1. Strip Bar – Napoli
Did you always think you would be a musician?
My father was an amateur violinist and he wanted me to study violin – but that hope did not last long because I very early understood that girls prefer guitar-players and at 15 I started playing popular music as a professional. Very early I had the reputation of a good musician and played with musicians who were older than me. In Communist times strip-tease bars were not only places where you watched naked women, but were also cult places where one could have the impression of an escapade from life. As a 17-year old my only enjoyment was to know how to play music to which women take off their clothes, and even the idea that at 17 I saw more naked women than all my peers in Yugoslavia put together, seemed very cool to me. Then I arrived in Naples (that was in the 70ies – LSD times) and I of course immediately started having problems with drugs… so after a year my mother came to fetch me and took me home to study.
2. Studies - Philosophy
What pushed you to study Sociology and Philosophy as well?
When one is young one thinks that studies of philosophy can give you answers to the fundamental questions one asks oneself – then one starts to study and only ends up having more questions. So from age 20-24 I studied philosophy and sociology and, at the last minute, when I was about to become professor of Marxist thought (in communist times this is what studying philosophy resulted in), my record («The White Button», which stayed on as the name of my band) came out and I became the biggest rock n' roll star in my country and was thus saved from the sad career of a professor.
3. First Concert
Do you remember your first concert?
After my rock n' roll group BJELO DUGME (White Button) published its first record we suddenly experienced local fame - we played in dancing halls in Sarajevo and around and had a feeling we were doing just fine… earning about 100 euros per evening. Then we received the first invitation for a concert in Belgrade. True that it was organized by mafiosi but we accepted because they were offering three times the fee we were earning at that time. Until that moment we did not know we were stars. When we arrived in Belgrade we realized that the concert was to take place in a sports hall with an audience of 6000 and that firemen were chasing away with water-hoses people who couldn't get a ticket. The mafiosi earned a ton of money on our back but this is the first time that I experienced the beauty of playing for an audience who really listened and the first time I understood I was worth more than a hundred euros. After this concert it wasn't easy to get the Belgrade mafia off our backs of course, but the Sarajevo mafia helped.
4. Second Career
Do you like touring, do you enjoy it?
For fifteen years I was a big r&r star in Yugoslavia. I was fed up with it, especially playing r&r as it always has a need to amplify things, to enlarge, to improve the picture with light, to strengthen the sound by the sound systems. So before the war I was already retired, I didn't want to play anymore, I'd had enough. What made me play again was when I heard, for the first time, the Balanescu Quartet playing two of my pieces in Rome, and I saw four men playing my music sitting in chairs without any need for amplifying. What I do today is a simple concert, which has nothing in common with show biz or stage performance, it is just music. So I sit and sip my drink slowly surrounded with talented people and it is a great pleasure.
5. Fame
How do deal with the fame? Do you feel it changed you to some degree?
In times when I was a star in Yugoslavia, in the communist times, income tax was 90%, and since I resented giving 90% of my money to the government, I worked once in every three years. The rest of the time I was a mountain climber, I sailed a yacht, was president of a boxing club… because I was had nothing better to do; I discovered the pleasure of work only in the past ten years and now I work eight hours a day – like all normal people.
6. War
The place where I come from has a terrible and tragic history because it is a unique direct border-line where in Europe for centuries three religions collided: Catholicism, Orthodox Christianism and Islam. There have never been more than 50 years of peace in that area. As for every person from Sarajevo, my life is divided into before and after the war. I was lucky to be in Paris and not in Sarajevo when the war broke out. Why is such a big part in history of art reserved for artists in exile? Because Darwin’s theory is right: both I and the Galapagos tortoises prove it equally well.
7. Collaborations
What is it that attracts you to another musician or singer?
It is always easy to work with people with great talent. I like to mix with various musicians because I am an eclectic person. My music is eclectic. Since I myself work with archetypes, I like to work with artists who in their way are archetypes. I lay my own archetype next to theirs and they live parallel lines, like strata in a fossil stone. I like to work with Gypsies just as much as I do with Iggy Pop or Cesaria Evora, the late Ophra Hasa or Scott Walker - those people are my musical family. They have marked a certain space and time. When you juxtapose archetypes you understand what they have in common that passes through the filter of Time. It is hard to predict the result but it is a process I enjoy very much.
8. Brass Bands
I'm mostly interested in brass bands, for several reasons: first because they'll never be admitted into expensive restaurants (where I come from it is a tradition that a gypsy band will come into a restaurant and play for tips). Brass players must often shake out their trumpets, spit around, so there's not much risk for them of becoming "restaurant music". Restaurants have ruined Russian gypsy music, flamenco, because players had to adapt their playing to plush places. (necessary) Spitting will save the brass bands from that danger, thank god!
