Room for You: The Balkans, Punk, History, Geography and Life-Writing
Reflections on: Barry Phillips, Tito's Punks: On the road in a country that no longer exists (Intellect Books, 2023)
Barry Phillips’ In Search of Tito’s Punks: On the road in a country that no longer exists (Intellect Books, 2023) is part of the Punk Scholars’ Network’s Global Punk series. It is a significant contribution to the study of punk as a global subcultural phenomenon.
The country in question, of course, is Yugoslavia, founded in 1918 in the aftermath of the 1914-’18 Great War (1911-’24 in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa) out of eight former Ottoman and Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire territories: Serbia, the first Balkan state to become independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1815 (before Greece); Croatia, once a Venetian province, then a Habsburg one; Slovenia, a Habsburg province; Muslim majority Bosnia and Herzegovina, an Ottoman province until it was occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1878 (as an outcome of the Berlin Conference of that year that also divided up Africa among the ‘Great Powers’), and formerly annexed in 1909; the once Habsburg territory of Vojvodina; formerly Ottoman Kosovo, Muslim majority and majority Albanian-speaking; and formerly Ottoman Macedonia, much fought over by Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia during the Balkan Wars of 1912-’13, which saw the final collapse of Ottoman power in what they called ‘Rumelia’ (‘land of the Romans’ (Byzantines)), but which in the West is better known as ‘The Balkans’, or occasionally ‘South Eastern Europe’.
‘Yugo Slav’ means ‘southern Slav’, and the majority in all Yugoslav territories except Kosovo spoke often mutually comprehensible south Slavic languages. One of the cultural fault-lines in Yugoslavia was the difference between former Ottoman and former Habsburg territories, reflected in religion, dialect and vocabulary, dress, food, art and architecture, habits and manners. Arguably, however, Yugoslavia was no more a divided than the United Kingdom is today, difference is as important or unimportant as politicians, generals and demagogues choose to make it. The 1990s were a particularly bloody decade as Yugoslav Federation fell apart in a series of fratricidal and sometimes genocidal wars between the Slovenian declaration of independence in 1991 and the end of the Kosovo War in 1999, with war crimes and acts of genocide being committed, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-’95.
I shall return to this history below. But, while Phillips perhaps wisely decided not to dwell overly on this history, insight into it greatly helps in the fuller appreciation of the book, and how and why Yugoslavia acquired fairly early on after London and New York City a diverse and dynamic punk scene. Indeed, when one appreciates the history, the reasons for the scale and impact of Yugoslav punk become more apparent. So much so that, rather than finding it remarkable that Yugoslavia had a punk scene, historical insight make one realise that it would have been more remarkable if Yugoslavia didn’t have one at all. Nevertheless, Phillips’ book is no weaker for not being a history book. While it does provide a history Yugoslav punk from roughly 1975 to the present, it is more of a travelogue than a history. It is both a journey into Yugoslavian punk and a journey into the author’s selfhood, in that sense it has a strong autoethnographic aspect, although it does not call itself an autoethnography.
Insightfully and out of respect and punk solidarity, Phillips is eager that the many participants he meets are not defined by that history: his participants mention the history and politics of Yugoslavia post-1991 only in so far as each of them feel comfortable. More often than not, their focus is upon the music, the performances, their travels, music production and distribution, and the role of punk as cultural and social agency prior to (and often after) 1992. He writes:
‘I apologise for those who think this approach is either unnecessary or trivial and hope that these fragments contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the issues and, perhaps, a shield against our complacency and exceptionalism.’
Barry’s apology is unnecessary. But his warning against complacency and exceptionalism is astute: 26 counties of Ireland gained their independence from the United Kingdom only after a lengthy and bloody armed struggle; the six remaining counties underwent thirty years of simmering low intensity conflict which was often very murderous on all sides, spilling over into the UK mainland and beyond. The United Kingdom’s unilateral secession from the world’s largest trade bloc, the European Union (‘Brexit’ in the infantilized language of twenty-first century British politics) threatens Northern Ireland’s fragile peace, even as it has led to a rise in racism, xenophobia, and far-right ultra-nationalism in England. Scotland and Wales are becoming increasingly detached from the Union, while the regions of England (in a sense the UK’s Serbia) suffer from deep structural inequalities and simmering resentments. With the possible exception of the Nazi invasion and occupation of the Balkans in 1942 and its consequences, there is little or nothing in modern Balkan history that compares in terms of death, destruction, displacement, and (in Walter Rodney’s transitive sense), willed ‘underdevelopment’ of the Irish Genocide of the mid-nineteenth-century.
It is in vain that anyone in the UK today imagines that they are in any way superior to the Yugoslavs of the 1980s, as the centrifugal tensions in the Federation became evermore apparent, and the mass media of the various Yugoslav republics spouted hateful sectarian and ultra-nationalist rhetoric with gathering intensity. Yugoslav punk was both a witness to that as it happened, and to a large degree a counterweight to it.
Who is anyone in the UK, at a time when the ruling Conservative Party, at the time of writing 13 years in power, has become an avatar of the far-right, to imagine that the UK is immune to the tensions that destroyed a country (that no longer exists) which Prime Minister Tony Blair (himself a war criminal) imagined to be ‘on the doorstep of Europe’, and which his predecessor John Major imagined as a land saturated by primordial and irrational ‘ancient hatreds’? Like the Middle East, the Balkans are misunderstood. Misunderstood to an even more pernicious extent is the role of ‘we’ in the ‘International Community’ (formerly the ‘Great Powers’) shape the bloody events ‘we’ in the West bemoan: importantly, Barry Phillips’ travelogue begins not in Slovenia or Vojvodina but in The Hague where the author was living at the time, almost within the shadow of the International Criminal Tribunal, where one day, perhaps, Tony Blair might stand. Phillips stresses that the title In Search of Tito’s Punks is not intended to suggest that all those he interviewed were supporters of Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980), anti-Nazi Communist partisan leader, revolutionary, reformist (for Albania’s Enver Hoxha and Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, a ‘revisionist’), and President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Some of Barry’s participants might have had sympathy with Tito, others not. Rather, the issue is peripheral to the book, and the title is intended to define ‘an era defined by an individual’ or a ‘cultural or ideological hegemony or philosophy’: punk queered Thatcher’s Britain too.
