Goran Bregović: 'Balkan brass is punk – more madness than music'
Goran Bregović sits in a French hotel lobby considering the battered history of Sarajevo, once his childhood home and later the scene of the most lengthy, brutal siege in modern European history. Hundreds of thousands were trapped, and more than 10,000 died, as Bosnian Serb forces encircled the city between 1992 and 1996 in the violent upheavals that marked the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. But life had once been very different there, Bregović says, back in the era of communism and President Tito.
“We were a little bit poor, but if you look back, this was probably the best time in our history. It was a peaceful time. My mum was Serbian, my dad was Croatian, and the only problem in our house was my father’s drinking … He was a Yugoslav army colonel and they drink too much.”
Bregović has had a colourful history. He was a major rock star in the former Yugoslavia, then went on to write award-winning film scores, compose for orchestras and become a bestselling exponent of Balkan Gypsy brass music – although he is not a Gypsy. He has sold more than six million albums, and collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop to Scott Walker to the late Rachid Taha. He describes himself as an “old-fashioned guy who doesn’t make videos or appear on TV but presents his music by travelling around” on a neverending global tour. I offer the inevitable comparison with Bob Dylan. “I love that.”
He grew up “surrounded” by the music of the Christians, Jews and Muslims who co-existed in the city, and it’s this era and those influences that are celebrated in his work Three Letters from Sarajevo. The Bosnian capital, he argues, is “a metaphor for our time. What we saw in Sarajevo after 1991, we now see all around the world. Today we are good neighbours – and then tomorrow we are shooting at each other because we are from different religions. Human beings are conditioned machines. If you condition them well they are good; if you condition them badly they can be really bad.”
Tonight he’s in Rennes, where Three Letters from Sarajevo is performed by the brass, percussion and singers of his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, joined by the Brittany Symphony Orchestra. The show starts with a culture clash as the orchestra play a theme and are answered by five Gypsy brass players and a drummer who come marching through the audience. Bregović walks on like a rock star – white suit, tousled hair – and sits on the edge of the orchestra clutching an electric guitar, but the key soloists are three impressive violinists from different cultures.
This is a work dominated by three mostly instrumental passages – Jewish Letter, Muslim Letter and Christian Letter – and each features a different soloist, with Gershon Leizerson from Israel followed by Zied Zouari from Tunisia and Mirjana Neskovic from Serbia. The finale features the singalong In the Death Car, with Bregović taking the lead, half-speaking his way through vocals originally tackled by Iggy Pop.
It’s a fusion that has its roots back in Sarajevo. Bregović’s military father was an amateur violin player and wanted his son to do the same, “so I took violin lessons at a young age … but I’m really more of a guitar sort of guy. I taught myself to play. I can’t say I’m educated in music”. At 17 he was playing guitar in striptease bars in Dubrovnik, but when he began playing in bars in Italy, “I had problems with drugs. My mum came to pick me up and I promised I wouldn’t play any more.”
For four years he followed her advice, and studied philosophy at Sarajevo University, a move that should have led to him becoming a teacher of Marxism. Instead, he dramatically changed direction. “I didn’t take the final exams, which saved me from that destiny. Instead I became a rock star – and I was the biggest. My heroes were British rock stars like Led Zeppelin; if you play guitar you want to be like the other good-looking guitarists, like Jimmy Page.”
His band were called Bijelo Dugme (White Button), “because I had a song with the lyrics, ‘If I were a white button I’d be next to you, and you didn’t know that I could touch you’”. After releasing their first album in 1974 they shook up the Yugoslav music scene with their mixture of hard rock, folk and Gypsy influences – with Gypsies helping them to get fired up before going on stage. “When I was a big rock star there was always a Gypsy brass band playing for us in our dressing room – this is what brings madness! I always think that Balkan brass music is like punk at the beginning. More madness than music.” He continues musing on punk. “It died with God Save the Queen, because this was really well done, well produced. That was the end of punk, when it started to be music.”
So what was special about White Button? “Rock’n’roll on the communist side was much more important than rock’n’roll in the west,” he claims. “If you were careful and not stupid, you could leave messages that were important at the time.” Such as? “Today it may seem childish, but it seemed important at one stage that my singer was dressed in a white general’s uniform, like Tito, and then in black like a cop in a Nazi concentration camp.” He said this was “an obvious allegory about communism and national socialist regimes”, adding “you try make young people think a little differently”.
So what does he think of Tito now? “He did a lot of good things but missed the chance to transform Yugoslavia into a democratic state. He could have done it and war would have been avoided.” As war approached, White Button recorded banned nationalist songs, “one Croat and one Serbian, together in one song, and used forbidden nationalists on the record … so of course my manager was jailed”. His lyrics somewhat optimistically suggested “when the war starts you and I will close the windows and kiss each other until it is over”.
But by the time Sarajevo came under siege, Bregović had broken up the band and was living in Paris. “I was rich and famous, but when the war started I lost everything – all my cars, ships, houses back in Sarajevo. I had to work for the first time – because until then I had been paid for things I would happily have done for free.” He wasn’t exactly at a loose end. In 1988 the Serbian film director Emir Kusturica had asked him to write the score for the acclaimed Time of the Gypsies, and more collaborations followed. “Even in England I did one with Ewan MacGregor [1997’s The Serpent’s Kiss]. But then I stopped. I had strong feelings that I was wasting my time.”
So he assembled the Wedding and Funeral Orchestra and went back on the road. He has toured almost nonstop for over 20 years now, with “120 shows last year – sometimes more”. In the process he has become the world’s best-known exponent of Balkan gypsy music. What does he say to criticism of him using the tradition as a nonGypsy? “I’m not the only composer to have been impressed and influenced by Gypsies … and what is the point of a tradition if we can’t take things from it? One of the things I’m proudest of is that today is a Friday, and hundreds of Gypsy bands will be playing for tips, and they will play a lot of my songs. I like the idea that because of that, some
kid will have marmalade on his bread.”
For his next project, he’s planning a follow up to his 2007 opera Karmen With a Happy End, but this time based on immigrant stories and set in Manchester “because I am told it has more different populations than anywhere in Europe”. He says he’s looking forward to living there for a few months. “And I’m a big fan of Manchester United.”
A French music executive travelling with him looks bemused: “When is he going to do that? After France he’s going to Siberia, then he’s in London.” He shows me the packed schedule for this year, which includes Europe, North America, Mexico and – of course – concerts back in Sarajevo.
“I pay my taxes in Sarajevo; I’m a local composer so I need to be there,” Bregović says. “But the city has changed.” He laments how the city has lost its pre-Bosnian war spirit, when various Balkan ethnicities, be they Muslim or Christian, all lived alongside one another. “It was a primitive war, with primitive results, and it will take time to come back. But I love Sarajevo.”
• GoranBregović is at the Royal Festival Hall, London on Friday 1 March. Three Letters from Sarajevo is out on Wrasse Records.