Better Not to Meet the Magicians

Not long ago, going through my records, I pulled out a bootleg of Coil live in Moscow. I had to look up the date: 15 September 2001, DK Gorbunova, the old Gorbushka. Four days after the towers came down in New York. The date I had forgotten. Nothing else about that night needed looking up.

My friend Andrey had a friend, Ivan Pavlov, who records as CoH and who opened the evening. Ivan put us on the list. What followed was not a concert in any sense I had known until then. The sound was not only heard; it was felt by the body, through the floor and in the chest. The visuals swallowed the hall. The band stood on stage in overalls smeared with what looked like blood, playing with light bulbs as if they were instruments, which that night they were. I walked out a different listener from the one who had walked in.

What I did not know until later was that Andrey had been expected backstage. He never went. Another friend from Nizhny Novgorod who did make it through brought him souvenirs at the train afterwards. Andrey did not mind in the least. The impression was so immense, he said, that he preferred not to meet the magicians in person. A quarter of a century on, I think he was right, and I think his choice says something about what music was for us then.

Lausanne, June 2026

This summer I went to see Cabaret Voltaire at Les Docks in Lausanne, part of what has been billed as their farewell run. Richard H. Kirk died in 2021; the name is now carried by Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, the two surviving founders. It was a good night. And yet I could not shake a thought that has been following me around for some time: that I was watching the closing chapter of a way of making music that will go when the bands who invented it in the late seventies and eighties go, words spoken or sung over short, repetitive compositions.

The new releases

The same thought returns every time I go through the lists of new releases and reissues. The reissues are where the energy is, which is already telling. As for the new music, it is obvious that there are loads of young men and women who can play their instruments with a virtuosity that would have made some of my heroes blush. It is equally evident that their music does not touch me the way The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Weather Report, Miles Davis, The Clash or The Stranglers did, and still do. Two of those names made music with barely a word in it, so this is not only about lyrics. It is about necessity: the sense that the record had to exist, that somebody would have burst had they not made it.

Almost any month’s list will give you a reissue of a record that changed popular culture when it first came out. Some artists managed that with every album; others released masterpieces and cultural phenomena interspersed with more pedestrian efforts. But they had something to say and something to play. Robert Fripp or Klaus Schulze, Leonard Cohen or Fabrizio De André: without fail, they made music. We are still living in a time when my generation remembers books, not texts; albums, not dropped tracks.

Last year I took a long walk with the new album by Geese, a band much praised by people whose taste I usually respect. Some of the music was perfectly listenable. The lyrics, though, struck me as so infantile and so divorced from any recognisable reality that a second listen was out of the question.

Recycling

What I hear instead, more and more, is the past being recycled: in the music, in the lyrics, even in the names of the bands. Bob Vylan clearly took a great deal of effort to come up with. Greta Van Fleet borrowed their name, innocently enough, from an elderly woman in their Michigan home town, yet the band sounds so much like Led Zeppelin that the name starts to feel like one more quotation. Even when it is not intentional, it reads like a grim reminder of how little is left to invent.

I should be honest here, because the charge cuts both ways. Cabaret Voltaire took their name from Hugo Ball’s Dada club, which opened in Zurich in 1916. My heroes borrowed too. The difference, I think, is direction. A Sheffield trio naming itself after a Dada cabaret in the 1970s was making a declaration of intent: it pointed forward, toward noise, chance and provocation. A pun on Dylan points only back at Dylan.

I know that every generation says this, and that somewhere, in rooms I no longer go to, someone is probably having their own Gorbushka night right now. I would be glad to be proven wrong. But I keep coming back to Andrey on that platform, turning over the souvenirs he had chosen not to collect in person. The magicians were real enough that meeting them might have diminished them. I find it hard to imagine anyone today needing that kind of protection from their favourite band.

My Treasure Cont. 3

I needed to look at the Discogs catalogue to remind myself when exactly I got this next record – Acintya – La Cité Des Dieux Oubliés. This must have been on a day when I was digging online through the Ricardo offers in search of something rare and interesting in 2023. I am not that big of a collector and this feeling of wanting to find something in a sea of nothing is one that I share with the more successful ones.

Undoubtedly, the only record I have that is made by a band from Nancy, France. The boy from 1986 that I once was would have immediately offered the only known fact about this place in France: that’s where Michel Platini started his professional career in 1970s. Acintya too started in 1970s and remains a progressive rock fan possible interest, not a music fan’s necessity.

The name of the band (Achnitya in English) is the name of the supreme god of Indonesian Hinduism, particularly revered on the island of Bali and equivalent to the metaphysical concept of Brahman of Indian Hinduism (thank you Wikipedia).

The record is the only one the band ever made. Two reviews I was able to find note the eclecticism of the compositions, influences of the classical and electronic music, a great display of virtuosity from the violinist Philippe Clesse and the keyboardist Philippe De Canck and rate it at about 3 and 3.5 out of five.

I would say that this is the kind of record I might play when stumbling upon it late at night, completely oblivious to what the music sounds like but willing to play it just because it will take me back to this evening when I was digging through Ricardo’s virtual crates in search of something curious.

My Treasure cont. 2

I can swear that the Accept logo, with the A and the T joined up, was by far the most popular, or maybe the only one that was omnipresent on every wall in Gorky. God knows why. I was never close to anyone who back then would have a bunch of Accept records. In fact, years before my purchasing power squeezed its way up into the theoretical possibility of buying one, every boy in the class was supposed to select either “metal” or “wave” as their true style. Accept were metal. Wave was their compatriots Modern Talking or artists like CC Catch or the Austrian band Joy: Life is life, nah nah na-na-na.

