‘Everyone in 2010 was singing in English’: the Anglophone Wave

On 28 November 2012, Tesla Boy, a three-piece band from Moscow, performed their single ‘Electric Lady’ on Vecherny Urgant, a national TV programme on Russia's Channel 1. The talk show, modelled on the format of the American Late Night, has aired at 11.30 p.m. five times a week since its inception on 16 April 2012. The presenter, Ivan Urgant, introduced the performance of the band with a few words:

The term ‘fashionable’ (in Russian: modnyi), with which Urgant described the band, was not only an indicator of the popularity, especially amongst the youth, that Tesla Boy enjoyed in 2012, but it also suggested that Tesla Boy were not alone on the ‘peak’ of music in vogue. On 26 April 2012, Pompeya, another local Anglophone band, had performed, also on Urgant, their single ‘Slow’. This occurred only 10 days after the first broadcast of the programme, with an audience share of around 12% (Borodina Reference Borodina2012). Yet, Pompeya and Tesla boy were not the only English-singing bands whose performances were being televised in that period. On 6 June 6 of the same year, another Anglophone indi group, Everything Is Made in China (EIMIC) played on Channel 2 (Rossiya 1) during the show Profilaktika. The same show hosted the performances of other local Anglophone bands Coockoo (19 April 2012) and Moremoney (5 May 2012), while another (private but prestigious) channel, Dozhd (TV Rain), broadcast live shows of On-The-Go (3 March 2011) and Human Tetris (2 October 2011).

The appearance of so many domestic Anglophone groups on national TV was both unprecedented and abnormal. Yet TV was only the most visible manifestation of a much larger and widespread trend. For example, the participation of Anglophone bands in relevant indie-rock festivals was also telling of their success. Moscow Piknik Afishi, organised by the trendsetting journal Afisha, featured on its bill On-The-Go (2011, 2014 and 2017), Pompeya (2012), and Tesla Boy (2013 and 2016), and held an Anglophone stage (called ‘Idle Conversations’) that gave voice to many more local Anglophone bands. Moscow Bosco Fresh Fest hosted On-The-Go on six occasions (2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018), Pompeya on three (2012, 2014 and 2016) and Tesla Boy on two (2013 and 2016). St Petersburg Stereoleto's programme also included On-The-Go (2012 and 2016), Pompeya (2010, 2017) and Tesla Boy (2009 and 2015).

According to participants (Gorbachev Reference Gorbachev2016; Brod Reference Brod2016; Makarychev Reference Makarychev2016; Xuman Reference Xuman2016, all personal interviews),Footnote ³ between 2011 and 2013 the aforementioned Anglophone bands could fill clubs with a capacity that ranged between 500 and 1500. Moscow's indie haven 16 Tons, for instance, with a capacity of 550, has been hosting at least one, sometimes two, gigs of each band every year since 2010.

This trend is not exclusively concentrated in Moscow. Particularly during the Anglophone booming period, the bands regularly toured across Russia's territory once or twice a year, seeing approximately similar attendances. Ekaterinburg, located 1700km from Moscow in the Ural region, represents a good example of this spread. In 2013, On-The-Go filled the local Dom Pechati (Printing House), which has a capacity of 600, whereas Pompeya and Tesla Boy gigged the Teleklub, which has a capacity of 1500.

If such numbers (500–1500) appear small to a Western reader, it needs to be considered that successful indi acts in Russia, whether Anglophone or Russophone, rarely experience more attendance than that for a solo gig. The numbers for indi, compared with those for Western indie, are much smaller, and this relates to all types of platforms (e.g. view-counts on Youtube). Daniil Brod, Pompeya vocalist, observes: ‘on Youtube, a popular Russian indie band gets around a few hundred thousand clicks, while for American standards indie bands get around a few million’ (Brod, personal interview, 2016). For example, On-The-Go's video for ‘In the Wind’ gathered, at the time of writing (February 2020), 190,000 views, Pompeya's single ‘90’ collected 1.1 million views and Tesla Boy's ‘Spirit of the Night’ gained 690,000 views: these are important numbers for a business of considerably smaller size and outreach than its Western equivalent.

