Bewitched by the underground

Here's an entry for Annie Kapur's 'Song of the Century' challenge. If you've read any Christopher Isherwood, you might catch a similar mood here (and, btw, Cabaret would be another great song for this challenge). It's incredible to think that it's already nearly 20 years since all this. And equally incredible that it's not even 20 years. Read on, and check out the link to Annie's challenge at the end.

It starts with rhythmic clapping. A sinuous, swirling accordion slithers between the beats. Vocals: low, close-harmonised, chanting, in an unfamiliar language. There’s an unease, an eeriness, a sense of folklore gone awry.

It builds. A clarion call, “Vedmu! Veeeeeeed-muuuuuuuuuu!” Then the brakes come off. A full-throated roar from Anastasia Postnikova, imposing red-headed lead singer, and the band lets rip. It shouldn’t be possible to wield an accordion in such provocative, such downright sexy style, but Elnara Shafigullina succeeds anyway. It’s as if Nick Cave assembled his Bad Seeds from a Russian folk ensemble, then forced them to dance with the devil. Intoxicating, unforgettable. A sweaty, smoky underground box of a nightclub goes crazy.

Later, stumbling upstairs into a darkened courtyard, a blast of frosty air heralded the first snow of the winter. From a night of fire and noise below to a wintry scene that could have fallen from a 19th-century novel, the whole thing was a bewitching experience. Fittingly, Vedma means witch.

That was my first encounter with Iva Nova, an all-female Russian folk-punk band from a once-vibrant underground scene. In the 2000s, when I moved to Moscow, it was a thrill to dive into the scuzzy bars that popped up in the courtyards of city mansions. Faded grandeur was the theme, the beer was cheap, the ambience embracing of a random foreigner with faltering Russian. And Iva Nova became my new favourite band.

Russia was very different then. The immediate post-Soviet chaos seemed over but the iPhone era had not stifled Moscow’s cultural scene. Proekt O.G.I. was a venue that summed up a sense of anarchic possibility. It was small, uncomfortably smoky (Russia’s smoking ban trailed in some years after the Western equivalents), and stocked the worst mass-produced beer from a country that had plenty of cheap-and-nasty industrial scale brewers.

It attracted the misfits. The kids who hopped off at Chistiye Prudy metro to walk past the ponds until it got cold. They needed a cheap, warm bolthole: O.G.I. obliged. The chattering oppositionists, ideologically opposed to the glitz and glamour, the one-for-the-price-of-two conspicuous consumption of Moscow’s fashionable clubbing scene, found their home here. A small expat crowd, students and teachers rather than adventurous oil traders, occupied an unlikely niche: tripping over a language barrier, we were prized evidence of a new internationalism but frustrating when stumbling through a big order at the bar. Still, if you could spot the inconspicuous sign on Potapovsky Lane and shrug off the incongruity of 18th-century aristocratic townhouse turned bastion of the people’s artistic democracy, you were in.

Not anymore. Like every golden age, it tarnished too soon. By 2012, Proekt O.G.I. was closed. The following year, one of the founders was arrested on charges of murdering his wife. Across town, similar small venues fell foul of rising rents and police harassment. Tochka, PodMoskovye, Bilingva, IKRA, Gogol – all gone. Gentrified, streamlined, depoliticised – and plunged into a new era of enforced conformity.

Note: I couldn’t find any footage of Iva Nova playing at Proekt O.G.I. But I’m sure I was at this gig in Feb. 2007 at Gogol.

Here's a link to Annie's unofficial challenge for July. I got to it late, but there's still a week to compose your own entry.