Music Behind the Iron Curtain: Hardcore Ljubljana

Here in the west, there is a common belief that rock music only properly reached Eastern Europe in 1989 -1990 when the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Iron Curtain was torn down, or, that at most, all that existed in these communist countries were crude, government sanctioned knock-offs of western European and American pop and patriotic folk songs designed to instill a fervour for the homeland in the hearts of the proletariat.

To a certain degree this is true. Popular music was at best tolerated by the various leaderships and was usually highly regulated and censored. Despite this, rock music not only existed in the East in some places it actually managed to thrive. Only now, thanks to a combination of the internet and passionate music lovers many of these old records are being unerarthed and  finding a new generation of fans, both in the ex-communist countries and beyond.

With its strong anti-authority values and often libertarian stance, punk seems an unlikely music form to have survived in this climate, yet nearly every country had a scene (with the possible exception of Albania, which, as one magazine put it, “had no rock scene of any importance” , and Romania). In some countries being in a punk band was very much an underground interest – in East Germany, for instance, the best known band Schleimkeim (Slimy Germs) released their album by smuggling it across the border to the West, whilst it was not unknown for the Stasi to pressure those in a group to inform on their bandmates.