Such popularity of local Anglophone collectives in Russia – which I shall term the ‘Anglophone Wave’ – occurred neither by chance nor suddenly. Even though it seemed that ‘everyone back in 2010 was singing in English’ (Vosmoy, personal interview, 2017), making ‘the choice of language obvious’ (Kriger, personal interview, 2017), Anglophone bands had increasingly gained momentum since 2008, when trendsetters started promoting them as part of a youth movement that wanted to go westward. Since ‘all artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people’ (Becker Reference Becker1982, p. 1), TV, festival, radio and online exposure were only the culmination of a collective effort, undertaken over time. Correspondingly, the rise of the ‘Anglophone Wave’ in Russia's alternative music panorama represented a symptom of a broader change in Russian society: the perceived modernity of the language of the lyrics and of the sound reflected the wider social modernity that the youth were attempting to construct. Both the use of English and the close attention to sonic details, guitar pedals, vintage synths and sound production in general, which all the Anglophone bands of that period shared, were indeed perceived as qualitatively equal to the latest Western trends. This, in turn, evidenced the intention, widespread in all strata of society, to situate Russia on a par with its ‘constitutive Other’, the West.

‘The European project’: the Russian scene and the Other

‘It was the striving towards the West, the love towards the West … like, we also can, we're not worse’ (Gritskevich, personal interview, 2016). With these words Nadezhda Gritskevich – ex-leader of the Anglophone indie group Moremoney – explains the Anglophone Wave in indi at the end of the 2000s. Firstly, bands were singing in English as a long-term consequence of the political and cultural opening towards the West of a country that had been bottled up for many years during Soviet times. Secondly, musicians had the urge to demonstrate that they stood at the same musical level as their Western colleagues, that they had ‘caught up’ with the West.

Both political and psychological reasons were embedded in a historical framework of Russian ‘inadequacy’ in relation to the West, which often manifested itself as a collective inferiority complex. Indeed, since the ‘discovery’ of the West during the reign of Peter the Great in the 18^th century, Russia has not been able to have another term of comparison (Greenfield 1992 pp. 191–274) against which to define itself and construct its identity. As in politics, in popular music Russia has perceived its Other in the West. This Other corresponds in psychological terms to what Claire Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009, pp. 14–15) has defined in linguistics: simultaneously ‘an idealised representation’ of something or someone else, ‘an object of desire’, and ‘another image of oneself’. Experiencing the Other transports the subject ‘from a tedious conformity with one's present environment to a state of plenitude and enhanced power’.

A brief account of the Other in the late Soviet period evidences that, for the Russians, the West was ‘a local cultural construct and imaginary’ (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006 p. 34) that engendered private, ‘underground’ and unofficial cultural practices, including playing, performing and listening to rock music. Consequently, in the field of popular music, Russian performers (and fans) of most genres identified the Other with the Anglo-American tradition. It is well documented (Aa, 1977–1978; Steinholt Reference Steinholt2005; McMichael Reference McMichael2005, Reference McMichael2008; Rybin Reference Rybin2010) how Soviet musicians listened to and performed Anglo-American tunes, regardless of understanding the lyrics, and imitated Anglo-American performers in attitude and style; these ways of connecting with the Other provided them with considerable pleasure and represented an escape from official ideology.

However, when the iron curtain fell in 1991, the flood of American symbols, lifestyles, advertising agencies, NGOs and language schools that officially and more or less legally settled on Russian territory did not favour a popularisation of domestic bands singing in English, and Russia had to wait until the end of the 2000s for the ‘Anglophone Wave’ to happen.

The main reasons for this incongruity lay in the absence of favourable sociopolitical circumstances and the deficiency of music networks and infrastructures. During the 1990s, Russia was at the mercy of lawlessness and demographic crisis: rampant inflation, criminality, AIDS and alcoholism prevented the country's economic growth. This affected the music scene, which, though diverse and thought-provoking, presented a lack of foci capable of systematically sponsoring Anglophone performers to audiences. The only genre that underwent a vast popularisation in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse was traditional Russian Rock (russkii rok), but this was mostly a long-term effect of its previous propagation during perestroika. The general view, as journalists Aleksandr Gorbachev and Ilya Zinin (Reference Gorbachev and Zinin2014) write, was that 1990s indie bands were playing ‘songs into the void’ (pesny v pustotu).

