstandings. They are now the energy that equally directs our crazy ship.
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