Barry Phillips’ journey is also a personal journey into self. Like me, he doesn’t seem to be a morning person. At all. As he sets about his travels, we often find him getting up later than planned, often hungover, often getting lost. Old punk habits across the lifespan. He nearly misses his initial flight to Zagreb, with barely the funds to take a later flight. But he sets himself an intense schedule and sticks to it, undertaking copious interviews in, among other places, Ljubljana in Slovenia, Zagreb, Rijeka , Pula in Croatia, Belgrade and Kragujevac in Serbia, Novi Sad in Vojvodina. That he is able to stick to his quite punishing schedule, working out at about an interview a day over a fortnight, is in large part due to the diligent hospitality, generosity, and commitment to his project of his Yugoslav hosts, in particular his photographer, fixer and dragoman, Tomislav. Balkan hospitality is legendary, anyone familiar with the region would be familiar with, as the rakija flows, interactions like this:
‘A waiter places the bill on the table. When I offer to pay I am firmly rebuffed, “You are our guest” When I attempt to hand over a modest amount which I calculate will at least cover my consumption and a little for the collective kitty, the response is even less equivocal, “We can be polite, or we can tell you to go fuck yourself, you choose.”’
Phillips manages to interview nearly all the significant surviving figures in Yugo Punk (as elsewhere, punkyness seems to impact mortality). The author came to his project through coincidence. As a teenager still at school he ended up as bassist in the Gloucestershire-based multi-racial punk band Demob, their definitive song being their 1981 ‘No Room for You’. The band broke up, people moved on. But in 2011 he receives a Facebook friend request from one Saša Mijatović from Kragujevac in central Serbia. From him Phillips learns that the song is ‘famous in the Balkans’, because ‘everybody knows this song, it has been recorded by some of the most famous Yugoslavian punk bands, the most famous version being ‘To nije mjesto za nas’, ‘This is not the place for us’, by Pula-based band KUD Idioti, whose singer, Tusta, passed away in 2012. Later, Phillips discovers that his old song has been covered by many Yugoslav bands: later he has it played to him in the recording studio of the Belgrade-based band Pogonbgd, which the band had restored after flooding caused by careless nearby development, ‘I could not be more honoured. I am humbled. But extremely happy, and proud. And quite drunk.’ So the germ of the book is a song recorded thirty years earlier that Phillips himself had, if not totally forgotten, then at least confined to his distant past, when ‘I received the unexpected message from a stranger in a city I had never heard of in a country that no longer existed’. The data for the book was collected in a road trip (‘more accurately a “bus trip”’) around Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Vojvodina in the late summer and autumn of 2017, bracketed by two shorter trips there in 2014 and 2019. The coincidence triggers profound reflection:
‘ . . . I came to realise that music has rewarded me in ways far richer than I could ever imagined. Little could I have known when I recorded “No Room for You” that it would be the catalyst for this journey – where people would embrace me with uncommon warmth and invite me into their homes the very first time we met. They would feed me generously and maintain a steady stream of beer, wine, and rakija. I could not have conceived that a punk rock song might initiate new friendships that already have lasted several years and which I confidently anticipate surviving to the grave. Nor could I have realised the value of all this. I travelled in hope and a fair degree of ignorance . . . some of what I have learned serves only to heighten my anxieties. But I will leave rewarded many times over, and wise enough now to understand how little I knew.’
A journey into self through others, leading to the realisation that, as a far, far earlier denizen of the Balkans came to realise, wisdom begins with an understanding of one’s own ignorance – the Socratic dilemma. It is notable that this journey began with a coincidence. For Jung, synchronicity was acausal connection underpinning human perception; for Arthur Koestler chance coincidence as serendipity was the ‘angel’ that creates meaning via the ‘roots of coincidence’, it is the principal that underpins the Confucian classic the Yi Jing, yet a-causality, as untestable and unfalsifiable, is denied by positivist thinking. ‘No Room for You’ is a cause, its recording, its transmission to Yugoslavia, its reception there, and its various cover versions can be dated, traced, studied, analysed. Yet it is a connection of which Phillips was unaware. The song and its Yugoslavian afterlife are objective and causal, the coincidence and the psychological, emotional, intellectual and existential affects upon Phillips are subjective and a-causal. The objective and the subjective binary breaks down, resulting in a book, Tito’s Punks, which occupies the forward slash in a/causality. Serendipity can create meaning more effectively that rational endeavour. Just before writing this piece I saw in a local newspaper an image of Brighton seafront taken from the International Space Station by Emirati astronaut and Brighton University BSc Electronic and Communication Engineering graduate (2004) Sultan Al Neyadi. I was working at United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain at the time he graduated. But Al Neyadi went on to do did MSc at United Arab Emirates University where briefly I taught him. At that time my son Benjamin went to school in al-Ain, he graduated from Brighton University in BSc Motorsports Engineering in 2020. There is scope for an article in this coincidence, although probably not a book, but as with Phillips’ serendipity the coincidence has traceable, objective causes, yet its inner impacts are effectively acausal, and it is from one’s inner being that writing emerges.
