Letov was alive. Cemetery punk: what is happening on the graves of rock heroes

The leader of the group civil defense» Igor Fedorovich, aka Yegor Letov, died in February 2008. But fans still remember this man. He was the most extraordinary figure in the history of Russian rock, the first punk in the Soviet Union, talented person with a difficult fate.

We have already written about it in more detail. And today, "Your News" was not easily found sibling Igor Fedorovich - Sergey Letov and asked him several exciting questions. And although Yegor is no longer with us, we have an exceptional opportunity to communicate directly with his closest relative and once again recall the legendary personality.

Tell us, please, how do you live and what do you do?

I have been living in Moscow since 1974. Currently I serve in three Moscow theaters: the Taganka Theater, the theater-studio "Man", the Center for Directing and Dramaturgy. I am currently in three productions. In addition, I am the author of music for these performances.

I am engaged in musical accompaniment of silent films. This year he performed with dubbing films in Paris, Brussels, Liege, Dordrecht, Madrid, not to mention St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yekaterinburg. I teach at the Institute of Journalism and literary creativity for 13 years now. In January, he lectured at the University of Niigata and in Tokyo (Japan), at the same time he played in clubs and museums with local free jazz musicians.

With Alexander Sklyar and Oleg "Sharr" (ex-"Aquarium") performed at the festival in Teriberka, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. It was there, in Teriberka, that the film "Leviathan" was filmed.

Recorded this year with the group "25/17" and Gleb Samoilov. There was a recording with rapper Rich ("Lithium"). Also with Vadim Kurylev ("Electric Partisans", "Adaptation", ex-DDT), this album is still in the works.

I have three daughters - the youngest is 5 years old. Three granddaughters - the eldest went to the 3rd year of the university, the middle one is learning to play the saxophone at a music school.

What happened to the members of the Civil Defense group after the death of Igor Fedorovich Letov?

Natalya Chumakova (wife of Yegor Letov, - author's note) is actively involved in publishing creative heritage Igor, made a film about him. Chesnokov recently performed in Omsk with arrangements of Civil Defense songs. Kuzma Ryabinov is the most active member of the "Defense" on currently. With our participation, his double vinyl album was released this year in Canada. In the Kamchatka boiler house, his project Virtuosos of the Universe celebrated its anniversary this summer. I specially came to this concert from Moscow on the Sapsan.

Do you know about the rumors on the Internet that Yegor Letov is alive and hiding from prying eyes somewhere in the vast expanses of our country. What do you think about it?

The word "Motherland" in Russian is written with a capital letter. Your question did not seem interesting to me, to put it mildly.

Excuse me... What kind of relationship did you have with Igor Fedorovich? I really want to know some new details of his life.

The relationship was different. In the early 80s, Igor came to me in the Moscow region and began to take his first steps in music, began to write poetry. We tried playing free jazz together. He could not adapt to Moscow life, he was expelled from vocational school, and his parents demanded that he return to Omsk. In the first years after his return to Omsk, he wrote me long letters weekly - often accompanied by handwritten lyrics of the songs "Time Machine", "Sunday" and the like. I sent him tape recordings of the albums "DK", in the recording of which I participated. Then he had a conflict with the KGB. He was forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital, and the letters stopped reaching. In 1988 when I was on jazz festival in Estonia, our mother died. I found a telegram about this at the door when I returned. mobile phones And there was no internet back then. Nevertheless, Igor was very worried that I did not come to the funeral (and I simply did not know that she had died). There was a pause in communication for a while. In 1993, Igor and his group, together with the Barkashovites, defended the Supreme Council, and I was very worried about him. Since 1993, we have again begun to converge. Yevgeny Grekhov, the director of Civil Defense in the first half of the 90s, turned to me in connection with the fact that Igor had problems with alcohol, asked me to use all his influence as an older brother ...

In 1997, Igor, Kuzma and Makhno came to the performance of my ensemble TRI "O" in the Marat Gelman Gallery. We were drinking at some construction site and there we first talked about playing together again. From 1998 to 2004, I began to participate in the concerts of "Civil Defense" and even together with Igor. Although such duets have happened before - in 1997, for example, at my birthday party in the Skrin Internet cafe ...

