And so everything is clear – Newspaper Kommersant No. 157 (7358) dated 08/29/2022

On Friday, the VEB Arena stadium hosted the Music with a Strong Character festival. It was scheduled for September 5, 2021, and the groups that were not at the festival as a result, Splin and Mumiy Troll, were supposed to participate in it. About those who remain Boris Barabanov.

“Music with a strong character” was postponed to 2022, and this spring the program began to change. The Mumiy Troll group stopped its activities, and the intermediate version of the line-up included, in addition to Splin, Moral Code, Chaif ​​and Vyacheslav Butusov. After the leader of the Splin group Alexander Vasiliev expressed hope for the return of his colleagues from Aquarium, Time Machine and Tequilajazzz at the Chernozem festival in Voronezh, he himself was deleted from the program. Later concerts of “Spleen” in Volgograd and Svetlogorsk were cancelled. Those who were worried about the band’s absence from the festival program probably turned in their tickets. The stadium was hardly half full, the point here is the postponement of the festival, and the replacement of participants, and simply that this summer people began to go to concerts less.

The first was the Moral Code. The group was finally left by the author of most of the music, Nikolai Devlet-Kildeev. On the elastic sound of his guitar, the sound of the “Moral Code” was largely kept. Now Sergei Sukhov is in charge of the guitar parts, who worked in the group as a technician before Kildeev left. Instead of Alexander Solich, Maxim Chigirin (ex Night Snipers) plays the bass guitar. Despite the departure of participants fundamentally important for the history of the collective, the recognizable sound of the “Moral Code” has not gone away. On the first songs, one could complain about the sound in the stadium as a whole, but the band coped with this problem.

Not so long ago, the Moral Code included an unexpected and little-known number in the win-win selection of hits – the song “Children of Workers” from the repertoire of the Trunks group, which Sergey Mazaev once undertook to produce. In the 2000s, the verse “The era is coming, but I’m not ready to turn off the TV, do it off” and the chorus “I want Brezhnev to keep everything the same” looked like a fierce parody that had nothing to do with reality. What caused the decision to perform the song in the summer of 2022, Mr. Mazaev did not explain to the public. In the words of Alexander Vasiliev, “and so everything is clear.”

During a pause taken to re-switch the equipment, Zemfira’s song “Mature” suddenly began to play in the speakers. I would like to believe that in this way the organizers congratulated the author of the song on his birthday, which fell just on the day of the festival. Or maybe they reminded the public about those whom Alexander Vasiliev spoke about in Voronezh. But the song was followed by the jingle of Nashe Radio, the information sponsor of the festival – the sound engineers simply brought it to the arena. And the jingle was followed by Alexander Marshal’s song “I remember that day.” Everything went according to plan.

Vyacheslav Butusov with his current group “Order of Glory” played a program that mostly consisted of songs from “Nautilus Pompilius”. Among the rare exceptions was the song “I remember a wonderful moment” on the verses of Alexander Pushkin with a powerful coda by guitarist Vyacheslav Suorri. The current accompanying staff of Mr. Butusov seriously bothers with the topic of arrangements, and the guitar plays a significant role in them. Another difficult and unfamiliar number for the public is “The Idiot” from the album “Hallelujah” (2019). His performance was accompanied by a clip with animation by Konstantin Komardin, depicting the winter post-apocalyptic St. Petersburg.

Vyacheslav Butusov did not leave the audience without the key hits of “Nautilus Pompilius”, there were “Walks on the Water”, and “I Want to Be with You”, and “Farewell Letter”. The replica “Especially for you!” the musician prefaced the number, not the most obvious, but penetrating to the very spine, to the verses of Ilya Kormiltsev “People”: “I would give a lot for a pair of wings, I would give a lot for a third eye, for a hand with fourteen fingers, I need another to breathe gas”.

The third branch of the festival was given to the Chaif ​​group. She was lucky with the sound, and the group’s frontman Vladimir Shakhrin demonstrated the inextinguishable talent of the entertainer. He spoke heartfeltly about love, because, according to him, both people and our homeland need it. There was no question of whether the Spleen group or, for example, his countryman Yevgeny Roizman, needed it, and in general the whole festival was held as if somewhere in space, where there is no current agenda, but only good and positive.

It seems that no one was expecting statements in support of the “cancelled” colleagues from the participants of “Music with a Strong Character”, they were waiting for hits. And it turned out that hits still “work” regardless of what doctrine their performers adhere to in today’s world. The disturbing Moscow disco of the “Moral Code” refreshed the NEP colors of the 1990s. Not a single line of “Bound in One Chain” of “Nautilus Pompilius” has lost its power. Nobody canceled male loneliness, so the song “Chayfa” “No one will hear” still spoke directly to the heart. And the line “We can’t get used to living without war” from “Cry for him” was also not removed. These songs really have character.