April 2023: my partner, son and daughter enjoy a mini-picnic of snacks from a kiosk in the Parku I Madh, the Great Park, on the outskirts of Tirana: Serbian Tzatziki flavoured crisps, Turkish seeds and pretzels, Coca Cola made in Albania, Kosovan beer, Greek confectionaries: wars become a brunch. I have some familiarity with the Balkans, albeit further to the south from Tito’s focus: Albania, Greece, and Macedonia. I first visited Albania in 2000, not long after the civil war there. Very distantly, from when it was still an Ottoman city, I have a maternal connection to old Salonica, much fought-over by Bulgaria, Greece, and Macedonia, and thoroughly Hellenised, I am tempted to say ethnically cleansed, as Thessaloniki following Greek forces narrowly beating Bulgarian ones to the city during the First Balkan War of 1912 against the Ottomans in the Balkans. Had it become part of Macedonia it would have become a Yugoslavian city; Greek punk would centre on Athens, and the anarchist squatting culture there persists. I would later witness a real revolution, with strong punk-influenced elements, and its murderous suppression in a neighbouring region, the Middle East. All that notwithstanding, I am ignorant: Barry’s book fills significant gaps in my knowledge, reading it enriches my experience.
Toxic Grafity was aware of and celebrated Yugoslav punk, covering it in ’79 and ‘80. Revisiting a page from the spring of 1980 is interesting in the light of reading and writing about Phillips’ book. The page is suitably anarchic, headed with the title ‘Punk Anarchism’ in Serbian Cyrillic letters, with ‘Punk and Anarchy in Yugoslavia’ typed in English by its side. The heading ‘USSA + USSR = oppreSSion’, with the ‘SSs’ written as SS runes is a definitive Yugo Punk statement on the geopolitics of the Cold War that hard started to heat up at the beginning of the 1980s, from the perspective of Yugoslavia, a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. In the top right quadrant is a crude line drawing of an Orthodox Christ Pantocrator with swastikas to each side as if they were earrings. The image bears the legend ‘Bog Je Fascista’, ‘God Is a Fascist’. In the context of Yugoslavian punk this is certainly a strong anti-clerical statement, linking religion to fascism, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia having come into being in 1945 after a long and bloody struggle against the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis. However, looking at the image in 2023 it occurs to me that an actual fascist might be quite happy with the statement ‘God Is a Fascist’. Oddly, that didn’t occur to me in 1980, although in some regards the image is prescient, as religious difference in large part underpinned the ultra-nationalisms that tore Yugoslavia apart during the 1990s.
More accurately, perhaps, it religious heritage or civilisational background rather than religion as faith or religious practice: the ultra-nationalists of Croatia imagined their emergent country as part of the world of Central European and Adriatic Catholicism, the ultra-nationalists of Serbia saw their country as a very particular manifestation of the Orthodox-Byzantine civilizational continuum: both tended to see the Bosniaks, quite stereotypically and without historical nuance (in the 1880s the Bosniaks had risen up against Ottoman rule), as South Slav turncoats who adopted Islam in return for privilege under the Ottoman Empire, paradoxically both enemies to be expelled or exterminated or allies of convenience as Croatia and Serbia sought to seize chunks of Bosnia and Herzegovina. BiH was also a place where the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds met : Sephardim dating from the Ottoman resettlement in the Balkans (particularly Salonica) of Spanish-speaking Jews expelled from Iberia following the Catholic Reconquista Balkans; Ashkenazim escaping pogroms and persecution in the Habsburg and Russian empires. In BiH there are still some Jewish cemeteries that escaped desecration, the stones bearing both sorts of names; but the fate of most Balkan Jews was sealed with the Nazi occupation (although Albania’s Jewish population increased during the Second World War as refugees from across the Balkans took refuge in its mountains under the protection of Communist partisans).
The image proclaims ‘Anarchy and Peace’ (Mīr) as a peak-capped Yugoslav police officer rises like a sun over the Tito era low- and high-rise social housing blocks Barry Phillips so accurately describes: as I composed this image in April 1980 Tito was on a ventilator at a Ljubljana hospital with days to live, a slogan reads ‘The Kids Are Raising Their Voices!’ Indeed, they did.
A Yugoslav-made automatic pistol points at the sun-cop’s head, next to a drawing of a woman wearing a strap-on suicide bomb harness (yes, they predate post-9/11 Jihadism). Anxious faces peer to the sky as a nuclear explosion destroys a city. There is an image of the cover of Dolgcajt (‘Boredom’ in Slovene, but sounds a bit like the English ‘dog shite’), the debut album of Pankriti (‘Bastards’), perhaps the definitive Yugoslavian punk band, that had just then been released. Pankriti still play, and Phillips gets to see them live in their hometown of Ljubljana in his travels. A handy map of the Balkans is supplied for the benefit of Toxic Grafity readers, and I inform readers of bands that were new to me: Warsza, Izuzetni Lezevi, Paraf, Pekinška Patka, KAOS. A 1980 Ljubljana postal address is given for Pankriti’s Pero Lovšin, who Phillips interviews in Chapter 2017, and for Rade Malinković, over in Ruma, Vojvodina. The page presents a Manifesto from Belgrade band ‘92’. 9-2 was the Serbian emergency telephone, like ‘999’ or ‘911’ (almost certainly they were thinking of the UK punk band 999):
‘ . . . we are musical primitives, no comparison might be made between our songs and rock music. The difference between dirty words on toilet walls and beleteristic literature [from the French belles-lettres]. We don’t play rock music because we hate it, we would be very happy if we could destroy it. Rock ‘n’ roll does not exist, only rock ‘n’ roll business, they think they are being artists, in fact what they are making is a load of shit. We hate and despise rock musicians because they amass money and are not able to admit that rock music can be played by anyone . . . they are models created by businessmen to allow mass-production and mass sales . . . If punk is to have any ethic it is to destroy conventional ways of normal behaving and living . . . we think punk is an individual revolt against the shitty middle-class mentality.
