Transcriber: Mary Beth Strawn Reviewer: Denise RQ
This is a story about how much music can matter.
A few years ago, I was in Russia with my band "The Real Tuesday Weld."
We'd been playing some concerts,
and afterwards, I went to a flea market with some Russian friends.
We were wandering around, and we came across a store,
and on the store were many strange objects,
but, one thing in particular caught my attention.
My Russian friends didn't know what it was,
and the guy whose store it was was rather dismissive.
But I bought it anyway and brought it back to London.
I was so fascinated by it that I began a journey to find out what it was.
That research led to a story,
and the story led to the X-ray Audio Project,
and that is why I am here.
But I'm going to start with a question.
Who here has got an MP3 player or a phone that plays music?
Everybody, right?
OK, so who's got more than 1,000 songs
on that device or on their laptop?
Ten thousand?
Twenty thousand? It's like an auction.
Twenty thousand.
Right, OK; well, look, we're used to listening
to whatever we want, when we want.
We have abundance, but you, sir, for the 20,000 songs.
Have you got anything illegal on your computer?
(Laughter)
OK, well, we'll trust you.
But imagine this, you're on the way to TEDx today,
you're walking through Kraków, and two men step out of the shadows,
grab you by the arm, they demand to see your MP3 player,
you show them, they go down and scroll through the songs,
and they say to you, "You've got a song by the British band
'The Real Tuesday Weld', and that is forbidden."
It's inconceivable, isn't it?
It's inconceivable you have a song by my band on your MP3 player.
Or it's inconceivable that it would be forbidden, or what about this?
You go home after today's TEDx.
You're asleep in your apartment or hotel or bedroom.
There's a tremendous banging and crashing.
You go out to the front door.
Police rush in, and they go through your things.
They examine your computer. They check your emails.
They say you've been sending music to people.
Sharing music, that's illegal, you are under arrest.
It's pretty inconceivable, right?
But, if we go back 70 years to Russia,
things were very very different.
This is Nick Markovich.
He's standing on a street corner in Moscow in the 1950s.
He's on his way to his friend's house to play music, to share music.
He's just like us, he's a music fan.
Those boxes that he's carrying are his MP3 player.
In there is all the music that he loves.
There are gramophone records there from before the war
which belonged to his parents or grandparents,
which he still loved.
They'd been bought in official Soviet record stores.
But the music on them had become forbidden.
He's also got in those boxes, some outright illegal records,
but I'm going to talk about that later.
Why would a nice young man like Nick Markovich
be carrying illegal forbidden things?
How could music be forbidden?
We have to go back a bit further.
There'd been a revolution.
Russia had become the Soviet Union.
At first, it was a very exciting time in the culture.
In music, there were lots of experimental amazing things happening.
But as the years went by,
the states got more and more involved
with what the products of culture should be.
And by 1932, Stalin and Nikoloy Zadarnov and company,
decided that all the products of the arts,
theater, architecture, literature, ballet, poetry, and music
would be subject to a censor.
The censor would decide if that piece of art,
if that book, if that song was in the service of Socialist realism.
Of course, I'm in Poland. You have some of this history yourself.
We know one thing about dictators, generally.
They like things big, and they like things simple.
They don't like jazz.
So jazz was one of the musical forms
that suffered under the Soviet Union until the Second World War.
The Second World War us the British, you the Polish,
the Russians, and the Americans were on the same team.
So, for a while, in Russia, jazz was OK.
There were Russian jazz bands, many of them, very popular.
You could watch American films with jazz soundtracks in Russia.
Young people loved it, of course.
But when that war ended and a much colder war began,
then jazz and rock'n'roll was the music of the enemy,
and it was completely forbidden.
Russian jazz stars were arrested and sent to Russian prison camp
So you could no longer listen to music by Ella Fitzgerald
or buy records by Bill Haley, who came a bit later.
But young people wanted to listen to that music,
but also you couldn't listen to music by these people,
now these were Russians or Russian speaking.
They were émigrees, they were massively popular.
Pyotr Leshchenko, Ella Belanova, they'd been big stars.
But they didn't come back to the Soviet Union
to join in the great communist project.
They became, effectively traitors,
so their records were, even if they were singing about love,
even if they were singing about the nobility of the working classes,
became forbidden.
