I have just made an interview with the author John Higgs for my BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE radio show. John’s book ‘Stranger Than We Can Imagine - Making Sense of the 20th Century’ is a terrific read - it really provides a narrative to understand a radically changing world and the birth of the youth culture. We mainly talked about the emergence of the teenager in the post war years. John places ‘teenage year zero’ to the 1953 issue of ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard.

Tutti Frutti, along with Rock Around The Clock, ignited teenagers on both side of the iron curtain and one of the things that has been interesting in researching our new book Bone Music is seeing how the ‘youth quake’ of the US and the UK spread through the Eastern bloc powered by swing and rock’n’roll. It is also fascinating to realise that the X-Ray underground, which serviced those styles to young Soviets, was itself a teenage phenomena - particularly at the beginning.

Boris Taigin and Russian Bogaslovsky, started cutting Bone Music as the Leningrad bootleg outfit The Golden Dog Gang when they were only 18. Mikhail Farafanov, another of our interviewees, when he was just 17. Most of their customers were teenagers too. Kolya Vasin was barely 14 when he first came across Little Richard on an x-ray record. It blew him away. His friend came to his house after school and showed him a disc saying:

‘Look Kolya! This is American rock’n’roll!’

He took the record in his hands, looked at it through the light and saw the image of bones. Immediately, he was fascinated and, when he put the record on the gramophone and it started spinning, he heard wild singing. He was delighted by the ecstatic screaming voice, and fell back, stupefied.

‘Who is this!?’

His friend said it was Little Richard and the song was ‘Tutti Frutti’. Kolya immediately became a convert at the church of rock’n’roll.

I have written several times about the Stilyagi, the only real Soviet youth culture group according to Artemy Troitsky. These were kids who listened to rock’n’roll, jived, drank, tried to dress how they imagined American kids did, spoke in pseudo American slang and generally wanted to have fun. I discovered there were similar groups in most of the Eastern bloc countries: Hungary had the Jampecek, in Poland there were the Bikiniarze, in Czechoslovakia the Potapka and in Romania the Malagambisti. All dressed in an ersatz rock’n’roll style and aped US mannerisms.

Like their western counterparts, and the earlier French ‘Zazous’ and German ‘Swingjuden’ (swing kids), they all used music and clothes to distinguish themselves from the older generation and from their more conventional peers who reacted with shock and confusion. The media and the authorities were enraged - just at they were in the West at the British Teddy boys and the US rock’n’rollers.

The similarities across these various groups were remarkable. A pamphlet publicised by the British Anarchist Federation described how a fascist magazine in wartime France wrote of the the male Zazou

”Here is the specimen of Ul-tra Swing 1941: hair hanging down to the neck, teased up into an untidy quiff, little moustache a la Clark Gable,..... shoes with too thick soles, syncopated walk”.

Female Zazous wore their hair in curls down to their shoulders or in plats. Blonde was the preferred colour worn with bright red lipstick, and sun- glasses, jackets with extremely wide shoulders and short skirts. Stockings were striped or fishnet, worn over shoes with thick soles (see images)

It is virtually an exact description of the eastern bloc cold war kids - who were just a little later to the party. The fascist youth movement the Jeunnesse Populaire Française patrolled the streets with scissors, attacked zazous and forcibly cut their hair - just as the Soviet youth patrols Komsomols did to the Stilyagi, Even the satirical cartoons published by a disparaging media were a dead ringer. Yet all these groups were small in number - often just a few in any town.

But teenage styles change - and fast. The stilyagi fell behind the times, partly because fashions had moved on in the west and partly because they were growing up. New generations of teenagers caught the bug of clothes, dancing and cool music and in the more open climate of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ were forming their own youth culture, dismissive of the previous generations’ style - just as they always have been.

A fascist paramilitary forcibly cuts a Zazous’ hair.

I recently recorded an extended interview for a US TV show called 'Mysteries at the Museum’ which will feature a piece on bone records in 2017. The producers were keen for me to confirm one of the most common myths about the Soviet x-ray records: that they were bootlegs of American jazz and rock ’n’ roll made as a dissident protest by ‘Stilyagi’, a small youth subculture based largely in Moscow and Leningrad.

In fact, the majority of bone records did not contain Western music. They contained Russian music, forbidden Russian music. On first impression that doesn’t seem so romantic a story to a Western audience because it doesn’t fit our inherited cultural prejudice, but on deeper examination it is a more interesting and moving narrative. The intention of the Stalinist censor was to completely control the cultural input of the Soviet people and by the late 1940s had outlawed a huge amount of popular music. If this was a crime, it was surely a much greater crime that an entire nation's music lovers were cut off from their own culture, their own songs, their own much-loved artists and performers than prevented from listening to music from abroad that they were barely familiar with.