The question of punk and class is interesting, and problematic. In the UK not all Street Punks (I prefer to name that sub-genre thus, rather than the manufactured ‘Oi!’) were horny-handed sons of toil, and not all proto-Goths and Positive Punks were effete middle-class fops. Punk hand a strong working-class following, or at least elements of punk had, but it was equally popular among middle-class kids, especially what would now be called the ‘aspirant’ lower-middle-classes, one generation and one rung ‘up’ the social class ladder from their working-class roots (very much my own class background). While punk is often imagined as radical and in one way or another ‘left-wing’, Johnny Rotten could sing disparagingly of ‘another council tenancy’ on ‘Anarchy in the UK’ in a way that anticipated Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of UK social housing, while a few years later Crass’ ‘there is no authority but yourself’ is, ‘Thatchergate’ notwithstanding’, ideologically a bed-fellow with Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society, only collections of individuals’, an ‘individual revolt’, a riot of my own. With a few notable exceptions (such as Gracia’s and earlier Trokakt Projekt’s Matija Vuica, ‘Croatia’s Vivienne Westwood’ and Jure Popović), most of Phillips’ informants are open about their middle-classness, and the extent to which Yugoslavian punk was a middle-class phenomenon. Indeed, some Yugo punks were daughters and sons of the Federal Republic’s political, diplomatic, business, and military elite:
‘. . . they played the gig and [Croatian Republic] President Tudjman and his lot took a break [from a cabinet meeting the then constituent Yugoslav republic] while the gig was on. They continued plotting the war [for Croatian independence from the YSFR] while the gig was on!’
It is significant that Yugoslavia, unlike other post-War Communist regimes had a viable middle-class beyond the Party elite. Many, if not most of Phillips’ informants emphasise how ‘liberal’ the Yugoslav regime was, how it was ‘not like the Iron Curtain countries’. They are reluctant to describe it as a dictatorship, although it was a one-party state. For Pankriti’s Pero Lovšin Tito was ‘one of the most important leaders in the world in the twentieth century’. The federal state could be tolerant, indulgent, even supportive of rock-based subculture, several of Phillips’ participants got their first breaks through organisations such as the Communist Party Youth Magazine, who organised the Yugoslavian National Rock Music Awards. For Jure Popović this was ‘Tito’s safety valve’. Others stress the federal government’s commitment to promoting inter-ethnic South Slav solidarity. For KUD Idijoti’s Sale Veruda, Yugoslav socialism was quite distinct from the Stalinisms that existed in the Warsaw Pact countries, and in neighbouring Albania (Albania split from the Soviet sphere in 1961):
‘We didn’t have a Russian type of socialism, we had a type of liberal socialism. Yugoslavia had a valid [i.e. ‘hard’] currency that was worth something, we could travel all around the world. The living standard was much higher than the Iron Curtain countries; this wasn’t like Romania or Bulgaria, or the whole Eastern Bloc, including East Germany. We were like a cross-fade between the West and the East. . . . .’
Indeed, due to Yugoslavia’s leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement a Yugoslavian passport was one of the world’s most useful passports during the Cold War, as it allowed travel, often without a visa across much of the world, both sides of the Iron Curtain. While they decry the violent ultra-nationalism of the 1990s, and the rampant, extractive, kleptocratic form of capitalism that followed, many of Phillips’ informants stress that in Yugo punk they didn’t seek to ‘destroy’ the Yugoslav system, but to improve or reform it, speaking out, for example against corruption or authoritarian bureaucracy. For others, punk was merely a push-back against what they perceived as the complacency of the middle-class parental generation.
Why was Yugoslavia like that? If Phillips has written a history book at all, it is a history of Yugoslav punk (although I’d argue it reads more like an (auto-)ethnography), not a general history of post-War Yugoslavia. If he had attempted that, it would have been something different, a quite shallow history jazzed up with a bit of punk colour. Sensibly, this is not what he has done. I will, however, briefly try to provide enough of that history to help the reader locate how and why punk was able to flourish there. That history has geopolitical, political, and socio-economic aspects.
Geopolitically, at the February 1945 Yalta Conference an Allied victory in the Second World War in Europe was certain, and the geopolitics of the post-War era were coming to the fore. Stalin and Churchill agreed on a British-Soviet divisions on influence in the Balkans: the USSR was to have a 90% say in the political make up of post-War Bulgaria and Romania, Britain 10%. In Greece, the reverse was the case, 90%-10% to Britain. Yugoslavia, the two leaders agreed, as to be 50-50% Soviet and British influence. However, Tito had ideas of his own: a Communist Balkan League that went well beyond ‘South Slavia’, bringing in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece (the majority populations of Albania, Greece, and Romania are not Slavs). At that time, Britain was brutally suppressing a communist uprising in Greece that came very close to success. Tito offered support to the Greek communists. Stereotypes regarding a Stalinist ‘empire’ aside, Stalin had every intention of adhering to his Yalta agreement. The Soviet Union was in no position, having just lost some 30 million people, to engage in a fighting war with the West in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. What Stalin wanted was less an empire but buffer states to protect the USSR from invasion from the west, as had happened in 1812-14 and 1943-5: the establishment of Stalinist puppet regimes in central Europe, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland achieved that. His Balkan buffers were to be Romania and Bulgaria where ruthless Stalinist regimes were installed. This somewhat involuntary ‘alliance’ solidified into the Warsaw Pact. Tito’s position on Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece threatened Stalin’s ‘peace’. The Greek communists were cut loose to face massacre at British and Greek rightist hands, Romania and Bulgaria were held in an iron grip of hardcore Stalinism, and their economies partially integrated into the Soviet economy, to the great detriment of the Bulgarian and Romanian peasantry. The Soviet Union cut all ties with Tito’s Yugoslavia, and began to exert economic and diplomatic pressure on the Tito regime. Gradually, however, Tito was able to form new alliances, with Yugoslavia joining Egypt under Nasser, and post-colonial India and Indonesia to form a new bloc, the Non-Aligned Movement, countries that were not aligned either with the NATO West, or with the Communist Bloc. It would eventually grow to include over a hundred members states and observer status states. Tito was also able to establish trade and investment links with the West, with many Yugoslav workers finding employment in western Europe, especially West Germany, while Croatia was able to establish a major tourism industry. At the same time, after the death of Stalin, the USSR and its Balkan satellites were able to facilitate a partial reproachment with now non-aligned Yugoslavia. During the 1960s and 1970s, a Yugoslav passport allowed easy travel all over the world, across geopolitical power blocs.
