CASSIBER 1982-1992

Cassiber and Keep the Dog were a somewhat different proposition. The fact that they were appearing in the USSR at all bordered on the miraculous, and was made possible in large part by the inclusion of a third band which, for reasons I can no longer recall, didn’t make it to Leningrad in this otherwise three-band-three-city tour. This was the Kalahari Surfers - a significant, indeed indispensable, part of the package, since everything had been organised through the KMO (Committee of Youth Organisations), itself a subsidiary of the omnipotent Komsomol (Youth Communist Union). For Komsomol, the Kalahari Surfers had been the clincher. Coming from apartheid-torn South Africa, they were one of the most politically radical musical forces in that country - so troublesome that there was no South African pressing plant that would press their albums (EMI declared them “too political”) and it was this clearly progressive status that allowed the tour be advertised as ‘Independent Musicians for South Africa’ and therefore legitimate the KMO’s initiative to support it in the name of Soviet bureaucracy’s pet formula: ‘political expediency’ - allowing them to release a considerable chunk of their budget to a little known bunch of musicians playing weird and not very user-friendly music.

That said, the other musicians had their own political credentials; both Chris Cutler, the drummer with Cassiber (and, on this tour, the Kalahari Surfers) and Fred Frith, guitarist and leader of Keep the Dog, had been founding members of Henry Cow - a rare example of a British rock band that had been favourably mentioned in the official Soviet press, back in the 1970s, as ‘a group of the British Komsomol’. This fact had been largely forgotten by 1989, but once brought out of the archives, it became a potent weapon: Komsomolskaya Pravda, the newspaper that had published the original article was the official organ of the Komsomol Central Committee, and proudly wore six of the highest government awards on its title page. It was a force to be reckoned with.

Heiner Goebbels

The initial planning was done in Moscow and I only entered the picture when the local organisers in St. Petersburg asked me to write notes for the concert programme - and an article for a local newspaper. Leningrad was then the centre of New Jazz, Free Improvisation and “Classical” avant-garde, while Riga - the third stop on the tour - was the centre of Rock-In-Opposition. In fact, it had been through Nick Sudnik, founder and leader of the Rigan group Zga that I had first heard recordings of Cassiber, Art Bears, The Work, Etron Fou Leloublan, Universe Zero and other bands that worked along similar lines: a music that seemed to merge the best of all worlds: the passion and energy of rock, the improvisational freedom of jazz and the compositional complexity of the avant-garde. I immediately fell in love with it. So the idea that some of these musicians would actually be playing in Leningrad seemed otherworldly. However, those who had even a vague idea of what these bands stood for constituted a tiny group of connoisseurs, and the novelty of Western bands appearing in the USSR was already on the wane: a few months earlier poor organisation and zero promotion had attracted no audience at all for the then still largely unknown Sugarcubes, with Bjork, and the concert had to be cancelled. So I put all my enthusiasm and conviction into the newspaper article in the hope of luring in anyone with even the faintest interest in serious rock (the prog-rock audience was substantial in Leningrad at this time). In the event, although the venue was not full, neither was it embarrassingly empty.

Come the day, I had no idea how a largely unprepared audience would react to these strange sounds. But when I watched a group of gopniki (our local term for what in England are known as yobs or chavs) in the back rows, they were sipping beers - but listening intently without booing or giggling. The Moscow concert (which unfortunately I missed) was in a smaller venue, and included Soviet bands Ne Zhdali, from Tallinn, Dzhungli, from Leningrad and both Zvuki Mu and Vezhlivy Otkaz from Moscow, which helped put the music into a more familiar context.

Chris Cutler

What I remember most is the feeling of stunning musicianship, incredible energy, freshness, inventiveness - and extraordinary conviction emanating from that stage. We were happy. Three of us: pianist and composer Sergei Kuryokhin, cellist and producer Seva Gakkel and myself, spent most of the day with the bands, talking, exchanging ideas and arguing. In particular I remember a wonderful cruise along the Neva on that beautiful May day - when St. Petersburg is at its best.