In the next few posts, I will write about some of the forbidden Russian artists whose songs were cut to x-ray. Their stories are usually tragedies. Many of them were ‘emigres' whose repertoire was forbidden just because they lived in the West and declined to return to the Soviet Union. But one of the most prominent was someone who lived in Russia all his life and performed in the Kremlin for the highest members of the inner party, a singer as famous in his homeland as Frank Sinatra in the USA, a star whose records were sold in all the Soviet music stores and a man who became one of the richest private individuals in the Soviet Union: Vadim Kozin.

Kozin with his band short before his arrest

In the X-Ray Audio documentary ‘ROENTGENIZDAT', the singer Marc Almond describes Kozin’s life and spectacular fall from grace. Marc has been a fan of Kozin for a long time, he made a record of his songs 'Orpheus in Exile' in 2009 and recently presented a BBC radio documentary about his life. In 1944, Kozin was arrested on charges of homosexuality and perversion. But it is likely that the fact of his sexuality, (which had been known about since the 1920s), was just used to bring him down because he had been in conflict with a high ranking Soviet official, possibly even Beria. Or it may be that he had just become too rich, too famous, too well-loved. After all, there was only room for one star in the Soviet Union and that was Stalin. Kozin was convicted and dragged from his luxurious, ostentatious lifestyle at the Metropole hotel in Moscow to the brutal conditions of the far eastern Siberian prison camps. As far as his adoring public were concerned he no longer existed. His deeply loved songs and beautiful voice would have surely been sorely missed and though many people would have owned his records and could carry on listening to them after his arrest, no new ones would have been made. Any still available would have immediately been withdrawn from sale and destroyed.

Kozin’s immense popularity would ordinarily have made him a prime candidate for the bootleggers. But interestingly he does not appear anywhere near as often on x-ray records as one might expect This is probably because news of his alleged crimes was widely believed. It perhaps still is. Recently I was talking with an old Russian, a music lover who was a bone record buyer in his youth. He had absolutely no respect for Soviet propaganda but grimaced when I brought up the subject of Kozin and referred to him with a Russian word a friend translated as ‘paedophile’ or child rapist. We know from recent experience in the West that any such association, real or false, effectively puts an artist's music beyond the pale.

Marc Almond performing Vadim Kozin and cut onto X-Ray at Rough Trade East, London

At an X-Ray Audio event recently, we cut a new x-ray record of a performance of the Kozin song ‘Druzhba’ (Friendship) sung by Marc Almond. The x-ray used was one made of Marc himself after a serious accident he barely survived a few years ago. This, as you can imagine, added a certain poignancy to the occasion, as did his description of Kozin’s life in Siberia. The fallen idol managed to survive there because his fame and voice afforded him protection by various camp authorities who had been fans before his conviction. He even continued to perform - in the extraordinary ‘gulag revues’ organised by prison camp bosses for their own entertainment, but even after his release, he was unable - or unwilling - to return to Moscow to revisit the scenes of his former glory, He died in 1991 in Magadan at the age of 91.

Marc's X-ray record with his performance of a Vadim Kozin song

Kozin experimental flexi gramophone record c.1936

For someone once so famous, he remains fairly forgotten in Russia and is virtually unknown outside. Like many artists who were not dissidents and whose ‘crimes’ were not political he hasn't been deemed worthy of any attention in the West - until Marc released his record of Kozin songs.

It was difficult to know how to say thanks for Marc's performance at our event so I decided to give him a present of a strange record I once found on a trip to Russia. This record is evidence of the inaccuracy of another common myth about music during the Soviet era: that there was only one record company, the State controlled Melodiya.

It was made by one of the so called ‘experimental’ independent labels. These were semi-private businesses allowed to operate under licence from the State. They made various discs with specialist recordings such as film soundtracks, spoken word narratives or certain permitted foreign repertoire. In this case, the label experimented with making coloured vinyl flexi-discs and this red transparent disc contains a special recording of a Kozin song made before his arrest. Any copies would of course have been destroyed afterwards but this one, like the old singer, survived.

Although it is not really playable now, it is rather lovely, almost like a very beautiful bone record, a blood coloured, luminous legacy of the life of a fallen Soviet star.

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