For all these reasons, Anglo-American music, as Russia's musical Other, remained an object that Russian musicians could compare themselves with, but not compete with. This discrepancy shaped claims of Russian popular music's backwardness amongst practitioners and listeners. The youth, as shown in the surveys conducted by Pilkington et al. (Reference Pilkington2002), considered Western popular music more evolved and generally qualitatively ‘better’ than the Russian equivalent (in terms of ‘sound’ and ‘drive’, not in terms of lyrics), whereas Russia was perceived to imitate and dwell, internationally, on the cultural fringes. Sonically, then, between Russia and the Other at the end of the 1990s, there was not only a distance, but also a gap.

For some pundits such a gap needed bridging, in terms of musical production but also in terms of audience's perception and reception. Aleksandr Gorbachev (Reference Gorbachev2019) has called such process of redressing the balance between Russia and the West ‘the European project’ (evropeyskiy proekt). The foundations of this project were laid at the end of the 1990s and during the first half of the 2000s through a few key initiatives led not by musicians, but mainly by private investors. The method of such enterprises was the outsourcing and importing into Russia of Western models and know-how.

MTV Russia started broadcasting in 1998 and for the first few years proposed a mixture of Western (65%) and Russian (35%) rock, pop and indie songs through a combination of American-derived and Russia's ‘own brand’ shows (60% and 40% respectively).Footnote ⁴ Despite such imbalance, in its ‘golden age’ (1998–2002) MTV Russia not only managed to introduce to the audience local bands with more alternative sounds, but also inspired a new understanding and taste in music to the generation born during perestroika (Dud’ Reference Dud’2018). The Western-derived figure of the VJ (video jockey), until then unknown to the Russian public, embodied a new way of performing music entertainment. With their laid-back attitude, ‘new humour’, youth, English fluency and an aura of cosmopolitanism, MTV Russia's VJs could not only speak straightforwardly and as peers to their young viewers, but also functioned as role models.Footnote ⁵ Specifically, they appeared to have directly encountered and experienced the Other, and to be able to spread the word. This, united with MTV's ground-breaking events like the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on Moscow's Red Square (1999), framed the Other as increasingly appealing and near.

Nonetheless, bringing the Other to Russia was a communal effort that involved the whole music industry. At around the same time, in 1999, Russian entrepreneur Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper and American businessman Andrew Paulson founded the youth journal Afisha, which soon became Moscow's and St Petersburg's go-to music, fashion and entertainment source.Footnote ⁶ For indi musicians, being on the radar of Afisha's fortnightly release (184,300 copies across Russia, 84,300 of which in Moscow alone),Footnote ⁷ or on the journal's website (11 million monthly visitors),Footnote ⁸ represented one of the best tools for expanding their fandom and gig opportunities. Afisha was not simply a taste-maker; it did not merely define ‘what counts as good taste and cool culture […] constructing legitimacy and adding value through the qualification of goods’ (Smith-Maguire and Matthews, Reference Smith-Maguire and Matthews2014 p. 1); rather, it defined these notions of ‘good’ and ‘cool’. As its former editor Yury Saprykin (Reference Saprykin2019) reveals, Afisha was a ‘factory of desire’ (fabrika zhelaniy), with the motto ‘it will be as we say’ (kak skazhem tak i budet). Afisha was visionary and effective because it saw the trends in the West and transferred them to Russian ground, promoting new bands as ‘Russian Arcade Fire’, ‘local Elliott Smith’, ‘our Interpol’ and so on (Gorbachev Reference Gorbachev2019), thus enacting a vital shift from ‘Imaginary West’ to ‘Russian West’. Afisha circularly promoted itself, its community and its artists through the creation of a yearly music festival, Piknik Afishi (Afisha's Picnic), which took place for the first time in Moscow in 2004. Piknik Afishi was ‘an emanation of what the journal was doing’ (Gorbachev, personal interview, Reference Gorbachev and Zinin2016) and over the years brought a considerable number of Western indie bands to Russian soil for the first time (Beirut, Mùm, Black Lips, Editors, Metronomy, Franz Ferdinand, Blur, Suede, Sohn, Foals, Everything Everything, Arcade Fire, etc.), while also showcasing Russian ones (On-The-Go, Pompeya, Tesla Boy, Mujuice, Markscheider Kunst, Manicure, SBPCh, Padla Bear Outfit, etc.).

