02/20/2005 | Уляна

Curious Orange
A chance hearing of song by a band from Ukraine on the late John Peel's radio show led Matthew Collin to the industrial badlands of the east of the country. Fotomoto's future seemed bleak, but then came political upheaval, protest in the streets and the 'Orange Revolution' ...

www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/ story/0,11710,1395949,00.html
Guardian Unlimited, UK
Matthew Collin
Sunday January 23, 2005

The greatest journeys often lead to unexpected destinations. This one began with a song and ended up in the middle of a national uprising. It all started a year ago when John Peel played a piece of shimmering dream-pop on his Radio 1 show by an unknown band called Fotomoto, but offered no details about who they were or where they came from. A web search sent me first to a series of Italian motorbike fetish sites, then to Stoke-on-Trent, where a man called Mike Eardley was selling Fotomoto's albums - which are unavailable in western Europe - by mail order on behalf of the band.

Eardley said that Fotomoto were from a city called Zaporozhye in Ukraine, a country which at that point appeared to be languishing in social and cultural torpor, and rarely made the headlines. 'They had a kind of cult following through people hearing them on Peel, but nobody could get hold of the CDs,' Eardley explained. 'It's a real pain getting money in and out of there; the banking system isn't exactly brilliant, and anything you post tends to get opened. For the early record sales, I would change the money into dollar bills and send them off concealed in bars of chocolate.' He said the band had a standing invitation to come to Britain to record a Peel session, but couldn't afford the air fares and were finding it hard to get visas.

Peel had become a champion for the band after hearing one of their early recordings. 'It was just the unexpectedness of it that appealed to me,' he said, a couple of months before his death last year. 'Most music I get from eastern Europe tends to be rather grim metal stuff, not awfully good, and when you see the bands live - of course this is a gross generalisation - there's always a kind of cabaret approach. There's always someone in the band dressed as a clown or a monk, and the vocals are always terribly theatrical.'

Pop that develops in isolation can grow up rich and strange. Influences are mistranslated, mangled and reimagined. So it is with Fotomoto. They're Ukrainian but speak Russian and sing in French, something that captivated Peel. Their songs have a certain elegant charm and a quality of innocence that's genuinely disarming. On their latest album, Suranov, A?, there are hints of Stereolab, St Etienne, Depeche Mode and Serge Gainsbourg, as well as gauzy melodies and an electronic pulse.

As I was soon to discover, it's a sound that's totally at odds with the environment in which it was produced. Rising from the verdant splendour of the Ukrainian countryside, Zaporozhye looks like a diabolical inferno; a city on fire. Clouds of yellow and black smoke blurt from chimneys and jets of flame shoot upwards into the sky above a tangle of metal and concrete. Zaporozhye! Even its name sounds like a firework going off. The streets are dusty with industrial deposits, and sometimes, at night, areas of the city are enveloped in smog.

Stalin designated Zaporozhye a metal town and began the construction of the huge hydro-electric dam that dominates the approach from the north. Travel writer Andrew Evans called it 'a blackened shrine to Ukraine's heaviest industry ... the prototype of the perfect Soviet city'. One young local put it more succinctly: 'This whole city is heavy metal.' Hundreds of years ago, it was home to the hard-drinking Cossacks. Now the region is best known for housing the continent's largest nuclear power plant. It's hardly an area one would imagine could be responsible for some of the most delicate and enchanting music to come out of the former Soviet Union.

Fotomoto's latest album was released by a Russian label; the band say they are virtually unknown in Ukraine, even in Zaporozhye. That was confirmed by an impromptu gig they played when I first met them last year, in a scruffy little club called Nora in the basement of an office block. They insisted it was the only venue for alternative music in this city of 850,000 people. Around 30 of their friends sprawled across tatty red sofas, swigging from bottles of beer they'd brought in from the off-licence. After the gig, Fotomoto packed all their equipment into the boot of a taxi and went for hamburgers.

Alex Ivanov is the technical maven of the band, the laptop sorcerer. He's also the eldest. He came of age when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, and Western rock music offered a glimpse of another world. He would listen to scratchy short-wave broadcasts on the BBC World Service, picking up tantalising fragments of information about youth culture on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and gaze wonderingly at the British indie charts in a Czech magazine at the local library: Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, the Pixies, the Smiths ... exotic voices. 'Strange music, as it seemed to me then,' he said.

Not so strange now, though, and despite living hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, the four members of Fotomoto insist they weren't cut off from the global music scene. 'There are plenty of deeper holes on earth,' said Ivanov. But if they were from London, Paris or Berlin, they'd be signed to a decent independent label and wouldn't be working for a vodka company, as Ivanov and Sergey Sergeyev do, or in a recording studio, like Olya Volodina and Anton Singurov. They wouldn't rehearse and record in a spare room on the ninth floor of the rickety apartment block where Volodina and Singurov live.