Politically, Tito started out as a strident Stalinist. There was little, in his early years, to distinguish him from Enver Hoxha in neighbouring Albania in terms of the degree of political repression he was prepared to inflict on political opponents, and in terms of his commitment to an ideology of the forced collectivisation of agriculture, a policy that would have disastrous consequences in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and in the USSR itself. However, a serious rebellion against forced collectivisation, the 1950 Cazin rebellion involving Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs, forced Tito to rethink. This uprising was especially disturbing for Tito as it consisted in large part not of former Četniks (rightist, royalist mainly Serbian guerrillas who had fought against both Tito and the Nazis), or former members of the Ustaše, an exceptionally brutal Croatian fascist movement that had collaborated with the Nazis, but of Tito’s former partisan comrades. This, combined with the fact that Stalin was offended that Tito expected to be treated as an equal rather than a client, and Stalin’s rejection of the Balkan League and pro-communist intervention in Greece, led Tito to abandon forced collectivisation, allow a relatively free peasantry while embarking upon industrialization sometimes with western finance, and establish a mixed economy. In many ways this was the mirror image of the British post-War mixed economy. Whereas, until the rise of Thatcherism, the British economy was fundamentally a capitalist economy with very significant state, public, and social sectors, the Yugoslav economy was fundamentally a socialist, state-run economy, with a very significant social and private sector. The latter included a relatively free agricultural sector, a tourism sector of increasing significance, and fledgling hospitality, music, and cultural industries. In political-economic terms, this is the Yugoslavia into which Barry Phillips’ Yugo Punk informants were born and in which they grew up, and which began to fall apart following Tito’s death in 1980, culminating in the horrible wars of the 1990s.
So if Yugoslavia was such a ‘liberal communist’ utopia that successfully combined the best of western liberalism and of Marxist-Leninist socialism, why did it break apart, and do so so violently? Well, it was not perfect: there were occasional outbreaks of state repression; a degree of endemic corruption, chiefly involving the federal state which gave the governments of Yugoslavia’s constituent republics genuine cause for grievance; Tito’s break with Stalin also led to a break with ultra-Stalinist Albania under Hoxha, leading to a sealed border, the potential for Yugoslavian-Albania conflict, and exacerbating tensions in Albanian-majority Kosovo, which was not a full republic but an autonomous region of Serbia, there were also less serious tensions in Vojvodina, like Kosovo and autonomous region of Serbia; to a degree, as the Iron Curtain began to fall, there was a reluctance on the part of the neoliberalised West to tolerate any alternative to its version of economic liberalism, leading it to fan the flames of conflict.
However, these alone are not sufficient reason for the very bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Much is made of the intra-ethnic diversity of the former Yugoslavia: six ethno-confessional republics and two autonomous regions, five religions, at least five languages. But this bears comparison with the UK. Tito went to great lengths to encourage inter-South Slav ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ (the name, not only of the trans-Yugoslav highway Barry Phillips travels, now dotted with checkpoints and border crossings, but also of an array of Titoist infrastructure and institutions). People in more industrially advanced Croatia and Slovenia did not necessarily mind, in the name of solidarity, security, development, and ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, taxation redistributing wealth to the less developed Yugoslav republics, but they did resent the corruption that saw a lot of that money diverted into a handful of Serbian banks and from then into the pockets of the federal elite. This was a significant cause of intra-Yugoslav tension. While real ethno-confessional tensions did exist within the constituent parts of Yugoslavia, divisions of social class were equally significant, and the intersect between ethno-confessional identity and social class was to prove incendiary.
Industrialization under Tito was in large part successful, although unequally distributed among the different parts of the federation. While, say, inter-ethnic and inter-faith marriages were quite common in the big cities, much of the country remained quite rural and agrarian, and there/their conservative religious and tribal allegiances continued and often exerted a greater sway on hearts and minds than seemingly abstract notions of socialism, solidary, Yugoslavness, and ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. Industrialisation created a degree of internal migration, with agricultural workers migrating to the cities for better paid work than they could find in the country, but work which was often regarded by city dwellers as low status. Meanwhile, the culturally liberal middle class remained an almost exclusively urban phenomenon.
One of Tito’s most serious errors was to try during the 1970s to increase the power of the federal government relative to the republics by setting the republican governments, particularly those of Croatia and Serbia, against each other. This attempt at divide and rule backfired spectacularly and ensured that after Tito’s death: liberal currents within Croatian and Serbian nationalism became increasingly marginalised; ultra-nationalist underground movements were created, including guerrilla groups and factions within the military; the mass media of the republics became ever more shrilly nationalist; differences between the nationalities were exaggerated while commonalities were minimised; the peasantry and internal migrants in the city became increasingly radicalised by ultra-nationalist rhetoric and propaganda, and; the culturally liberal urban middle classes and guestworkers returning from the West became increasingly alienated from workers, peasants, and internal migrants. The tinderbox was primed. While most Eastern Bloc countries had a privileged elite based around the military and the senior Communist Party leadership, the Yugoslavian middle class was different: it was much larger, was culturally liberal, was well-travelled, well-educated, and multi-lingual, and often it was involved in industries such as tourism, hospitality and entertainment, and culture. Integrating new and emerging social classes with older ones is a challenge faced by many developing countries, but Tito’s botched attempt to strengthen the federal centre by setting the nationalist peripheries against each other would, following his death, tear the Federal Socialist Republic apart.