From 1998 to 2004, I was mastering discs for HOR Records, a company that mainly released CDs and cassettes for Igor and his circle. In the last years of 2004-2008 we communicated much less.

What are your plans for the future? Will there be any other musical projects?

In October, together with Oleg Sharr, I dubbed the Argentinean film Antenna at the Bashmet Center. Then I fly to Sochi for the festival of youth and students with the play “Revolution Square, 17”. In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk I play with Va-Bank musical accompaniment to a Japanese silent film. On the day of my return from Sakhalin, I fly to Brussels - I accompany there in the evening French actress Valerie Chenet, who will recite Mayakovsky's "About This". There is still a tour of Siberia ahead - first solo, and after a couple of months with Oleg Garkusha (soloist of the Auktyon group, - author's note).

What do you think about the current order, how do you like the situation in the country as a whole?

Everything goes according to plan!

This is how simple, but informative, our short conversation with Sergei Fedorovich Letov, brother of the great Russian rock musician Yegor Letov, went. As can be seen from the interview, these two are completely different person, With different destinies, but, of course, both are absolutely outstanding people.

Follow the news. Perhaps you are waiting for a few more exclusives from the incomprehensible world of art.

On the grave famous singer fans prefer to gather on the anniversary of his death. The largest celebration of fans is considered to be the "party" arranged in 2010, when exactly 20 years have passed since the death of Tsoi.

Fans of Tsoi's work, gathered at the singer's grave. The video was filmed in 2010.

During the "festivities all night until the morning" the fans behaved as if they were at a street concert: smoking, drinking and shouting "Kino" songs with a guitar. True, most of the alcoholic drinks were not in the hands of the fans, but on the singer's tombstone - in the video it is completely filled with glasses, cans and bottles of wine and port. Despite the torrential downpour that fell on August 15, 2010, connoisseurs of creativity put cigarettes and CDs with his recordings in the same place.

On the 25th anniversary of the artist's death, in 2015, the fans behaved more decorously: they gathered, paid tribute to the deceased and dispersed. But by this time, the singer's grave had already become a rather dangerous place: from time to time, Kino listeners welcome guests cordially, but on other days they either drag the bodies of the unconscious victims of the brawl onto the railway tracks.

On August 15, 2016, due to these events, a police squad was on duty at the grave of Viktor Tsoi. Apparently not the last time.

Yuri Klinskikh, Gas Sector

Buried: Left Bank Cemetery, Voronezh.

Judging by the collection of videos on the Internet, there are always people standing at the grave of the lead singer of the Gaza Strip group. It can be a variety of characters: fans, punks or just.

The fence within a radius of hundreds of meters from the burial place of the artist is covered with inscriptions "Punky hoy!" and mentions of the cities from which the fans came. Despite this, a popular video for "Yuri Klinskikh" is an instruction on how to get to the singer's grave.

Performance of the song "Collective Farm Punk" at the grave of Yuri Klinsky.

Another popular video is from the incident in 2010, when Igor Kushchev, the guitarist of the first line-up of the Gaza Strip, came to celebrate 10 years since the death of the Klinskys. The musician, who had gone through a lot, became very emotional and at some point became talk to the singer's gravestone and reproach the deceased for "betraying them."

Video of fans singing songs at the singer's grave.

Mikhail Gorshenyov, "The King and the Jester"

Where he is buried: Theological cemetery, St. Petersburg.

Silence and tranquility reign at the grave of the soloist of the group "King and the Shut": no tears of former colleagues or alcoholic parties. A year after the singer's funeral, a monument appeared on the grave. It was installed with money raised from charity concert group "Kukryniksy", in which Mikhail's brother sings.

Amateur video filmed in the year of the singer's death.

On the anniversary of the death of "Pot" his mother Tatyana Ivanovna came to the grave along with the fans of the "King and the Jester", touchingly showed the singer's friends the "goat", read poetry own composition and was glad that the fans of the group dug up her entire garden in the country.

Despite the exemplary behavior of Gorshka fans, the authorities of Russian cities are in no hurry to meet them halfway - projects to erect a monument to the late soloist in Krasnoyarsk, Voronezh and St. Petersburg did not find support.

