One of the largest names in Russian rock music — maybe the largest of all — is now listed as a “foreign agent” in his homeland, a designation that taints Boris Grebenshikov as an anti-patriot, even a traitor. The cost meets with an amused shrug. “Ah, I’m always on a list!” he says, laughing. “In the ’70s I was on a list of forbidden people. In the ’80s I was there. It’s all right.”
Grebenshikov, 69, is legendary all through the Russian-speaking world because the chief of the band Aquarium. They pioneered the rock scene that emerged within the USSR within the Seventies. Initially a semi-clandestine model of western hippy music, particularly prog and folk-rock, acts corresponding to Aquarium captured fashionable creativeness within the Nineteen Eighties as harbingers of a brand new Russia. They had been just like the pied pipers of perestroika. But Grebenshikov has fallen foul of officialdom as soon as once more with the return of authoritarianism.
The ministry of justice in Moscow declared him a overseas agent in June for talking “in foreign countries for the purpose of providing financial assistance to Ukraine” and for criticising Russia’s warfare towards its neighbour. Formerly based mostly in St Petersburg, Grebenshikov hasn’t been to Russia for greater than a yr and a half. Prospects for doing so are distant. “It may be a bit dangerous,” he concedes.
Since 2019, he has lived in London together with his spouse, Irina. He speaks in English on a video name from his flat in Earl’s Court (an in-person assembly had to be cancelled after I caught Covid). Contrary to his grandee standing, Grebenshikov has a heat and casual method. His is a face of laughter traces slightly than frown traces, though there are moments when his options lose their brightness and purchase a graver look.
One such event comes as he talks concerning the warfare in Ukraine. He has many buddies there. “They don’t understand why they’re being bombed,” he says. “I think it’s not even a grave injustice, it’s an insult to humanity. A war without any reason at all.”
His new challenge Heal the Sky is elevating cash for Ukraine’s largest kids’s hospital. It’s a compilation of songs by western musicians, together with Jackson Browne, Marianne Faithfull and Richard Thompson. Grebenshikov makes appearances too, together with a observe with Dave Stewart, Stevie Nicks and Ukrainian singer Serhii Babkin.
BG, as he’s identified to followers, has curated the compilation, due for launch later this month on Bandcamp. A variety of its members are identified to him personally: in 1989 he teamed up with Stewart, previously of the Eurythmics, to make an English-language album. In their new joint quantity “War Song”, Grebenshikov sings, in Russian: “The day will arrive, and the war will become a dream/And in the sky the light will return/But it is just where my home once was/It’s no longer there.”
The traces had been impressed by photographs of bombed buildings, together with a good friend’s childhood dwelling in Kherson. “This is not a house any more, it’s a hole. I’ve seen whole theatres be destroyed in Ukraine — we played in them,” he says emphatically. “I know these places very well.”
Before the warfare Grebenshikov regularly toured Ukraine, each as a solo performer and with Aquarium. “The reaction to our band in Ukraine was even more welcoming and loving than in Russia sometimes. It was just amazing,” he remembers. But he can’t see himself taking part in there now. “Half of Ukrainians think, ‘Oh, a good Russian is a dead Russian.’ I’m getting a lot of mail like this.”
Other celebrated Russian musicians have additionally raised their voices in opposition to the warfare. The pop singer Alla Pugacheva, amongst Russia’s top-selling artists ever, now dwelling in Israel, dared the authorities to add her to the “foreign agents” registry final yr when she spoke up towards the invasion. Others, nevertheless, have both saved their heads down, or are actively collaborating with the Kremlin and its “Z”-themed propaganda.
The final Aquarium live performance in Russia came about in St Petersburg the night time earlier than the invasion in February 2022. “Some people in my band, in Aquarium, they suddenly became Z patriots,” Grebenshikov says. “It’s like playing Woodstock and saying, ‘Yeah! Kill and rape the Vietnamese!’ Something that doesn’t go well together. I’m sorry for these people. What else can I say? Some people think, some people do not.”
He has since retired the group and is at the moment touring as BG+. London is his base, however he insists that he doesn’t dwell there as an émigré or exile.
“Actually, no. I prefer to live and work in London because it suits me much more than being in St Petersburg. I’ve been working here since 1988,” he says. Born within the yr Stalin died, he spent many years unable to go away Russia. “For more than half of my life I was behind a wall, and then suddenly I could leave. So it’s my choice.”
When I interviewed Grebenshikov in 2015, he had lately been denounced as a fascist sympathiser by a pro-Kremlin tv channel for taking part in a profit gig on behalf of Ukrainian refugee kids. Yet he didn’t need to be seen as a political determine. “I’m not taking a stand, I’m trying to behave normally,” he informed me again then.
On being reminded of this, he replies: “Well, it seems that I was quite wise in 2015. Being in my position, it’s very easy to write topical songs. Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, will react to it immediately and go, ‘I’m with you’ or ‘I’m against you.’ But the songs tend to fade away very quickly. I don’t like that! I want my songs to remain!”
He is widely known for his allusive, metaphysical writing type. The thought of dwelling turns up repeatedly in his work, not solely as a spot of shelter and identification but additionally oppressiveness, someplace to escape from.
“At the moment, the country that I was born in and the country that I love is” — he pauses — “in a very sad, tragic position. Millions and millions of people are afraid to think, afraid to speak out. We all know that silence is like cancer. It eats you from within and kills you. And that’s what’s happening. So I’m thinking not only of ways to help Ukrainians but Russians as well, because they are in a terrible position.”
He cites Socrates’ idea of eudaemonia, which he interprets as being in good spirit. “That means when you live your life knowing that you did everything you could and everything that you feel is right. That’s what Aquarium and I have been doing for the last 50-plus years. In a country where you cannot trust words, you cannot trust anything, we were looking to establish the way of life which is true. This is what home is.”