Given the history outlined above, it can now be seen that rather than an odd cultural quirk in an ‘exotic’ location, the emergence of Yugo Punk fits into a broader cultural and developmental pattern: it would have been more surprising if Yugoslavia didn’t have a punk scene than if it did. In the context of the 1970, the emergence of Yugo Punk was inevitable. This history also helps explain the strong nostalgia felt my most of Barry Phillips’ interlocutors for the former Yugoslavia, but also the apparent blindness of some of them to the mistakes that were made. It helps explain his informants broadly progressive outlook, and the way that almost all of them regret the rise of intra-Yugoslav ultra-nationalism, the very blood wars that followed, and the chaotic and kleptocratic form of capitalism than now almost dominates the former Yugoslav region. Phillips’ interviewees are not immune from ethno-confessional prejudices, as a careful reading of the interviews sometimes reveals, but broadly they are cosmopolitan liberal-left people who regret the passing of the Yugoslavia in which they grew up. Lastly, the history offered above underlines the significance of the middle-classness of nearly all of Phillips’ informants. Yugo Punk was largely a middle-class phenomenon. To a degree this is true too of UK punk; indeed it is true to a far larger degree than many old Brit Punks care to admit. But UK punk was never quite as middle-class a phenomenon as its Yugoslavian equivalent. That Yugo Punk generally was so does not undermine its integrity, quite the opposite: its middle-classness embeds Yugo Punk in a specifically Yugoslavian pattern of development. It explains their cultural liberalism, their humane cosmopolitanism, their nostalgia for a more ‘liberal’ form of communism than was found elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, but it also explains some of their blind spots, and why rather than them shaping history, history ‘happened to’ them, often with regrettable results. I don’t think it is entirely wrong to say that ‘Tito’s Safety Valve’ meant that as tensions mounted that would destroy Yugoslavia, ‘Tito’s Punks’, the culturally liberal urban middle-class were looking in the wrong direction, looking inwards to the gig or the recording studio rather than outwards to the wider society. Doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and place. This is not to denigrate these awesome people, merely a life lesson learnt against a history that was closing in around them. One could say something similar about Brit Punk and Thatcherism. As KUD Idijoti’s Sale Veruda puts it:
‘To change the world with music? I got rid of those illusions when I was young. Music and musicians do change the world, but not in a political sense – not in a political way off thinking – because music is just not the thing for political changes, you have to do politics. You won’t fix unemployment, you won’t get rid of unemployment, just by singing about it. Let’s say you’re driving along a highway and you burst a tyre – you’ll need a wrench Number 13, not a song about it. You can write a song about wrench No 13 but it won’t change your tyre or fix your problem. The song is not the tool to change the tyre; it’s wrench No 13. So I would say if music and musicians do change opinions, they do it on an individual level. If you look at it, you can see how many bands in England tore their throats out singing against Margaret Thatcher, from Crass to I don’t know who -- but she did all her terms almost to the end . . . So all of us will know somebody who says ‘when I read this book or heard this song my whole world shifted’. That’s this individual change I am speaking about. And after that you, as a person, function better throughout your whole life. But the political systems around you didn’t change. You did.’
But the political systems around Sale did change, and change catastrophically. Perhaps Gramsci on the role culture in class struggles and anti-fascist struggles, culture as a form of political agency, is our friend here and deserves rereading. Italian Fascism was born in 1919 when aristocrat former general turned ultra-nationalist poet and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio and his proto-Fascist private army seized the city of Fiume for Italy from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the precursor to Yugoslavia. A Symbolist Aesthete, in the constitution of his fiefdom (absorbed into Italy by treaty in 1920) d’Annunzio accorded music a constitutional role as ‘a social institution’. Fiume is now Rijeka, Croatia. Fascist Italy would go on to invade Croatia, Slovenia, Albania and Greece during the Second World War stalling before the Albanian, Greek, and Serb partisans. This required Nazi Germany to divert resources from their planned invasion of the USSR to the Balkans to assist their faltering Italian ally, bringing the Holocaust into the Balkans. Not all ‘Balkan violence’ is of Balkan inception: ‘Europe’, often so keen to differentiate itself from its supposedly errant Balkan Peninsular, has a worse history of violence.
So how does Yugo Punk shape up relative to UK Punk? Mark Perry of the vaunted Sniffin’ Glue fanzine and later the band ATV recently reviewed two books in the Global Punk series. Glue, out of Deptford in London’s south Docklands is often credited as the first UK punk ‘zine, although I’d argue that Tony D’s Ripped ‘n’ Torn was the first ‘zine to really establish the punk ‘zine aesthetic, both ‘zines from ’76. One of the books Mark reviewed was Phillips’ Tito’s Punks. Perhaps it’s more an anti-review; it’s short, so I’ll quote it in full here:
‘Barry Phillips' book is . . . a personal tome, about a journey to the Balkans to discover how a song by his old punk band, Demob, ended up being covered by a former Yugoslavian punk band. As such, it's a serious story, full of info on the political situations going on over there and its effect on the local rock scenes and characters. Again, I didn't read every word but the whole thing does sound a bit bleak. But respect to Barry for putting this very personal journey down in print. I'm sure they'll be some takers out there . . . to clarify, I do think this idea of some sort of universal punk culture, 'Global Punk', a bit daft. People like to use labels, I know that, but 'Punk Scholars Network'!?! For fuck sake, was that really what it was all about?’
So, perhaps more of a ‘don’t send me any more books’ dis than a review as a review. Responding, one of the editors of the Global Punk series of books said:
‘Most of us are interested in researching a kind of evidence-based, factual, and accurate history of punk, including its influence around the world and the diversity of interpretations in different cultures and languages etc. Something more meaningful than standard “music journalism” which often depends on a bunch of superlatives – or negative comments – which are based on the personal opinion of the writer . . . .’
