In December 2019 the VKontakte community "Oblachny Kray" reposted a fragment of Fyodor Chistyakov's interview with Rockcult. Chistyakov was the leader of the band Nol, and this is a first-person account of a trip to Arkhangelsk that ended in "a concert that never took place". The community dates it 1 October 1989 and sums it up briefly: instead of a concert there was a big brawl in the foyer. Chistyakov himself is more careful and more detailed, and he tells it without embellishment. Below is a retelling with short quotations; he describes the events from memory, decades later.
An invitation without a contract
"Those were absolutely wild times," Chistyakov begins, warning at once that today's people cannot understand much of it. Concerts were organised by amateurs, there was hardly any proper equipment, "everything was very poor". Nol had no stage or professional experience at the time: they rehearsed in a military-patriotic club, recorded something at home, then at the studio of Andrey Tropillo, and played a couple of concerts.
Someone invited them to play at a festival in Arkhangelsk. No contracts were drawn up and money was mentioned only in passing: young Soviet musicians were brought up to think that earning money from music was somehow "vicious", and that "real rockers had to be in it for the idea". To their surprise the guests were put up in a hotel, and it was paid for. But then the organisers came and said they had money problems and could not even feed them. Fans fed them, bringing food to the hotel or inviting them over. According to Chistyakov, the bass player of Oblachny Kray spent a lot of time with them and "supported them very much"; he does not name him (the band's bass player in those years was Andrey Lukin).
A culture palace in Solombala
The festival was held at a culture palace in Solombala, where people from the neighbouring plant usually came to "relax in a cultured way". Judging by everything, this is the same palace of the Krasnaya Kuznitsa plant where the V rock festival took place in 1987 (Chistyakov names only the district and the plant next door). The metal band Front had come as well. "Unlike us, simple guys in simple clothes", they looked the part: leather jackets, chains, rockers' rings.
The first thing the guests saw on entering the foyer, at the moment when everything should already have started, were "bloodied and bandaged heads" of the visitors. In the hall with rows of seats the lights were on as in a room; someone was drinking, someone, it seems, eating; on the stage the equipment, which had only just been brought, was still being set up. The stands were held together with blue insulating tape, some had no fastenings at all. The lads from the plant had come to relax and had already been drinking, and, as he understands, the guests were the ones they wanted to "beat up by all the street rules".
The organisers asked Chistyakov to go out to the foyer and play the button accordion "so that people would calm down" while they set things up. He began to wriggle out of it: it was clear that they had to leave, but how was unclear, because downstairs, on the ground floor, "a massacre was already going on". The musicians of Front sat "one with a black eye, another with a split lip" — "they were the first to get it".
Bogaev the electrician
While they discussed what to do, someone tapped Chistyakov on the shoulder. It was Sergey Bogaev: they had met earlier at Tropillo's studio, when Bogaev came to Petersburg to record. It turned out that he worked as an electrician at this palace, and his workroom was next door. Bogaev "was in shock" — both at how the guests had ended up there and at what was going on. He led Nol out through the roof and the back door, together with their instruments. "That is how we went to Arkhangelsk for a festival."
What this adds to the picture
The story agrees with what the site says elsewhere: Bogaev worked as an electrician at the Krasnaya Kuznitsa plant and its palace of culture, and his acquaintance with the Petersburg scene began with Aquarium's visit to Arkhangelsk and the recordings at Tropillo's (Arkhangelsk rock around Oblachny Kray). Next to this story it is easier to understand what concerts in the provinces were sometimes like at that time. Pictures from the 1987 festival are in the gallery.
Where this comes from: a fragment of Fyodor Chistyakov's interview with Rockcult in the publication of the VKontakte community "Oblachny Kray" of 21 December 2019 (the post). The date "1 October 1989" is from the headline of the publication; Chistyakov himself does not name a date. The names of Front's musicians and of the organisers are not given in the story.