One of the problems is there's hardly a music industry to speak of in Ukraine - at least not a legal one. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global music business body, Ukraine is one of the top 10 producers of pirate CDs worldwide. The bootleg merchants make no attempt to conceal themselves. On the grand, tree-lined boulevards of Kyiv, pavement stalls and kiosks openly sell illegal CDs, DVDs and software as armed police officers saunter past, seemingly oblivious or uncaring. As Ivanov said: 'These people trade CDs like hot rolls. They seldom like and know music, they just do it to feed themselves and their family. It's all the same to them what they sell - CDs, cigarettes or potatoes.'

A journalist I spoke to in Kyiv went further: this was institutionalised criminality, he insisted. 'Piracy is tolerated, if not encouraged. If it was discouraged, you wouldn't see it. Because of the near-dictatorial powers of the president, if they wanted to get rid of it, they could do it in a week. But there's graft at every level, from the cop on the beat to the local city administrators, and they just don't care because they're making money.'

I went to a small bootleg factory in Zaporozhye to watch some of the pirates at work. Its stock room was piled high with illegal copies of bands like tAtU and the Prodigy, and one of the employees was busily processing new product: rip and burn, rip and burn ... In a nearby record shop, most of the CDs by Western artists were decent-quality bootlegs. Many of them were delivered in a weekly shipment from a supplier in Moscow who could provide anything from Kraftwerk and Radiohead to Emma Bunton and Gareth Gates. Particularly popular were illegal MP3 compilations containing the entire recorded works of, for example, Eminem or Madonna.

However, one type of music was doing good business: Europop. In Kyiv, it was impossible to avoid, blaring cheerily out of every other shop doorway. The relentlessly upbeat message of Europop - life is fun, we're so happy, come on baby, let's dance! - almost amounted to a kind of cultural propaganda. And, of course, life is good for some in Ukraine's new consumer society, like the oligarchs who've grown fat on the privatisations of state industries, and Kyiv's 'businessmen', with their black jeeps and mini-skirted molls, living the casino fantasy in neon. But at the city's raggedy fringes it's a different story, as pensioners scavenge in dumpsters and beg for coins.

In the minibus-taxis that rattle down Zaporozhye's main drag, the Lenin Prospect, the soundtrack was a little darker: Russian criminal music - chanson, a bizarre folk style that glamorises the post-Soviet underworld. Tattooed hard men sing in a guttural growl of their heinous exploits, of prison camps and fallen comrades. Their lyrics are decorated with jailhouse slang. Chanson cassettes invariably depict the artists as stone-cold, heartless brutes; scarred mugs glowering into the lens, huge diamonds glistening on their fingers, toting their guitars as if they were rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They make 50 Cent look fey.

In a culture of Europop and criminal chanson, of prancing girls in skimpy costumes and macho bruisers in leather jackets, it was hard to know where Fotomoto fitted in. Probably not at all ... and perhaps that's the point. Their nonconformism has consigned them to the fringes. Nevertheless, they haven't deluded themselves that music could become a viable career for them in Ukraine. 'As we say here, this is a "sick" question. In our city and our country, our band hasn't any chances,' admitted Singurov.

Faced with a dire economic situation, many young Ukrainians simply want to escape - a survey in a Ukrainian business magazine last year suggested that more than 50 per cent of young people were thinking about leaving the country. For Fotomoto, this wasn't an option. The ties of family and friends bound them to Zaporozhye, but they are also caught in a gap between dreams and reality; free to consume the products of the global entertainment industry, but unable to participate fully.

In Kyiv, flyposters advertised nu-metal gigs featuring bands with names like Braindeath and Holy Blood, but alternatives were scarce even in the capital. There was simply no cultural infrastructure outside the mainstream, I was told by Maket and Pistols, two veterans of the Kyiv post-punk underground which was at its most vibrant after Ukraine became independent in 1991.

The waif-like and charismatic Maket was the leader of Ivanov Down, who played a kind of jagged industrial rock with lyrics in the singer's own invented fantasy language, achieving cult status in Poland and Russia. He was even invited to contribute music to Boris Yeltsin's election campaign. But by 2004, the pickings were slimmer and Maket was dividing his time between what he called his 'official project' - which seemed to be a more mainstream rock band sponsored by some local entrepreneur - recording other-worldly electronic soundscapes in his apartment, and studying the philosophies of the Maharishi, the Beatles' favourite Indian mystic, under whose spell he had fallen. Maket said he believed in miracles, which at least showed he'd managed to retain his optimism. 'Miracles can happen,' he urged. 'Otherwise, what is life? Nothing!' It was a strangely prescient sentiment, although he couldn't have known it at the time.

Pistols (nicknamed for his youthful affection for Rotten and co) used to be Ivanov Down's manager, but now works as a scientist. He sketched out a dismal portrait of the Kyiv scene: 'There's no good music radio at all, no decent music press, and no viable music industry because the population is so poor and CDs sell for two dollars each.'