In this operation of local and foreign indie discovery, Afisha was aided by the work of concert promoters like Igor’ Tonkikh (founder of one of the first Russian indie labels, Feelee, in 1988) who, together with Afisha's ex-music editor and Piknik developer Greg Goldenzwaig, opened Ikra, a club in the eastern part of Moscow that regularly featured not only Western indie artists (Róisín Murphy, Amon Tobin, 65daysofstatic, NoMeansNo), but also local ones (Tesla Boy, Alina Orlova, Petr Nalitch). Together with Solyanka, between 2007 and 2011 Ikra would be the centre of a growing indie community that had as an underlying process the incorporation of the Western Other into the Russian musical fabric.

Meanwhile, in 2002 Muscovite pop duo t.A.T.u. released the single ‘All the Things She Said’ and succeeded in what many other Soviet and post-Soviet musicians had failed to achieve before them: worldwide fame. This was due not simply to their provocative homoerotic videos and stage performance, but also to the refinement of the sonic product, the carefully packaged Western sound in which English lyrics were integral. Most importantly, t.A.T.u. showed all Russian musicians, including the ones gravitating around the indie world, that singing in English could be paired with commercial success and public recognition.

Thus, the first half of the first decade of the 2000s provided the indie scene with new resources that paved the way for the subsequent strengthening and expansion of the Muscovite indi community in the second half. This transformation occurring at the level of popular culture reflected another transformation on a larger scale, equally influential in post-Soviet recent history: the architectural renovation of Moscow.

‘They imagined a comfortable, hipstery Moscow’: time, city and soundtrack

The sociocultural significance and audience recognition of Russian Anglophone bands in the post-Soviet space are entwined with the time and space that those bands inhabited; specifically, sociopolitical conditions were a contributing factor in the popularisation of Anglophone indi. These conditions were determined by the conjunction of Russia's economic growth (2000–2014), Moscow's modernisation (2008–2018) and the perceived political openness of Dmitri Medvedev's presidency (2008–2012). Gleb Lisichkin, music journalist and founder of the independent label and artist management company Kometa, has put the Medvedev's years in relation to the local indie scene in this way:

Similarly to Lisichkin, Boris Barabanov, music journalist for the newspaper Kommersant, explains:

The quotes above show how two members of the music community positively view the political, economic and societal context in which local Anglophone bands appeared at the end of the 2000s, and how they saw such bands as celebratory soundtracks of that particular time (‘we had fun and listened to Pompeya’). Yet this context acted upon the musicians and the community around them to create the cultural space for their vision. The fact that local Anglophone bands could make such a significant breakthrough in the Russian music world between 2008 and 2014 exactly is not just a coincidence, 2014 marking the start of the Ukrainian conflict and the subsequent Russian economic crisis. Pompeya, On-The-Go, Tesla Boy and the other artists belonging to the Anglophone Wave could not have gathered a substantial following had it not been for the favourable conditions in which they arose, not only inside the music community, but also inside the social and political milieus. As journalists and music-promoters Ilya Zinin and Maksim Dinkevich explain, ‘many bands in Russia had performed in English before Tesla Boy and Pompeya’ (Zinin Reference Zinin2017 and Dinkevich Reference Dinkevich2017, personal interview), but only a few exceptions (Gorky Park at the end of the 1980s and t.A.T.u. in the early 2000s) had gained significant popularity amongst Russian fans. The rest of the Anglophone collectives, as Colta music-observer Denis Boyarinov puts it, ‘had remained in the past, completely forgotten’ (Boyarinov, personal interview, 2016). Therefore, the reasons for such a breakthrough have to be sought also in the upper layers that enclosed the indi world.

First of all, Russia's economy improved extensively. In the years 2000–2014 – with the exception of 2009 – Russia's GDP experienced constant growth, averaging annually around 7% during Putin's first two terms (2000–2008) and 4% during Medvedev's second half of office (2010–2012) (World Bank Reference Bank2016a). The economic crisis that hit the world in 2009 affected Russia only briefly, and Russia experienced a speedier recovery than many other countries, including the US (World Bank Reference Bank2016b).

Politically, in 2008 Dmitry Medvedev became the new president of the Russian Federation, aged 42. Whereas many – not unreasonably – viewed Medvedev as Putin's puppet, it needs to be said that Medvedev, at least at first, delivered through the media the image of a young and progressive politician. And while his ideas about political reform and Russia's modernisation on the whole were only an excuse to introduce more of the same (Wilson Reference Wilson2015), Medvedev's administration succeeded in modernising one thing: Moscow. During Medvedev's term, large amounts of funds were invested in the renovation and development of Russia's capital city. In 2008, 1 trillion roubles (£11.5 billion) were allocated as the capital's budget, an amount then similar to that of London (Olifirova Reference Olifirova2007). The city's budget has grown consistently over the subsequent years, owing also to the football World Cup in 2018, and doubled to 2 trillion roubles (£23 billion) in 2018 (Moscow Official Portal, http://budget.mos.ru/, accessed 25 October 2017).

