In 2005 a Moscow author's column recalled how in the late 1980s the Arkhangelsk band Autodafe performed in the capital. The author — by her own account, an organiser of Moscow concerts and the publisher of the samizdat rock magazine "Zombi" — calls Autodafe's vocalist Dmitry Leontiev "once a drummer of the best-known rock band Oblachny Kray", which in those years was on the lists of those "strictly forbidden to perform". The column as a whole is about something else — reflections on today's pop and rock scene; only what concerns Autodafe is retold here.
The concert of 1986 and the invitation to Moscow
The author recalls a concert she organised in 1986 at the hall of the firm "Melodiya": Oblachny Kray and "the then still rock band" DDT played. After "the Edge", she writes, "the local bigwigs" tried to "wind up" the concert, but it was possible to continue. "Soon after that concert" the drummer from Arkhangelsk made a musical project of his own, "as radical and furious as OK" — that is how Autodafe appears in her story — and she "at once summoned it to Moscow".
The axe at the station
"The lads stepped off the train in the capital with a huge axe," the author recalls. The axe was "not a prop but a quite real butcher's one, of terrifying look and weight", and the trouble began at the station: "the cops froze". What Autodafe did on stage "waving this tool" is easy to imagine: she expected Leontiev to "chop the speakers and monitors into splinters". "But it was fun." The same axe on Autodafe's stage in Arkhangelsk is mentioned by "Severny Komsomolets" in its article on the festival of 1987 (see Autodafe. The year 1987: "on the handle of the axe 'for clarity' was written: 'PERESTROIKA'").
The cover of "Zombi"
"I could not help putting on the cover of the samizdat rock magazine 'Zombi' a collage with this very axe, which fiercely and mercilessly 'chopped' 'Sovetskaya muzyka'," the author writes: on the collage the axe cut through the then universally recognisable logo of the Soviet music magazine "Sovetskaya muzyka". The message, by her account, was "many-meaninged, risky, dangerous". How "Zombi" talked with Sergey Bogaev is in the article Bogaev's interview in "Zombi" no. 10 (1988).
What can be checked in this story and what cannot
The columnist writes from memory, almost twenty years later; there are hardly any names in the story, and hardly any dates (only the concert at "Melodiya" is dated "1986"). That Autodafe really did travel to Moscow in the late 1980s is confirmed by other sources: the chronicle of the band's concerts names concerts in Moscow in 1987–1988, and Bogaev's memoirs describe the joint trip of Oblachny Kray and Autodafe in the autumn of 1987 (part 2, chapter 1).
More about Autodafe: Autodafe: sworn brothers of Oblachny Kray, the line-up and a chronicle of concerts, the songs and recordings.
Where this comes from: a column of 2005 about Autodafe in the band's archive materials. The author's political and evaluative reflections on contemporary musicians and society, and her coarse expressions, are not given: they do not belong to the band's history.
