Tantsi: the Vopli Vidopliassova tape recorded in one night

Vopli Vidopliassova recorded the album Tantsi in 1989, and the musicians played almost all of it in a single night. They meant it as a demo. Listeners copied the cassette from one another and sold it hand to hand, which is how the recording travelled from city to city. The first official release of Tantsi came only in 2023, thirty-four years later.

In the late 1980s many Kyiv bands imitated Russian groups. Vopli sang in Ukrainian. Oleh Skrypka told the radio programme The World that the title song, “Tantsi”, made the band popular: it hit audiences like an explosion at concerts, and by his account the band became famous as soon as it began singing in Ukrainian. Two years earlier, in 1987, Vopli had made their debut at a Kyiv Rock Club concert, and listeners named them band of the year.

The classic line-up of that period had four members: Skrypka on vocals and bayan, Yuriy Zdorenko on guitar, Oleksandr Pipa on bass and Serhiy Sakhno on drums. Songs such as “Politrok” and “Buly denky” poked fun at life in the last years of the USSR, and the sound came from punk with a streak of folk melody. The band kept developing that mix for decades.

The original session tape was found in 2019. The American musicologist Maria Sonevytsky was writing a book about the album and interviewed Pipa, the band’s former bassist. He tracked down the tape and handed it to her, and she carried it to the United States. The tracks were remixed there at Infrasonic Sound. Pipa told The World that the engineer made the recording sound better than it did in 1989.

On 22 April 2023 the California label Org Music issued Tantsi on vinyl for Record Store Day, in a run of 2,000 copies. Label head Andrew Rossiter said it was an honour and a thrill to work on the first official release. Ahead of the record the label put three tracks online: “Tantsi”, “Buly denky” and “Politrok”. At the same time Bloomsbury published Sonevytsky’s book Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi in its 33 1/3 series. It covers the Kyiv underground of the late 1980s, the role of humour and satire in the band’s songs, and the way the members organised the making and selling of the cassettes.

The band later re-recorded some of the songs from that night. “Hey! Lubo!” appeared on the 1997 album Muzika, and “Buly denky” gave its name to the 2006 album. Two years later Skrypka and Pipa moved to France, and the band stayed there until 1996. For a listener who knows “Vesna” and “Kraina Mriy”, the 1989 tape shows the band before its French years: four musicians from Kyiv, one night in a studio and the song that started everything for them.