“You need to learn to be a free person in this barracks” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 225 (7426) of 03.12.2022

After the concert in Barcelona c Boris Grebenshchikov talked Boris Barabanov.

— The reaction of the people in the Barcelona hall was not at all different from what I have seen at your concerts for decades. So everywhere?

– I will say more: those who now come to concerts in Europe are the same people who recently went to our concerts in Russia. We recently played in a church in The Hague and we had a concert there a few years ago. So, then there was a feeling that people came not so much to listen to us as to communicate with each other. And now in the same hall everything was packed to the very rafters, and the reaction was as if it were Samara or Krasnoyarsk.

— Your today’s program is divided into two parts. The first clearly responds to today’s situation and consists of dark, heavy songs. The second is access to the light. So, it seemed to me that the first part looks more convincing, this is a complete solution, and in the second, fair, not all songs are so obligatory. It turns out that it is easier to talk about bad things.

“That’s how it happened on its own, you can’t imagine such a thing. The first part is a tragedy, the second is a return to the carnival. And I’m very happy about it. I read a lot of comments from both countries, especially from “that” country that now is not the time for happy songs. “Not time, comrade, war.”

— Do you read what they write to you?

– Reading this is not only interesting, but also necessary; feedback is the only way to improve.

And I am sure that people who are now forced to fight and suffer should not live with the thought that there is no way out, everything is bad and everything has died. If you want to win, you need to go smiling, with your head held high.

The attitude should be the same as in the song “Glasses”: “and I say that I will.” And when I read comments like “what a shame that while there is a war somewhere, these people are writhing to the song“ Glasses ””, I think: “God, what are you, dear, do not bother to think …” The word “drink ” has always been used by the Sufis, in the sense of “to live.” “Glasses” is about the fact that, in spite of everything, you need to go forward and not give up.

— Today’s existence of the “Aquarium”, or rather, the group “BG +” – is it some kind of new life or a continuation of the former one?

“Back in the 1960s, I had the feeling that, since I live in a country with limited freedom, without the possibility of ever seeing life elsewhere, I need to learn to be a free person in this barracks. Everything we did in the 1970s and 1980s was a search for that way of life. And we have learned. I remember how in the days of the Leningrad rock club, when we were banned from some kind of concert, Sergey Kuryokhin could call his curator from the KGB and yell at him: “What are you doing? Here come the foreign journalists! Do you want The Times to write about it tomorrow?” And the concert was allowed. And the system failed. I remember a concert at the Rock Club, when one of ours was taken to the police for no reason, I went on stage and said that until they let him out, we refuse to play – the whole hall stood up in protest, and “representatives of punitive bodies ‘ just ran. I am proud that in our life it was; everyone felt that what we were doing was not in vain. We have achieved our goal, but alas, a holy place is never empty.

– How did it happen that St. Petersburg gave us both the most beautiful and the most cruel things at the same time?

“It has always been that way. Where was Kirov killed? This city is no better or worse than others, but it is special, it is full of shadows. Both Gogol and Andrei Bely wrote about this – they all wrote about it. As one Tibetan shaman told me: you don’t see it, but this city is full of shadows of dead people. And yet, I still have an innate love for these places. I would call it “the spirit of the earth”. I remember this feeling. You arrive in St. Petersburg from anywhere, go down the ladder of the plane, draw in the air and think: “What happiness!” Love for this place, for this sky, for these people will not go anywhere. Nobody will take this away from me. I moved to England long before the war, even before covid; it’s just that being outside of Russia, I can do much more for people than if I were sitting in St. Petersburg.

— Recently, your version of Bulat Okudzhava’s song “Omen” appeared, and in the concert program, frankly, it outweighs all your anti-war songs.

– I really never thought that I have anti-war songs, but I’m happy about it anyway. Okudzhava is a great person. This song came out on my album of Okudzhava’s songs, and then no one noticed it. And now she gets the most views out of all my videos in the Offering of Time series. In general, by the new year I am preparing to release an album with songs of bards (although Okudzhava was against this term). I grew up with them and embraced them at the same time as rock and roll. Over the past 12 years, we have collected an album on which there will be songs by Bulat Okudzhava, Yuri Kukin, Yuri Vizbor, a little Galich with Vysotsky, Evgeny Klyachkin (including “Procession” to Brodsky’s verses), Alexander Gorodnitsky … Gorodnitsky came recently to our concert in Germany, he is actually a legend man. He is almost 90 years old, but he does not give up at all, writes, sings, everything is interesting to him, he is in amazing shape.

And it seems to me that with the album of songs of bards I not only return my debt to these authors, I return to all people the real living Russian language.

Not my modern version of it and not the version of Oksimiron (included in the register of foreign agents – “b”), but classical Russian. Because Okudzhava, Galich, Vysotsky and all the rest – this is the Russian language and is.

— In the just-released tribute to “Aquarium”, which was released by the group “Electricity”, there is a version of the song “The guys get high” with your vocals and a new arrangement. The image of the country under the gopniks has not lost its relevance. Was there a formal reason for writing this song?

– This occasion is a whole life, starting with the “revolutionary sailors” of the 1920s. Wherever you are, the gopniks can hit you in the horn at any moment. Gopniks were at the top of power and on the street, they set the tone, they were the tuning fork of reality. I grew up in a world where everyone lived in this feeling, and from childhood it seemed to me that real life should be completely different.