Category: Music

On a street in Almaty there is a brass statue of Viktor Tsoi. Here’s why.

You stroll along the wide street called Abay Avenue which leads towards the Abay monument (dedicated to the poet, composer and reformer Abai Qunanbaiuly). You have a different poet and composer in mind, however, and just before you reach the gaping mouth of the Abay metro, you hang left and find yourself facing a large statue of a seated man and behind that an impressive fountain.

This is the entrance to the street which you take. The statue was of the composer Mukan Tulabaevich – the first Kazakh classical composer and author of the Kazakh national anthem. You, though, have another monument to another musician in mind and continue down the street You find yourself on a downward incline with trees on either side of you.

All of a sudden you are in the midst of some familiar verses as you are flanked by plaques all along the leafy pathway and these feature quotations from certain songs. You recognize some words from the legendary song Change.

Then you encounter the dark bronze statue. It has its back to you so you pass it and turn and find yourself facing an iconic tableau of a man in the centre of the path in the act of lighting a cigarette. Beneath him are the engraved word `Igla` – `The Needle`.

Soviet Cinema’s turning point.

From Kazakhfilm in 1988, The Needle was a film which kickstarted an all too brief trend of Kazakh New Wave cinema. Taking its cue from French New Wave films, this trend was willing to grapple with less than ideal social conditions (The Last Stop from 1989 about a soldier returning to his home town is another key example from this era).

For all its Avant-garde gestures The Needle brought in the punters, becoming the most watched film over the coming year. Furthermore, it made a superstar out of the leading man, who plays a character just known as Moreau. He is played by Viktor Tsoi, the lead singer and songwriter of the band Kino. Soviet Screen hailed this relative newcomer to the silver screen `the cinema actor of the year`.

Directed by the then 34-year-old Rashid Nugmanov, The Needle was shot in Alma Ata (then the capital of Kazakhstan, now known as Almaty and relegated to being `the capital of the South`) and took the St Petersburgian Tsoi to the land where his Korean father grew up. (There are many Koreans in the Central Asian states having resided in the Far East at the end of the Nineteenth Century).

One one level the film is a topical thriller.  In it, an enigmatic stranger returns to his hometown to meet up with a past girlfriend and becomes embroiled in a feud with drug dealing gangs (this theme being something of a hot potato of the late Soviet period). Then again, the narrative uses the stylistics that are more common to modernist theatre than popular cinema. For example, Moreau’s girlfriend spends one sequence wearing a mask without explanation. In another scene, Moreau and some allies arrive to make a revenge attack on one of the drug dealers who is in a bath house. The men simple stand stock still on the edge of the pool and in this way some kind of violence is implied rather than depicted. Moreover, extended shots the parched wasteland of what was once the Aral Sea anchor the whole production in a dreamlike landscape.

Nor is The Needle just a showcase of Kino’s music. Sure enough, there is the presence of Kino’s mid-tempo interwoven guitar melodies here, but the songs do not dominate the tale. (Review of a Kino Album here)

The most famous song (written for the film) is `Blood type` which plays  at the film’s denouement when Moreau stops to light a cigarette just before being knifed by one of his drug baron enemies.(This is the very scene recreated by the statue – which has been erected on the precise locale where it had been filmed some three decades earlier).

Eurasian superstar.

Viktor Robertovich Tsoi came into the world in June 21^st 1962 into a respectable family composed of an engineer father and P.E teacher mother. One crucial fact is that he spent his formative years in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). The proximity of this city to Finland made for a lot cultural interpenetration between it and Western Europe. Tsoi, somewhat set apart from his peers by his Asiatic appearance, came to idolize Bruce Lee. He was also enamored of the pop-rock scene of the Eighties in Britain and was familiar with such bands as Joy Division, The Smiths and Duran-Duran. He would flog his own hand-drawn reproductions of album covers to people in his circle.

Later under the moniker Garin and the Hyperboloids – a reference to a Spy-fi thriller by Alexei Tolstoy which was both filmed and serialized on Soviet television -became a part of the officially sanctioned Leningrad Rock Scene (a period of history examined in the film Summer – my review here).

We should be grateful for the Soviet policy which insisted that bands could not do covers of Western songs but had to write their own material – without this edict one feels that Tsoi and others of his ilk might well have remained cover bands.

Instead, throughout a twelve-year period, from 1978 to 1990 Tsoi, with a lean black-clad rock-hipster-cum-Kung fu fighter persona, put Russian rock on the map through his guitar, bass and piano playing and, of course, his portentous low register voice – but above all his zeitgeist laden lyrics. Kino would release some four hundred songs, many of them still sung by young buskers throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They played to a huge crowd as Luzhniki stadium in Moscow before Tsoi met his end in a car accident in Latvia in 1990.

In the meantime, a great deal of `Kinomania` had been generated. It is said that some fans took their own lives on hearing of the loss of their hero. In the longer term, conspiracy theories abound as to the exact nature of Tsoi’s death. There is also much lively debate about just what Tsoi would have made of the end of the Soviet Union, which he had got so close to but never got to see.

There is also a deep irony in the fact that some of Tsoi’s songs have been requisitioned by the Putin regime and turned into pro-war anthems sung by military choirs!  (Needless to say, Tsoi was a draft dodger).

Metal Ghost.

 In the presence of Nugmanov, the lead guitarist of Kino band Yuri Kaspyarin and (a real sign of the times) the Mayor of Almaty, the statue was unveiled on the thirtieth anniversary of The Needle’s release – June 21^st 2018. The sculptor – one Matvey Matushkin was born on the year that Tsoi embarked on his musical career.

Tsoi’s metal ghost continues to haunt this former country of the Soviet Union, forever lighting a cigarette in grim reflection….