Another said:
‘I’ll have a chat . . . later concerning ‘punk’ authenticity – how dare people write in an intelligent way about how they see punk?’
All this is hardly punk verses the break up of Yugoslavia, but there are important points here. It is easy to pull apart Mark’s ‘review’: frankly, if this were about a book I’d put a lot of effort into, I’d be pretty pissed off about this short-shrift. Hardly any of Barry’s book is about ‘political scenes going on there [the former Yugoslavia]’, Barry wisely keeps the politics in the background. Although there is quite a bit of valuable interview material on the impact of political events on ‘local rock scenes’. Saying that the break up of Yugoslavia is ‘a bit bleak’ is grossly insensitive. Whatever is claimed about Ukraine, the 1990s wars of Yugoslav succession remain the bloodiest wars in Europe since the Second World War, and that 1990s history cannot be easily separated from the Second World War, the 1914-’18 Great War (1911-’24 in the Balkans), as some historians have claimed, the wars of Ottoman Succession continue to this day, Europe’s and the Middle East’s One Hundred and Twenty Years War. Thus considered, Perry is glib and parochial. He also claims that ‘the idea of some kind of universal punk culture’ is ‘a bit daft’. More parochialism: if there were a ‘universal’ or ‘global’ punk ‘culture’ it would be bland and generic, hardly worth the effort of scholarly research nor creative writing. But I don’t think that is what the Punk Scholars Network is concerned with. Even in Perry’s (and my) mid- to-late ‘70s London there was never one generic ‘punk culture’, it was always plural, punk or punk-influenced cultures, and with post-punk it splintered into an often contradictory kaleidoscope of sub-subcultures. There was never, even in 1970s London, one unified ‘punk culture’. Barry Phillips is aware of this. At the start of Tito’s Punks he is aware of, and celebrates, provincial punk. He knows that Demob was mere ‘provincial punk’, but also implies, perhaps rightly, that although provincial punk is related to metropolitan punk, it is distinct from the punk centre, and in some ways is superior to the punk of London. This is an important reflection, because Phillips then sets out to explore Yugo Punk through the lens of UK Provincial Punk. At what point does the ‘provincial’ become the ‘global’? Within the UK, in Europe, in the Balkans, beyond? Were The Saints punk? Or Bad Brains? Pankriti certainly were. Besides, I doubt the Punk Scholars Network is concerned entirely with ‘punk culture’, global or otherwise, whatever ‘punk culture is’: there are other ways of understanding punk, global or otherwise, other than culture: punk aesthetics, punk as attitude and affect, as an articulation of grievance, as politics, as identity, punk as a lifelong transcultural, transgenerational journey. When Mark Perry asks ‘For fuck sake, was that really what it was all about?’, the past tense ‘was’ implicitly opens up the interesting ‘Punk Is/Is Not Dead’ argument. It is an interesting position, and perhaps it is correct to say that punk flourished for a handful of years in two cosmopolitan cities of the trans-Atlantic West, London and NYC in the second half of the 1970s, then died quite suddenly and anything that came after is either copycat or inauthentic, merely ‘provincial’ or ‘global’. I can see a degree of truth in that position, but only a very narrow degree. The wider circle is more interesting. For fuck’s sake, what is it all about? That’s a valid question.
In other regards, Mark Perry is spot on: Tito’s Punks certainly is a ‘personal’ and a ‘serious’ story. It certainly is ‘full of info’, or perhaps, as an (auto)ethnography, it is full of ‘data’. It certainly is a ‘very personal journey’, and it took a lot of labour, of many kinds, to get it into ‘print’. Here Perry is prescient. For fuck’s sake, what IS/WAS it all about? Perry’s a valid question, and as grad school tells us, quality research must begin with a valid question. Perry’s question is not invalid, even if his terseness is, perhaps, disrespectful. But since when has punk been expected to be respectful of academe, be it the academe of Oxbridge or the Ivy League, or that of the community college or post-1992 UK higher education institution?
Barry Phillips rightly dismisses ‘punk-fundamentalism’, the eternal ‘FUCK OFF!’, ‘I never cared for punk as the lowest common denominator’, the Sid Snot, or indeed Sid Vicious take on punk. But perhaps he fawns a bit to much to the ‘professors’, ‘I realised that punk is not dead, it just got a PhD’. Perhaps the two Sids are right to flob at that; that so much of punk was strongly autodidactic is often forgotten. I got, for what it’s worth, my PhD in 2001. Not in punk, but in the comparative Arabic and English literatures of the British occupation of Egypt, 1882-1956; my approach was ‘new historical’, but I feel looking back that there was something distinctively punky about my choice of topic, even though that was the time of my life when I was most minimally punky (I had acquired by then advanced skills in literary Arabic). In her Foreword to Tito’s, the middle-class voice Yugoslavia’s punk generation, its lost generation, the voice of Rujana Jeger is probably more insightful:
‘Most of us considered ourselves punks, then we were suddenly made aware that we were not simply punks. I remember my father telling me one day how his side of the family was Serbian, probably foreseeing that could shortly become a problem. “Oh yeah”, I said, “and how do you know that?” And then I added “maybe you are a Serb, but I am a punk . . . Alas, soon after that, we learned to how to tell the difference among the Croat, Serbian, and Bosniak family names. The country fell apart; the bands fell apart, some of us stayed and fought against the war, some left, and some were dragged down by it. Nevertheless, the punk spirit survived.’
