The New Hultura Klub

The time is now. We are nowhere. A very good place to start.

Pete Solowka has ‘Wedding Present’ stencilled on his guitar case. He drinks machine coffee that’s as addictive as Crack. You can almost see the caffeine beneath the glaze of his eyes, behind his gold-rimmed glasses.

“It’s only weird if you look at it from an English perspective.” He’s parrying my accusation that his band – the Ukrainians – operate from a weird concept. He moves constantly while he formulates his response. His fingers twine and twist. “Every English artist has influences, Western and Pop, that are considered normal. There are bands around now who were just babies in their prams when The Beatles were on the go. Yet they say ‘Oh, yeah, The Beatles were fine’. But if I say to you ‘I’ll play you songs that were written in the Ukraine in the 1960s’ you say ‘Ah, that’s weird. How can that be relevant to you?’ Of course it’s not relevant to you if you’re – I won’t say ‘ordinary’ – but if you’re from mainstream English culture. But it is relevant to you if you grew up with it and if it’s part of your culture.”

“It’s like being called ‘The Celts.” Len Liggins, shoulder-length black hair and a mauve tie-dyed T-shirt, nods his assent. “Irish traditional music, and Ukrainian music has a similar tonality, and sometimes even the same chord progressions. But the Ukrainians? Maybe people only think of the Ukrainians as a fiery Eastern European nation? One that’s hanging onto its nuclear weapons . . .?”

To fill in those gaps: the emergence of Ukrainian independence from the ex-USSR is very much part of what has been called a ‘Europe of the Nations’, in which all the submerged ethnic groups from the Celts and Basques to Azerbejans and Chechnyans are reclaiming and re-asserting their cultural identity. And the appearance of the Ukrainians’ band neatly coincides with the liberation of the Ukraine, which is a pretty astute marketing device. Can we now expect to hear from other bands like the Armenians, the Byelorussians, and the Lithuanians?

“It is weird from that point of view, and it does sound a bit strange,” Pete concedes. “But it was quite a radical name when we chose it initially. We took the name ‘The Ukrainians’ a year before independence and all the possible wranglings of the splitting up of the Soviet system. It was the name of a country which most people didn’t recognise. A country of 50 million people which most people here had never even heard of. But we released our first record about two weeks after the declaration of independence. Which was a complete coincidence. That was the really weird part.”

After that – this!

‘To all bands: ‘Don’t fuck with the leads in the back of this PA’, it says on the wall of this rehearsal space in Chapel Studios, Czar Street, Leeds. And here the new Kultura Klub are running through material from their current album Kultura for the tour that commences tomorrow. They’re heading for Hamburg and Berlin, then further, “wearing down the autobahns again and generally destroying our eating and sleeping patterns.” Within the surround of static their songs are Natural Born Thrillers, with a feel-good factor high in a Poguesy hoe-down sort of a groove.

But bringing my sophisticated sensory apparatus to bear on the music, there’s a problem too. Was it Byron who said ‘critics have just enough learning to misquote’? Well – in the CD insert, it’s all there in the small print. A toe-tapping explosion of a track called ‘Horilka’ is supposed to be about ‘a very potent illicit brew’, it has a mandolin intro and a jaunty swing suggesting a potential Eurovision candidate. But it has lyrics that go “przed rankiem samogonke naganiajmy/Tylko szklanke samogonke pije . . .”. And that’s one of two translations. The original Ukrainian text is in Cyrillic lettering. There aren’t enough asterisks and exclamation marks on my keyboard to do justice to this material.

The speaker burps.

Doesn’t the fact that the Ukrainians sing in Ukrainian limit their potential audience?

“How many words do you understand when you actually go to a concert?” counters Pete. He sinks down into a studio chair with the grace and inevitability of a building collapsing under its own weight, in slow motion.

And we engage in a full and frank exchange of views. I say, “That’s the obvious come-back.”

“It is. But if the music is emotional and expressive, that’s what appeals to people most.”

Isn’t it an option to do English-language versions of the songs while retaining the Ukrainian musical elements?