Second reason is that this type of music is authentic – it stems from tradition of army brass bands. Armies seem to be the only authentic tradition around here - in the whole history of the Balkans we've never lived for more than fifty years without a war. Tradition of brass bands dates from the 1st World War and from the Balkan Wars when armies between Istanbul and Bucharest needed military music, and since there were no music academies, they simply bough trumpets and gave them to the gypsies because they quickly pick up playing on any instrument. And so they acquired military music without having to build music academies. Of course, the minute they got the instruments, gypsies started using them to play music they've played their whole life: same occasions, same music - weddings and funerals to the sound of shiny trumpets. And they were good at it: brass bands stemming from this military tradition took root - you can now count them by hundreds between Istanbul and Bucharest. And even today they still play on the same old tattered military trumpets, instruments very difficult to tune.
Which is another reason why I like to work with these bands, they make me think of early punk, of times before "God save the Queen" was recorded – first punk piece produced by a serious producer. Punk was touching and human until producers started using elaborate instruments with tuning machines. Punk died after it was tuned. I still find something of that human out-of-tune playing in my gypsy bands.
9. Favorite book
Music of course resembles life and life is a series of small miracles that happen to us each day.
I shall illustrate this with a story that begins at a reception of a hotel in Buenos Aires where I come to play my first concert. The receptionist gives me the key and says “I have an envelope for you”. I open the envelope to find in it my favorite book “Alejandra”, by my favorite writer Ernesto Sabato (for those who don’t know him maybe the greatest Latin-American author). It is my preferred edition with a preface by Borges. I open the book and start looking for a note to understand who sent it to me and find a handwritten letter that says:
“I thank you for your beautiful music which has saved me from depression many times. I regret not to be able to attend your concert tomorrow – it will be my 94th birthday and I feel too weak to go out… etc“. Signature: Ernesto Sabato.
And here is my letter to the great man, written the same afternoon:
“…When I was given your letter yesterday, I immediately thought ‘Lord, could this be a sign?’
I served army, infantry section, in a casern near the Bulgarian frontier. Like all other caserns in Yugoslavia in that time, it had a small library. The rule was: one book for each ten soldiers and officers. It consisted of “complete works”: Tito’s complete works, complete works of Karl Marx, Lenin etc. It goes without saying that we stole what we wanted – those were the communist times. Tito, Marx and Lenin were intact when I started my year of service. But of complete works of Dostoyevsky there were only two books of “Letters”, only one book of Chekhov’s “Short Stories” and of the complete works of South-American authors I found only one book by Vargas Llosa, “The Journal" by Gombrowicz and … Ernesto Sabato’s "Alejandra". It is “Alejandra” that I stole. When I finished the army, the only thing I kept from that terrible place was this book, the one small miracle that happened to me in this lost year of my life. In civilian clothes “Alejandra” continued her life on my book-shelf in Sarajevo.
I lent it to friends. Often.
Then war broke out in Sarajevo, my house was pillaged and – with all else – disappeared the only stolen object that I had there: your "Alejandra."
Since then I don’t collect books. Life is long enough to start over twice – but not long enough to build a library twice. However… Could this be a sign, Lord?”
10. Bjelo Dugme
What do you think about “Bielo Dugme” music now? How do you rate it?
Pope Voytila wrote poetry when he was young. Marks wrote the “Communist Manifesto”. When you are young, even the ugliest suit looks good on you. I feel as in the proverb that says that “When whores marry, they become the best wives.”
In 2005 your old band White Button (Bjelo Dugme) reunited and played for 200000 people in Belgrade – could it mean a kind of “new page” for Mr. Bregovic? Like “back to roots” or it should be considered as an act of pure politics? In a very good sense of course.
It was more like when people get together to celebrate 30 years from graduation – we all have this sentimental streak. In White Button no-one ever graduated – we all became starts too fast, too soon, so you could call these three concerts in Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade “three days of sentimentality” rather than anything else. In those three days we discovered that Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb – three towns that fought a terrible war over ten years had become places to which Yugoslavian ex-pats from all over the world flew to be together. Bosnians, Croatians and Serbs alike. This of course changes nothing in the political reality, but even the fact that our people have some songs that we can sing together already means a lot to me.
Do you want to work with any of your old brother-in-arms (from 70s or 80s)?
No. At that time I worked with musicians who had to copy and imitate – now I work with real, talented musicians who play music naturally.
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