The kiosks that were so typical of the Russian capital's landscape – but were perceived as shabby-looking – were removed. Central streets were paved and closed to the traffic, and pavements were enlarged to host the flow of shoppers. The rusty rollercoasters in Gorky Park were dismantled and replaced by museums of contemporary art, pavilions, sport areas and cafes. Parks were replanted, decorated, embellished. Historical buildings were restored and polished. The numbers of new bars, restaurants and clubs mushroomed at an unprecedented rate, and resembled those of Shoreditch and the East Village. In the central and old district of Kitay Gorod, as Skolkov (Reference Skolkov2009a) noted on Look At Me, ‘a whole venue route began to take shape’.

Since ‘space produces as space is produced’ (Leyshon et al. Reference Leyshon1995, p. 425), two consequences occurred. Firstly, thanks to its economic prospects and cultural innovation, Moscow now attracted a large number of young musicians seeking to make a career.Footnote ⁹ Having moved from the city of Togliatti (1000 km East of Moscow), On-The-Go vocalist Yury Makarychev reveals:

Not only On-The-Go, but other influential Anglophone indi bands (or members of bands) such as Therr Maitz (from Magadan – 10,000 km away from Moscow), Parks, Squares and Alleys (Khabarovsk – 8,000 km), Moremoney (Kogalym – 3,000 km), The Jack Wood (Tomsk – 3,500 km), Vosmoy (Perm – 1,500 km) and Hospital (Komsomolsk-na-Amure – 9,000 km) moved to Moscow from remote parts of Russia's vast territory. People in the Anglophone indi world thus converged, resources were shared and musicians began to overcome the threshold for the popularisation of the genre.

Secondly, Moscow's territory became populated with cultural hubs and art centres that soon became platforms and junctions for the creative youth. This happened in less than three years: Vinzavod opened in 2007, Artplay and Garage in 2008 and Flacon and Strelka in 2009. Kuleva (Reference Kuleva2019, pp. 6–8) describes such spaces as ‘new, sexy and international’. These institutes stood at the intersection of the interests of rich private investors – Chelsea FC owner Abramovich (Garage), Rosneft adviser Trotsenko (Vinzavod), Afisha's holding owner Oskolkov-Tsentsiper (Strelka) – and the Moscow public administration. Indeed, the development of privately owned cultural institutions gained political support because this process coincided with the urban policies pursued by the city government, specifically by Moscow's former Head of Culture Sergey KapkovFootnote ¹¹ (Kuleva, Reference Kuleva2019, p. 7), and later by its mayor Sergey Sobyanin (2010 – present), who explicitly revealed his intentions to make Moscow look like a European capital (Bush Reference Bush2016).

These projects were innovative because they had a pronounced Western imprint:Footnote ¹² they were ‘clusters’ where art forms were not only mixed with one another, but also with entertainment, relaxation and fashion activities: concert halls, art galleries, design schools, hipster clothing shops, fancy cafes and craft-beer bars were all concentrated in one area and accessible to potentially all Muscovites. The polyfunctionality of the spaces, which would reflect the versatility of its practitioners (see later), actively encouraged interaction between the professionals involved, leading to the formation of a creative community of young people who viewed the West as increasingly near and locally realisable. Established in 2010, the webzine of urban culture The Village, itself a tribute to (and a driving force of) the changing city, proclaims as its motto:

Coffee, comfort and global initiatives were part of a design to turn Moscow into a European space. As Sergey Poydo, former editor of The Village (2010–2011), has it:

Indeed, it was the clear intention of the participants involved in Moscow's creative community (which included indi) to promote a Westernising approach across the whole entertainment industry, an approach consciously embracing globalisation and dismissing differences between Russia and the West. Aleksandr Gorbachev insists:

Similarly to Gorbachev, Gleb Lisichkin, in our interview (2017), talks about ‘a complete renaissance’ that affected the lifestyle of the up-and-coming Muscovite intelligentsia. Yet the creative tusovka (community) promoted changes in the city that were significantly endorsed, if not enabled, by politicians and businessmen too. This collective effort created a new, westernised and ‘cool’ Moscow, out of which indi emerged as a music movement.