“We haven’t really thought of doing that. It doesn’t really appeal to us. It seems a little bit of a crass marketing thing. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it, in the right environment, but it’s not a natural thing for us to do. We don’t think, ‘Hey, let’s appeal to an English market by singing in English. Let’s appeal to the German market by singing in German.’ It’s just, we are what we are, and people accept us as we are.”

Kultura opens with a horn fanfare, with mandolins and balilaikas over sold rock rhythms. It’s an extraordinarily non-ordinary album. A music reflecting the seismic political and social changes shocking eastern Europe, apparently resting on two opposing musical tectonic plates, grinding together tremulously, throwing out sparks.

“If someone took a photograph of our audience you could mark all their heads with different coloured felt-tip pens,” relates Len with some amusement. “This one’s an Indie kid, this one’s a World Music buff, this one’s a Folkie, this one’s a Wedding Present fan and so on. It’s quite amazing.”

It’s a sound that originally evolved in late 1987 around a Wedding Present spin-off project. The Leeds band indulged then-member Pete’s Ukrainian family roots, allying them to Len’s useful Slavonic language degree to formulate a hybrid one-off Ukrainian album. Then, while the Weddo’s moved on to other things, Pete and Len hung with the idea, developing it through three well-received albums for the Cooking Vinyl label. Other members have come and gone around their solid nucleus. Now there’s Mick West (mandolin), Stepan Pasicznyk (accordion), Allan Martin (bass) and long-time drummer Dave Lee.

“We’ve laid ourselves open a bit since this band began with those Wedding Present sessions,” leers Len. “I’d been teaching myself Ukrainian and how to pronounce it for about two weeks before we did that, and all the songs that we did were traditional songs. Then we went on to our first proper album (The Ukrainians – 1991), and we wrote some fairly simple songs in Ukrainian folk style using folk subject-matter. Then we did the second album (Vorony – 1993) on which we developed a more current style but still with folk subject-matter. Since that second album we’ve actually been to the Ukraine twice, and basically we’ve all been quite moved by the experience. So now we’re wanting to branch out and write about more contemporary themes, which – on Kultura, we feel we’ve done.

Songs like ‘Polityka’, ‘UkrainAmerica’ and ‘Kievskiy Express’ are directly inspired by our experiences in the Ukraine. We found an impoverished people there, struggling to find an identity after three-quarters of a century of political, economic, social and cultural suppression. But unfortunately, instead of creating a new modern culture, Ukrainians are succumbing to the attractions of Western consumerism and the thoughts of being able to partake in the American Dream. Thus McDonald’s burgers and Marlborough cigarettes are everywhere. Sad, but totally inevitable.”

It was not until August 1993 that they got to tour the Ukraine properly, climaxing the jaunt with a performance in Kiev’s Independence Square (formerly the Lenin Square) before 75,000 people in a nationally televised event organised to celebrate the end of Soviet dominance.

“The event was kind-of interesting,” says Pete. “There were quite a few bands playing. We were just one of them. The Ukrainian authorities – their Ministry of Culture – had invited us and those other bands over, and they sequenced alternating Western bands with Ukrainian ones. And all of them – including the Ukrainian bands, played music that was definitely ‘American’ rock music. Some of it was from Germany. Some of it from Finland. Some from the Ukraine. Some of it from America. Some from England. But it was all very definitely American Western Rock Music.

“And then we came on with mandolins and accordion, a British group singing in Ukrainian! And they couldn’t quite work it out. It’s as if, over in the Ukraine, if you want to be cool musically you play guitar solos and you play loud and you have Marshall stacks and you play rock music. You don’t play mandolins and accordion, that’s very uncool. But, we were absolutely amazed by people coming up to us afterwards saying ‘It’s weird, you’re throwing our culture back at us, and we really like it!’ That felt good. It made us very aware that we’re not stuck in a little cocoon over here in the West.”

“A few journalists there have kept in touch and they’ve sent us some tapes they’re playing on the radio,” adds Len. “And we’ve heard stories that since we’ve been over there, there are bands out there now basing their style on the Ukrainians from England. Now that is a weird concept.”