One can read much into this: a loss of innocence, punk as endurance in the face of extreme disintegration, punk as a unifying ‘spirit’; or punk as a comfortable middle-class rebellion against father and family, ignorant of the wider social and political forces that will soon reap genocide and destruction. Both readings have an existential validity, against which Mark Perry’s position seems small and dismissive and parochial. Yet the Punk Scholars seem parochial in a different sense: the insistence on that which is supposedly ‘evidence-based’, a ‘factual’, and ‘accurate’ history. Historiography certainly tries to reference evidence, although ‘evidence-based’ has become a cruel cliché of neoliberalised governance, and few if any historians would clutch at the straws of factuality and accuracy: in history the sources always radically diverse, often contradictory, and accuracy is something of a delusion. The job of the historian is to weigh and balance sources the historian knows are seldom if ever factual or accurate. A balance of probabilities usually comes into play, and this more often requires a degree of subjective interpretation. Not the subjectivity of the sensationalist mainstream music journalist on the make, for sure. But perhaps punk scholarship ought make its peace with the informed subjective, the toxic Research Excellence Framework be damned, pseudo-positivism should have no place here.
Barry Phillips has written a very important book here. It is important for understanding Yugo Punk, and has clear relevance, Mark Perry notwithstanding, to the study of punk generally. More than that, by focusing on lived punk lives rather than on the politics, geopolitics, and the imagined primordial ancient hatreds that are held to define the Balkans, Phillips has made a significant contribution to Yugoslav and Balkan studies. Through they Global Punk series, the Punk Scholars Network has done a superb job in realising this book into beautifully presented and very reader-friendly print. The typography, structure and presentation of the book is excellent, leaving aside the use of for me toe-curling ‘fake Russian’ English letters in the title of the hardcover (Serbian does not use the /yaa/ reverse Я). Other than that the book is lovingly presented.
Sometimes the reader is intrigued by what is not mentioned: crucially, did some bands and artists did check for the ultra-nationalists of the 1990s, if so, who were they? What is their position now? For example, the ‘Nazi Punk Affair’ perhaps demands more in-depth treatment. In the context of Slovenia shortly after the death of Tito, using the German name ‘Laibach’ for Ljubljana would have recalled Second World War Nazi claims over the territory, the gross atrocities of the Ustaše, and is echoed the claims of Slovene ultra-nationalists whereby Slovenia is imagined not part of the ‘Balkans’ at all, but part of ‘Mitteleuropa’. That statement could not possibly be assigned to mere punk exuberance. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek addresses in a somewhat ironic voice the paradoxes of the concept of the assignation ‘Balkan’:
‘ . . . its geographic delimitation was never precise. It is as if one can never receive a definitive answer to the question, "Where doe[s] [the Balkans] begin?" For Serbs, it begins down there in Kosovo or Bosnia, and they defend the Christian civilization against this Europe's Other. For Croats, it begins with the Orthodox, despotic, Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia defends the values of democratic Western civilization. For Slovenes, it begins with Croatia, and we Slovenes are the last outpost of the peaceful Mitteleuropa. For Italians and Austrians, it begins with Slovenia, where the reign of the Slavic hordes starts. For Germans, Austria itself, on account of its historic connections, is already tainted by Balkanic corruption and inefficiency. For some arrogant Frenchmen, Germany is associated with the Balkanian Eastern savagery — up to the extreme case of some conservative anti-European-Union Englishmen for whom, in an implicit way, it is ultimately the whole of continental Europe itself that functions as a kind of Balkan Turkish global empire with Brussels as the new Constantinople, the capricious despotic centre threatening English freedom and sovereignty. So Balkan is always the Other: it lies somewhere else, always a little bit more to the southeast, with the paradox that, when we reach the very bottom of the Balkan peninsula, we again magically escape Balkan. Greece is no longer Balkan proper, but the cradle of our Western civilization.’
As if. Run out of Balkans, then you are in the imagined ‘Middle East’, which might be considered to begin with Cyprus, an imperilled ‘Balkanised’ small island republic a long way east of the Balkan peninsular, contested a few miles off the coast of Syria by historic Balkan rivals Greece and Turkey. The Balkans is always somewhere else, the Other’s Other, up to the point it becomes either the Middle East, or else, getting more northerly and mor white it becomes magically Mitteleuropa. Not the Balkans. Definitely not. How could anyone confuse Slovenia or Croatia with those migrant-generating hell-nations that are, for the British ultra-nationalist (now mainstreamed) far-right, Albania or Romania? Perhaps Barry Phillips might have given more thought to how the Balkans are imagined (and denied) in this way. But that’s a lot to ask of a book about punk. Phillips seems better at ease in Slovenia and Croatia than in Serbia or Vojvodina. Serbia in particular seems to challenge him, not his very welcoming Serbian interlocutors, but the harsh reality of the NATO bombing of Serbia, the ruins of which are still there for him to see. Serbian ultra-nationalism is a very ugly thing. But so too its Croatian equivalent, or Greek or Turkish ultra-nationalism, or the historical or contemporary ultra-nationalisms of Italy or Germany, or France or Brexit Britain; or the West’s arrogant assumption of superiority over the Balkans, and the Middle East. He realises with a justified degree of horror that Western precision bombing was nothing of the sort, that we committed atrocities there. His journey into a heart of darkness, yet illuminated by the joyousness and generosity of his Serb hosts. He should visit Iraq, or Libya, where the death and destruction was far worse, ‘our’ death and destruction: this kind of ‘precision’ means, in purely military terms, that a high percentage of munitions will fall on a precisely defined target; ‘precision’ says nothing about the consequences of faulty intelligence, or about so-called ‘collateral damage’, civilian death, maiming, and trauma: in the West, the political-media system likes to imagine that ‘our’ bombs only kill the Bad Guys. Nothing could be further than the truth: Belgrade still bears the scars, as do Serbian hearts and minds. Phillips processing this after coming face-to-face with this reality is a poignant highlight of the book.
This is an excellent book, an eye-opener both for those interested in the Balkans, and those interested in punk. And beautifully realised in print, paper, and card by the Punk Scholars Network, who clearly take book production as craft very seriously. Very punky. A must-read.