Observations on post-sov rock
To most people the impending marriage of Yevgenia, 26, daughter of Ukraine's former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko, to Sean Carr, 36, the Yorkshire-born, tattooed lead singer of the thrash metal group Death Valley Screamers, may appear a little odd. To anyone who has spent time in the former Soviet Union, however, it comes as no surprise: music fans of Yevgenia's generation are obsessed with headbanging, weaned as they were on bootleg copies of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. To them, anyone connected with prog rock or heavy metal has godlike status: Alice Cooper is their Sid Vicious, the Scorpions their New Romantics.
I lived in St Petersburg in the mid-1990s. Back home it was Oasis v Blur, but everyone I knew in Russia who was in their late teens and early twenties wanted to listen only to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Robert Fripp.
At the time, I had barely heard of these people and it took a while to understand that, in a climate where access to western music was not always straightforward, the first "illegal" music they had ever heard stayed with them. It represented freedom. It also symbolised a turning away from their parents' musical expression of rebellion - the Beatles. Whenever I announced I was making a trip home I was inundated with requests for Metallica T-shirts.
I was also required to translate lyrics - of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here", for example. A local band regularly performed an excruciating cover version in English, including the immortal lines: "Can you tell a green field/From a cold steel rail?/A smile from a veil?" Ten years later, despite the advent of iPods and Russian MTV, this music is still revered. You never lose a taste for the music you loved in your teens.
When I took my husband to Kiev two years ago he was forced to spend three hours watching a King Crimson video with my (non-English-speaking) friend Zhenya, who regarded this as the ultimate in male bonding and emphatically sighed "Robert Freep he genius" every five minutes during the viewing.
The next day at a party, another friend earnestly explained, as I was forced to translate: "Please tell your husband that we are part of a subculture who appreciate the music of Led Zeppelin. Ask him if he is also part of this subculture." (This was in 2003.) He pretended he was part of the subculture. It would have been foolish to say anything else.
I will never forget one rock idol I had great trouble identifying in the mid-1990s. What was this mysterious beat combo You're a Hip that everyone was talking about? Russian friends would screw up their faces pronouncing the name in their best possible accent, screaming with frustration that I showed no recognition for one of the "greatest musical legends of century". Eventually I got someone to write it down. It was Uriah Heep. I hope Yevgenia and Sean have some limited-edition releases on their wedding list.
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