Now, this particular album had the aura of the fruit forbidden twice. Metal was forbidden. In addition to that, even though none of us could make out any words, let alone sense from the lyrics, the cover of the record that circulated in black-and-white photos that were taken from other black-and-white photos, showed the band dressed up as Russian White Army officers and the title made everyone relate to it immediately. It was Russian Roulette. Russian written in English was cool.

And it goes without saying that if Accept made any videos (I don’t know if they did), they would not and could not be shown on the Soviet TV. I can’t remember if that’s my own invention or someone else shared their fantasy with me, but the mental image I have when listening to this next song was that of their singer taking out an alarm clock out of his pocket, showing seconds left before the end of the world in a nuclear attack and proceeding to scream the refrain.

The record next to it is AC/DC’s live record that made its way into my collection just because I could not have passed on the constant companion to my running. These live performances that were later embellished in the studio are not probably the most popular amongst the AC/DC fans. The drummer here is Chris Slade, the shaven head Shrek-like gentleman previously known for his work with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and not the more original drummer who much later was sentenced for trying to get a contract out on someone. I do like AC/DC although stating that I am a fan would be disrespectful to the many die-hards the band so richly deserves.

By trial and error, this AC/DC live album from 1990 proved to be a near perfect soundtrack to my runs that at the peak were typically 16km twice a week and anything between 10km and 13 km once a week. I removed several tracks (Fire Your Guns did not sound right and the intro to The Razor’s Edge was too long) but I loved listening to the 14 minute version of Jailbreak that most people would probably find boring. Not me. Given my lack of musical ability and intelligence, I grew to love the lengthy section where Malcolm Young is producing a powerful but minimalist demonstration of economical rhythm guitar playing and his brother is weaving increasingly powerful but simple solo phrases in parallel.

I was lucky enough to catch the disintegrating band live on a show in Zurich on their Rock or Bust tour. Malcolm was no longer touring but still alive, I believe. The stadium was packed with people way past their youth and presentable looks. There were lines for the blue toilet cabins. Bald and fat men playing air guitars in the aisles on their eighth trip to get more beer looked ugly. Just like with any stadium concert, the impression I got was being sat on the 9^th floor balcony in my block of flats in Gorky and looking at a bunch of guys striking poses a block away.

But just before AC/DC went into Thunderstruck, probably, my favourite song from their vast repertoire, there was thunder and lightning and the heavens opened. It was a summer night and after the mandatory salute, we went to the car park to drive back home. By the time we got to the car, we were completely soaked and happy. This, quite possibly, was the best stadium gig experience for me.

My Treasure

What kind of treasure does your music collection have? A readily available resource called Discogs will help you out almost in an instant. It is quite rare that the bar code off the back of your record or CD, or in case you own records from the pre-bar code era, the catalogue numbers will not be found by Discogs. Almost everything will have a valuation, almost everything will have a history of buying and selling.

When you think of it, that’s how it should be but in my experience, that’s not how it has always been. For me, my current situation of being firmly rooted in a very pleasant country on the right side of the Iron Curtain, is a gift in itself and time has put an abyss between my days in the Soviet Union’s city of Gorky, back then, the city of the Academician Andrey Sakharov’s guarded exile.

In those days owning a record meant being part of a slightly parallel reality, at times more rewarding, at times more dangerous and often times heart-breaking. Danger could come from the police (then – militia) raiding a weekly gathering of owners of records and those wishing to own them or tape them. Danger could come from the small but well organized groups of youths who did not care about the music but were eager to promptly separate isolated record owners from the rest and quickly dispossess them of their records, most of the time with a bit of physical violence to improve the effectiveness of the rather unilateral transaction. Heartbreak could come from being tricked into buying a record to discover that the labels had been switched and what you paid for dearly was in fact worthless. Heartbreak could come from the necessity to ditch your very valuable records while running downhill lest you be caught in possession by an eager volunteer or Mr Policeman to avoid the follow up in school or university, which involved explanations of varying degrees of gravity to panels of varying degrees of importance to help them understand why the young man standing before the esteemed panel chose to come into questionable ownership of a piece of anti-Soviet propaganda.

Back in the mid and late eighties I spent several years in the gradually thawing environment with my best friend whose parents generously financed about 90 per cent of our acquisitions that together amounted to a rather modest collection of less than moderate value. To us it was a treasure nonetheless. We had Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Rainbow and even though some of the gatefolds had been cut out by previous listeners and the records would be sometimes graded as VG at most, we played them, talked about them, researched them and were very happy.

I still have a couple of records that survived the 90s when the vinyl was pronounced dead. They remind me of Pavel, my friend who died in an accident in his prime. It reminds me of the time when what we heard meant more than what it cost.

So I thought to put together a series of illustrated stories that would lead the way through my greatly expanded collection that I can keep and not worry about running away from the police. How to build this path is a question because for a disorganized person like me, my collection is relatively well organized, alphabetically and chronologically. Plus, working my way through every Jethro Tull record would make me a competitor to Seva Novgorodsev, whose programmes on the BBC Russian Service I listened to every Friday at midnight and, I should add, who read two of my letters posted with rather little hope of them making it to London. They did.