Egor Letov, "Civil Defense"

Where he is buried: Staro-East Cemetery, Omsk.

The grave of Yegor Letov in Omsk is perhaps the most peaceful place in the city. No one arranges holidays on it, relatives come alone, without dozens of fans.

There are no videos on YouTube with "gatherings" of fans with a guitar and beer. Like the Klinskys, Letov has clear instructions on how to get from the entrance to the Staro-Vostochnoye Cemetery to the burial place of the singer. He has more videos like this than any other. Russian musicians- either the cemetery in Omsk is very large, or it is easy to get lost in it.

Celebrities and politicians come to honor the memory of the singer. In 2011, the head of the Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, visited Letov's grave, and in 2014, Yuri Shevchuk came to the Staro-Vostochnoye Cemetery.

On February 19, in Omsk, in his apartment at the age of 44, the founder and permanent leader of the cult rock group Civil Defense Yegor Letov suddenly died. The musician died in his sleep from cardiac arrest.

With the departure of Igor (Egor) Letov, an entire era in Russian rock ended. The so-called "Siberian punk" has finally gone into oblivion. It wasn't so much musical genre how much a way of life characterized by a total rejection of the Soviet system and, as a result, rabid anarchism.

It was Letov who brought protest in Soviet rock music to radicalism. And it was he who became a kind of ideologist of the rebellious youth of the 80s - 90s of the last century.

Created by him in 1984 at the age of 20, "Civil Defense" was initially doomed to an "underground" existence and persecution by law enforcement agencies. Perfectly understanding and accepting this, Letov concentrated on studio work, recording in own apartment five or even ten albums a year. The "Grob" magnetic albums of that time ("Mousetrap", "Red Album", "Good!", "Totalitarianism", "So the Steel Was Tempered", "War", "Nausea") were made deliberately dirty, carelessly and simply, with a large amount of anti-Soviet and profanity in the texts.

The revolutionary approach found a lively response among the masses. Self-made recordings of the group spread throughout the country, after which the authorities had to intervene. GrOb co-founder Konstantin "Kuzya Uo" Ryabinov was urgently sent to the army, despite heart problems, and Letov landed in mental asylum, where he was drugged with psychotropic drugs for several months (he even went blind for a while).

Leaving the hospital, Letov realized that now he had nothing to lose at all, and began to create with a vengeance. In addition to "Defense", he participated in the projects "Communism", "Egor and Op ... Denied" (with Igor "Jeff" Zhevtun), "Great October" (with Yanka Diagileva), "Gypsies and I with Ilyich" (with Oleg " Manager" Sudakov), "Instruction for Survival" (with Roman Neumoev), "Black Lukich" (with Vadim Kuzmin).

By 1990, the popularity of "Grob" had become so huge that Letov, like a true anarchist, disbanded the group in order to prevent its commercialization. Soon he begins to cooperate with the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov and the Russian Breakthrough movement, and in the 1996 presidential election he supports the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov.

In the late 1990s, Letov became disillusioned with politics and disappeared from view of the general public, touring with the revived "Defense" in outlying cinemas.

Zero became a real renaissance for him. For four years, "Grob" has released the trilogy "Long happy life" - "Resuscitation" - "Why do you have dreams?", Which opened the lyrical side of Letov's work.

The more unexpected was the death of the musician, when, it would seem, he finally reached peace of mind. However, in a recent offline interview for visitors to the group's website, Letov admitted that the last album took a lot of strength from him and the new record may not come out at all. However, he continued to make plans for the future.

With his work, Yegor Letov erected a monument to himself during his lifetime. Probably in every Russian city in the sleeping areas you can meet teenagers singing imperishable to the guitar "Everything goes according to plan", "About the fool" and " Russian field experiments."

43 years is, of course, negligible. But by the standards of a revolutionary like Letov, it looks like a long and happy life. Rest in peace, Igor Fedorovich...

Yegor Letov, leader of the Civil Defense group, died at the age of 43 at home in Omsk. According to drummer Pavel Peretolchin, death was due to heart disease.