Paul Miazga, the senior editor at a Kyiv newspaper, suggested that poverty and political isolation had helped to ravage the cultural landscape. He reeled off dark tales of organised crime and high-level corruption, which he said was crippling the country. It became clear that his paper, the Kyiv Post, was one of the few questioning voices in a country where media influence was largely controlled by a few powerful and wealthy men close to the President, Leonid Kuchma, and the Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. Independent media were regularly silenced, editors were instructed how to report the news through a system of official notices called temniki, and violence against investigative journalists was commonplace. In the most disturbing case, in 2000, the headless corpse of a reporter who campaigned against institutional corruption, Georgiy Gongadze, was found in a forest outside Kyiv. Opposition groups alleged that secret tape recordings suggested President Kuchma was involved in the killing - which he strongly denied.

And the pressure was rising as the Ukrainian presidential election approached. Yet even in the early summer, some were already dreaming that the poll could prove to be some kind of turning point for Ukraine. 'There's no shortage of talk that this is the most important year in the country's history since independence,' said Miazga. 'It could be the changing of the guard.'

The next few months would be full of joy and turmoil, for Fotomoto as well as Ukraine. After saving every kopeck they'd earned, and enduring a punishing 70-hour bus journey across Europe, the band eventually arrived at Victoria Coach Station in London one bright morning, keen-eyed and ready to record their Peel session. Against the odds, they'd made it this far. 'This,' said Volodina, 'is something I've always dreamed of.'

But not long after their session was broadcast, Peel was dead. His passing was particularly felt among bands who hadn't yet (or might never) become successful, and who still relied on the veteran DJ as their only outlet to the world. For who would play such records now? Fotomoto were among them, and they were devastated by his death. They had admired him so much that they had even used a sample of his voice on one of their early tracks. To them, Peel wasn't a rock'n'roll institution, admired but rarely listened to - he was a vital force for good, and a man who exemplified all that was best about Britain. 'We are grieving,' Volodina emailed me to say. 'It is a heavy loss.'

In the same message, she explained that the day before, she had been to vote in Ukraine's presidential election but had been prevented from doing so because her name wasn't on the electoral roll. She had just been to court in an attempt to reverse the decision. Her situation wasn't unique. Allegations of nationwide ballot-rigging and fraud brought hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians onto the streets after the Prime Minister, Yanukovych, was declared the winner over the more Western-leaning opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko. They felt that a crime against democracy had been committed, one symbolised by Yushchenko's poison-scarred face. A tipping point had been reached. The 'orange revolution' had begun.

The sheer scale of it even surprised some of those who were involved. In the protest camp that sprang up in central Kyiv, a group of students told me they could hardly believe the mass outburst of feeling in the country. As they sipped sweet tea and warmed themselves in front of smoking braziers, Ukrainian rock bands thrashed away on a stage in nearby Independence Square, while a radio station which had set itself up in the middle of the tent village blasted out sugar-sweet pop. It's probably the only time that Kylie Minogue has been part of the soundtrack to a civil uprising. Despite the bitter cold, Kyiv felt transformed - it was crackling with energy and enthusiasm. 'It's different because everyone is smiling now,' said one intense young activist, his breath steaming white in the freezing night air, his jacket glowing fluorescent orange. 'This is, more than anything, a revolution of the mind.'

But Fotomoto's hometown, Zaporozhye, wasn't at all like the capital. Despite the huge Western media coverage for the 'orange revolutionaries', Ukraine was genuinely divided over the election crisis. Zaporozhye was in the industrial south-east, where Yanukovych commanded a genuine majority. The band went along to some of the small pro-democracy rallies in the city, but opposition was muted. This was not an orange city.

For Fotomoto, as for many young people who'd become disillusioned with politics, what was at stake wasn't the presidency but the possibility, however distant, of a life that wasn't ruled by injustice. 'We know that Yushchenko isn't an ideal person, but we have a chance to get rid of the corrupt liars in government,' Singurov explained. 'There is a clear choice: a criminal should not be president. This has crossed the line beyond what people are willing to put up with.'

Eventually, the orange surge lifted Yushchenko to victory after a re-run of the presidential election in December, and he was officially declared the winner on 10 January. I asked Singurov what it had all meant to him and his friends, and whether they now saw the future more brightly. I suppose I expected a sense of hope renewed, perhaps even euphoria. But for him, tomorrow was no less uncertain than it ever had been. 'I don't think that Yushchenko or some other politician can really change my life,' he said. 'I'm not waiting for a miracle.' My journey had ended, but theirs continued.

Matthew Collin's book, 'This is Serbia Calling: Rock'n'Roll Radio and Belgrade's Underground Resistance', is published by Serpent's Tail. To buy Fotomoto CDs, contact Mike Eardley (michaeljayuk@yahoo.co.uk)