In Search of Tito's Punks by Barry Phillips is a collection of over 20 first-hand interviews of musicians, journalists and publishers from the territory of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia-SFRY.Footnote 1 Among them are Pero Lovšin, Zdenko Franjić, Marin Rosić, Ante Čikara, Darko Rundek, Saša Vujić, Petar Janjatović and Branko Rosić. They directly created and followed the punk and post-punk scenes from the middle of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, and some of them are still active in the field of music today.
A musician himself, Phillips was in 1980–1981 the bass player for the UK punk-rock band Demob, formed in Gloucestershire in 1978.Footnote 2 He was also a member of other UK post-punk bands such as Kiss the Blade and The Rainsaints. It is in his capacity as a musician that Phillips here embarked on this Yugoslavian fieldwork, having been contacted on Facebook in 2011 by Saša Mijatović, an old punk from Kragujevac, suggesting that the song ‘No Room For You’ (1981, Round Ear Records) by Demob was well-known in the Balkans and had been covered by several Yugoslav punk bands. The most famous cover was by the band KUD Idijoti (from Pula, Croatia), with the title ‘To nije mjesto za nas’ (‘This is Not the Place for Us’). Intrigued, Phillips prepared himself devotedly for a trip to the former SFRY, with the intention of carrying out fieldwork, doing interviews and gathering information about local music, local history and the cultural milieu in which punk rock musicians operated.
The result is a rich book divided into 21 chapters mainly with interviews (plus several appendices), presented narratively and clearly according to the days of fieldwork, a total of 13 during the visit to selected cities in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia in 2017. In addition, the author briefly visited Serbia in 2014 and Croatia in 2019. Unexpectedly, this collection connects several regions of SFRY with England and the Netherlands, as Phillips reflects on his life, travels and musical experiences in these different places. As this parallel geographical comparison unfolds, readers discover or rediscover a transnational history of punk music in Europe, which never isolates the historical, political and cultural specificities of the Yugoslav region.
As a historian by vocation, Phillips here delves into the historical background of SFRY recognisable as Tito's Yugoslavia.Footnote 3 The key features of SFRY are solidly covered and explained: self-management (in the economy), brotherhood and unity (in the regulation of national policy) and non-alignment (in the foreign policy). This is followed by political crises with the country's national disintegration, the 1990s civil war and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Given that the Hague is where Phillips now lives, he manages to visit the Court and briefly describes it, bringing an element of subjectivity to his renarrated history of Yugoslavia's politics.
In three different chapters inserted between interviews, Phillips writes about the ICTY, from its location with a description of the building and the surroundings, to statistics on how many prisoners were tried. The purpose of this digression away from music and punk rock in Yugoslavia is about the consequences of war and its contradictions, and the superficial satisfaction of justice through the convicted persons in court, because nothing can be compensated for the loss of many lives. As someone born in SFRY I don't believe that any local author would have connected punk and post-punk music with the International Court in The Hague, but Phillips’ approach refreshes existing writing on the subject by linking local and external authors, providing a simultaneously emic and etic approach.
The way in which Phillips presents and connects the stories through three geographical parameters (SFRY, the Netherlands and the UK) allows readers to recapitulate the knowledge they might have about the history of punk rock music in both SFRY and Britain (there is an interview with Robert Miff Smith, singer in the band Demob and songwriter of the song ‘No Room For You’). At the same time, the book offers new information about the past and the present of the music scene that may be used (verified, expanded) in new investigations, while the interviewees frequently connect their perception of their local scene with the Western, especially British, one. For example, the journalist Aleksandar Dragaš connects the local sounds of SFRY cities, such as punk in Rijeka and Ljubljana, and new wave in Zagreb, with the sounds of Manchester and Liverpool (p. 20).
Through the interviews, we get a personal view of the main topic, we delve into the feelings about the process of creating music, about concerts, working as journalists, publishers, about the life stages in the SFRY period and since the collapse of the state. Among the topics of music and history, there are also stereotypes and comparisons between the Balkans and the West or the ‘West’ and the ‘East’. These are juxtaposed as Phillips receives a comment from a local musician prior to a trip to Belgrade, for instance, that Slovenia and Croatia are sanatoriums compared with Serbia (p. 150). On the other hand, when visiting the restaurant ‘Radost Fina Kuhinjica’ (‘Little Joyful Kitchen’) in Belgrade, Phillips compares the atmosphere to a restaurant in the East End of London (p. 155).
Although the book is not academic as such, and the author himself lays down the highly personal tone of his writing – which he compares with a mural of collected stories (p. 5) – including a bibliography of literature or recommendations for curious readers would have been helpful. Nonetheless, this book is suitable for everyone who wants to learn or reminisce about Yugoslav punk, post-punk and new wave music, and about the important bands, clubs and museums of this part of the world. Here is an insight into a complex journey through lives, experiences, successes, creative processes and love of music, and into the various phases of a politically difficult period when the state was crumbling apart, impacting musicians’ places of residence and professions.