But also, music by these people was forbidden.
And they were Russians living in the Soviet Union.
On the right, it's Vadim Kozin, another huge star.
But he was arrested, probably for being homosexual.
And his records became forbidden.
On the left, is Arkady Severny
He came a bit later,
but he represents a musician who performed in the Russian prison
or barred Russian folk styles that were hugely popular,
singing about criminals and prostitutes and the dark side of Socialist realism.
The authorities didn't like that stuff at all.
Also, Arkady Severny sang his own songs.
It was forbidden to sing and record your own songs in the Soviet Union.
You had to be a member of the Composers' Union.
And whole rhythms were banned.
The tango was banned. The foxtrot was banned.
It was said that the foxtrot represented a man and a woman making love.
If you see me do a foxtrot,
you will know that is definitely not the case.
(Laughter)
But you have dances banned. The saxophone was banned.
Western music's banned. Jazz music's banned.
Music by Russian stars from before the war is banned.
You have a whole culture cut off from its culture.
It's like someone saying to us you can no longer listen to the Beatles.
And, of course, the states completely control the recording industry.
There was no alternative,
there was no other way to get this music,
apart from in very small quantities at high cost.
But then, something amazing happened.
A Polish man arrived in Leningrad in 1946.
He was called Stanisław Philo,
and he was carrying with him a most extraordinary machine.
It was recording tool made by telephonkin company.
He had stolen it - it was a war trophy - it had come from Germany.
A recording lathe is like a gramophone in reverse.
Instead of a needle, there is a cutter.
You feed an audio signal - music, say, or voice - into it,
and the cutter will cut the groove onto a record of plastic,
which can be played back.
It was probably used by a journalist during the war
to make a report from the front.
Stanisław Philo got permission to open a shop on Nevsky Prospekt
and he installed his machine in the corner.
For a few rubles, people could come in and use a microphone
to make a recording of their voice onto a plastic disc, like a souvenir.
His business started to do amazingly well.
But it wasn't because of the souvenir recordings.
It was because in the evenings, when the shop was closed,
he was using this machine to copy forbidden gramophone records.
He was a bootlegger. And he was selling these to music lovers.
One day, into his store, came the guy on the right, Ruslan Bogoslowski.
He was a music lover.
And while he was in the shop, he heard a tango playing.
He loved tango.
But he knew it was forbidden.
He said to Stanisław Philo, "Can I buy that?"
And Philo said, "No,
but come back when the shop is closed, and I'll see what I can do."
Bogoslowski came back, and Stanisław Philo sold him a bootleg copy of the tango.
He decided to hang around the shop a bit more.
There he met the guy on the left, Boris Taigin.
They became good friends. They bonded over music.
They were music lovers.
On one day, Bogoslowski said to Taigin, "Wouldn't it be amazing
if apart from just buying these bootleg records, we could make our own?"
And Taigin said, "It would be amazing,
but where are we going to get a machine, a recording lathe,
to do that in the Soviet Union?
Even if we could find one,
it would be so incredibly expensive on the black market."
Then Bogoslowski takes out his notebook and shows him.
For weeks, he's secretly been making drawings and measurements
of Stanisław Philo's recording lathe.
And he now believes he can build his own.
They go to his father's country house.
His father was a celebrated engineer and had a workshop.
They'd go to the workshop,
and they repurposed and recycled bits
from gramophones, from tools, from all over the place.
And Bogoslowski manages to make a recording machine.
And they make their first recording.
But I've missed something out!
This is the Soviet Union, what were they recording on to?
You can't buy this stuff in the shops. It's impossible to get.
We have to go back to the beginning of my story.
Because when I was walking in that market, in St. Petersburg,
and I bought something, it was this.
This is a record.
You can put it on a turntable
and you can put a needle in, and it will play music.
But, as you can see, it is also an X-ray.
You can record music on to various types of plastic.
But human beings as we know,
are incredibly ingenious, particularly in times of oppression.
Some, very clever resourceful person, had come up with the idea
of repurposing, recycling used X-rays
as a base for making bootleg records.
This is what Boris Taigin and Bogoslowski were doing.
And it was a very good idea, why?
Because in the Soviet Union,
the government had issued an order that all hospitals had to get rid of
their X-rays after a year, because they were a fire risk.
