Published with the source named: Alexey Drumkitch, "Blues Inspector" on Arkhangelsk TV, the community "Podtankovskaya Gvardiya" (VKontakte), 14 April 2020.
Blues Inspector: Igor Koshkin (guitar, vocals); Konstantin Lapshin (saxophone); Andrey Ilyichev (bass); Alexey Denisov (flute) and Alexey Tsyganov (flexatone)
In the second half of the 1980s the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Mikhail Gorbachev, proclaimed a course of so-called perestroika, democratisation and glasnost, declaring them the new state ideology. The winds of change reached our northern outskirts too. The unspoken bans on unofficial rock bands were lifted, and although the local press still kept stigmatising the "ideologically empty decadence" of Arkhangelsk rock-and-roll bands out of inertia, the local Komsomol functionaries already sensed that the old conservative attitudes were going into the past and that to ride the new wave one had to keep one's nose to the wind. In March 1987 the first truly official rock festival took place in the Krasnaya Kuznitsa plant's culture palace; the Solombala district Komsomol committee, headed by its first secretary Yakov Poparenko (now "the owner of plants, newspapers and steamships"), took a most active part in organising it.
The perestroika "thaw" reached local television as well: Vitaly Galilyuk launched a music series called "Music That Unites", and video clips of Oblachny Kray, Autodafe and the band Kamera, led by Andrey Korelsky, were shot and shown on the "Pomorye" channel.
In addition, in June 1987 the progressive rock band Blues Inspector took part in the filming of a joint programme about the work of local amateur groups. The programme was recorded on the steps near the building of the joint Sea and River Terminal with the help of a mobile television station. How the Arkhangelsk rockers ended up in the company of folk choirs, vocal-instrumental ensembles and assorted balalaika and accordion players, none of the Blues Inspector musicians remembers any more, but, in the words of the saxophonist and flautist Konstantin Lapshin, they "were the only truly SELF-made amateur act there, from the music to the costumes".
During the filming the Inspectors performed the touching ballad "Dream (I am waiting for those...)". Although it was shot to a pre-recorded soundtrack, the band members did not diligently pretend to play: they honestly sang and played the instruments (acoustic guitar, flute, saxophone and flexatone) that could produce sound without being plugged into a socket. And although this spontaneous improvisation could not affect the final result in any way, it was not done otherwise then — everything was honest.
The whole "Pod Tankom" crowd that happened to be there that day came to the recording and played the part of an informal youth audience. For a fuller picture the television crew supplemented it with chance onlookers and children hanging about nearby, who were immensely happy that they would "get on TV".
Since the saxophone came in during the second half of the song "Dream", Kostya Lapshin and his instrument were hidden in the crowd of listeners until the right moment. He was to appear suddenly, like the ambush regiment at the Battle of Kulikovo: a young wind player walking past by chance sits down to listen and then his poet's soul cannot bear it, he seizes his horn, bent under the yoke of capitalism, and jumps out. Well, and off it went.
Besides, Natasha Kirilyuk-Babkina was used as a "decoy duck": she was given the role of a listener moved by the music who, in an irresistible emotional impulse, jumps out of the crowd and, as a sign of peace and love, pushes into the bell of the saxophone the red carnations she happened to have at hand — in fact they had been bought with the last small change at the central market shortly before the filming. Such was the concept: a sort of parody of the hackneyed flower-power clichés.
To great regret, the video recording of this programme has not survived: because of the acute shortage of imported videotape, old programmes on Arkhangelsk television were periodically "cleaned", and home video recorders were still a great rarity in our parts at the time. The rich kids and black-marketeers who did have them were keen on quite different music and recorded mostly "Police Academy" and "The Benny Hill Show" onto their cassettes.
How this connects to the rest of the site
Among the clips shown on the "Pomorye" channel were clips of Oblachny Kray; photographs of the filming of the band's clip on Arkhangelsk television (credited by Sergey Supalov to Sergey Telov, 1987?) are collected in a separate album. The bass player of Blues Inspector was Andrey Ilyichev and the saxophonist and flautist was Konstantin Lapshin; the festival that Blues Inspector opened is covered in The V rock festival in Arkhangelsk.