Leader another famous rock band- "Corrosion of metal" - Sergey Pauk suggested that Letov's death could be beneficial to someone in the recording industry. “In Russia, it begins after a rock idol dies, as was the case with Tsoi, Talkov. Then the record company earns huge sums,” says Spider.

"Gone out of life outstanding musician that influenced more than one generation of people who somehow associate themselves with non-conformist music, with punk rock, with garage rock, with protest rock, ”said Alexander (Chacha) Ivanov, leader of the Russian punk rock group Naiv. According to him, Letov was "the most prominent representative of Soviet punk rock, original and very outstanding."

The leader of another well-known rock band, Metal Corrosion, Sergei Pauk suggested that Letov's death could be beneficial to someone in the recording industry. “In Russia, show business begins after a rock idol dies, as was the case with Tsoi, Talkov. Then the record company earns huge sums,” says Spider.

The showman of the Auktyon group Oleg Garkusha said that a whole generation grew up on the songs of Yegor Letov. "It was wonderful person. An insane number of young and no longer young people grew up on his songs - songs of protest, challenge and freedom. Letov was a talented and brilliant person, and such a person left,” he added.

Igor Fedorovich Letov, known as Yegor Letov, was born in Omsk on September 10, 1964. The leader of the Civil Defense group, he was one of the most prominent representatives punk movements on the territory of the USSR in general, and in Siberia in particular. The younger brother of the famous saxophonist Sergei Letov.

He began his musical activity in the early 1980s in the city of Omsk, having formed, together with like-minded people, the rock group "Posev", and later the rock group "Civil Defense", according to popular Internet portals. At the dawn of their activity, the musicians of the "Civil Defense" due to political persecution by the authorities were forced to record musical works in semi-underground apartment conditions.

In 1987-1989, Letov and his associates recorded a number of albums of Civil Defense (Red Album, Good!, Mousetrap, Totalitarianism, Necrophilia, This is how the steel was tempered, Combat stimulus) , “Everything is going according to plan”, “Songs of Joy and Happiness”, “War”, “Armageddon Pops”, “Healthy and Forever”, “Russian Field of Experiments”), at the same time the albums of the Communism project were recorded (Egor Letov , Konstantin Ryabinov, Oleg Sudakov (Manager)), cooperation between Letov and Yanka Diaghileva began.

Despite the semi-underground existence of musicians and their so-called. GrOb studios, by the end of the 1980s and, especially, in the early 1990s, they gained wide popularity in the USSR (later Russia), mainly in youth circles. Letov's songs were distinguished by powerful energy, lively, simple, energetic rhythm, non-standard, sometimes shocking lyrics, a kind of rough and, at the same time, refined poetry. At the heart of Letov's lyrics is the incorrectness of everything around him, and he expresses his position not directly, but through the image of this irregularity. Yegor Letov was not a star. He was the one and only. Letov created provincial, Siberian city rock, the most precise, direct, most authentic.

In the early 1990s, as part of the Egor and the Oppi***nevshie project, Letov recorded the albums Jump-Skok (1990) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1992), which are among his most popular and beloved albums among the people. . In 1994, Letov became one of the leaders of the national communist rock movement "Russian Breakthrough", and was actively touring.

In 1995-1996 he recorded two more albums "Solstice" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (his group is again called "Civil Defense"); the music in these albums becomes more refined, "faceted", the lyrics lose their excessive rudeness, becoming more poetic, each song resembles an anthem, acquiring at the same time psychedelic.

Egor Letov long time supported the National Bolshevik Party, which many consider contrary to the ideals of anti-fascism, anti-nationalism and punk rock in general. In February 2004, Letov officially disowned any, including nationalist, political forces. Before recent years interest in the work of Yegor Letov weakened, until in 2004-2005 two new albums of the group “Long Happy life”and“ Resuscitation ”, which collected all the songs written since the release of the albums“ Solstice ”and“ The Unbearable Lightness of Being ”in the mid-90s.

In May 2007, the album "Why Dreams" was released. It should be noted that a song with this name is present on the album "Psychedelia Tomorrow" released in 2001 as part of the "Psychedelic Tomorrow" project.

Egor Letov. "My Defense"