So these guys could go to a hospital, around the back,
with a few rubles, or some bottles of vodka and make an exchange.
The hospital staff would get rid of a difficult job,
and they would get plenty of resources to make records with.
The records that they were making sounded so good
that poor old Stanisław Philo started to lose his customers.
They moved over to these guys.
They became so busy they got a friend involved.
They called themselves, "The Golden Dog Gang."
They were the first underground X-ray bootleg record label
in the Soviet Union.
Bogoslowski was so clever that he started to copy his own machine.
He gave one to somebody else.
The secret got out: how to record onto X-rays.
This started to spread.
Other people in Leningrad started to do it, too.
It went to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa.
Of course, the authorities got very interested.
And in 1950, they swooped,
they arrested everybody involved in this business in Leningrad.
Bogoslowski was taken to court.
There was a trial, he was given five years in the gulag for copying music.
Boris Taigin was given seven years.
He was given an extra two years
because he had been writing and recording his own songs.
Fortunately for them, two years later, Stalin died.
There was a general amnesty.
A million prisoners were released from the gulag.
The Golden Dog Gang came back to Leningrad.
What do you think they started to do when they got there?
They immediately started to make X-ray records again!
We should maybe have a listen and a look.
(Music)
They are images of pain and damage inscribed with the sounds of pleasure.
They are pictures of the interior of Soviet citizens,
impressed with the music they secretly loved.
They were sold on street corners, in parks, in dark secret places
a bit like drugs are.
They cost a few rubles, they wouldn't last for very long.
But you could replace them.
They often didn't sound very good,
the song title that was written on them was often wrong.
But it didn't matter in a way.
They were precious objects
because they allowed people to listen to what they wanted, when they wanted.
Unfortunately for Bogoslowski, he was caught again.
And he spent another prison for two years.
When he came back, what do you think he did?
He started again.
He'd used his time in the gulag incredibly well.
He'd been perfecting his technique, thinking of how to do it better.
And he did; he did it better and bigger, with more and different types of bootlegs.
This was a very unusual man.
He was an audiophile, he was a music lover.
He was not a dissident, he didn't want to bring the system down,
or corrupt Soviet youth.
He was a music lover, and he believed that you should be able to share music.
Unfortunately, he was caught again.
When he came out for the third time,
you'll be relieved to know, he stopped doing it.
But, that wasn't because he'd changed, it was because the world had changed.
That's another story.
But I set up The X-ray Audio Project,
to tell the story of people like Bogoslowski and Taigin,
the other bootleggers.
And with my friend Paul Hartfield, to record, to take photographs
of as many of these records as we could find.
Last year, when we were in Moscow, we met up with this guy.
Do you know who this is?
This is the young man who was standing on the street corner
at the beginning of this story;
Nick Markovich.
He came to see us in an apartment in Moscow,
and he brought with him his portable music player.
And he took out an X-ray record, and he wound the gramophone up.
And he put it on, and he dropped the needle on, and it started to play.
And it sounded absolutely awful!
(Laugher)
But through the noise and hiss and crackle and static,
there was a thin ribbon of melody.
And that thin ribbon of melody was snaking back to his youth.
It was connecting the dots, if you like, to his youth
to a time when he loved music so much, to a time when music mattered so much,
that people went to prison for it.
Can it ever matter so much to us?
Another thing that we do with the X-ray Audio Project,
we have live events, when we cut new X-ray records, in front of your eyes,
from live performances.
Here's my colleague, Alex Kulkowski, doing that on a recording lathe.
Why?
I'm a musician.
I, too, have thousands of songs on my computer.
And I love it.
It's amazing to have so much abundance.
I would not give it up. I hear music every day.
But sometimes, I worry that I've stopped listening.
I'm sure we've all got songs that meant an awful lot to us; Maybe we still do.
But, why not, next time we're flicking through our MP3 player,
looking at all the thousands of songs we've got, thinking,
"Ah, what shall I listen to?"
Maybe think back to a time
when the only way to enjoy and share the music that you loved
was on an X-ray.
We could ask ourselves,
"What would happen if somebody just took it all away?
What would I be losing?
What would I risk to get it back?
Can music still cause a revolution in my blood?
In my bone?"
Thanks for listening. Let's keep listening!
(Applause)