The renovation of Moscow, therefore, inspired the renovation of independent culture and empowered the community of cultural producers that led it. Thus, together with the urban geography, the cultural perceptions of its inhabitants changed. As Western lifestyles and forms of entertainment took shape in Moscow, there was no need to seek them elsewhere: the Other was finally visible and within reach. Muscovites realised that their city could now compete on all grounds with other Western-European capitals, that they had been liberated from the ‘elsewhereness’ that had been influencing the youth since the late Soviet generation, that the ‘Imaginary West’ (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006), the Other at which Russia had constantly gazed – at times with resentment (Greenfeld Reference Greenfeld1992) and envy (Pilkington et al. Reference Pilkington2002) – was now perceived as no longer ‘imaginary’, no longer ‘other’ and no longer ‘better’.

The Anglophone bands emerged as epitomes – as sonic representatives – of this change in perceptions, and generated a substantial local following that identified them as the soundtrack of the ongoing modernisation. The intensification of Russian Anglophone music in the years 2008–2012, therefore, did not concern simply production, but also reception: people increasingly listened to ‘cool’ and fashionable local bands who sang in English. Locally sourced Anglophone music acquired meaning, in the eyes of many Russian youngsters, as evidence that Russia had levelled the game with the West. As Aleksandr Gorbachev has revealed, in that period ‘people on social networks were often saying: Oh my god I've just listened to Pompeya and I can't believe they're Russian!’ (Gorbachev, personal interview, Reference Gorbachev and Zinin2016). Such enthusiasm entailed the assumption that the musical gap, perceived as such only 10 years before, had been filled, and that the local Anglophone bands had finally built a bridge to the West.

‘You want to organise a gig, play it and then talk about it’: indi networks and circularity

The success of the Anglophone collectives around 2010 also depended on the growth and strengthening of the network of people involved in various ways in the indi business. Such impetus to partake in a direct interaction led eventually to the micro-mobilisation of the Muscovite indi world, resulting in a ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim Reference Durkheim1915 in Crossley Reference Crossley2015) that rose beyond the threshold and had a knock-on effect on the popularisation of the genre on a national level. In his study on British punk, Networks of Style and Subversion (2015), Nick Crossley has demonstrated how such tight and sympathetic networks of music participants give rise to micro-mobilisation as they expand. Drawing on Small's (Reference Small1998) idea of ‘musicking’, on Becker's (Reference Becker1982) concept of ‘Art Worlds’ and on Durkheim's theorisations about ‘Collective Effervescence’ (1915), Crossley stresses the importance of personal interaction in the creation and popularisation of music phenomena. For him, the main actor is the network itself: ‘Music worlds emerge as an effect of collective effervescence within a networked critical mass of actors who are defined by shared interests of some sort’ (Crossley Reference Crossley2015, p. 80).

Crossley thus identifies the features that make a network effective: (a) the number of participants must exceed a threshold; (b) members must be solidly connected; and (c) members must be coordinated. Alongside this, Crossley argues that action is more likely to take place in a large city and it cannot be reduced to a single actor, but it is always collective and mutually influential. It follows that the larger, more connected and more coordinated the network, the more it will spread and impact society.

All of these factors came together in the Moscow indi community at the end of the 2000s. The core of such a world is shown in Figure 1, which identifies the dense connectivity of 31 Moscow-based musicians, label owners, promoters, festival organisers and journalists. As participants recall, the ties were strong: ‘we all knew each other’, says Maria Melnikova (personal interview, 2016), then frontwoman of Coockoo, while Poydo argues that ‘we saw people who were ready to change the city, and we knew all of them, they were our friends or friends of friends’ (Poydo in Sheveleva Reference Sheveleva2015).

Figure 1.

UCINET graph showing the (inter)connections between 31 of the main participants (musicians, journalists, venue promoters, festival organisers, label owners) of the Moscow indi world in 2010.

These members were usually directly linked; when this did not occur, they had a ‘second degree’ tie (Crossley et al. Reference Crossley2015, p. 21). For example, Melnikova (Coockoo frontwoman) was not directly connected with Nesterov (owner of the label Snegiri), but the two were linked with each other through a considerable number of other indi members, who functioned like hubs. The nodes enjoying the most connections were the journalists Gorbachev and Boyarinov, the musicians Gritskevitch and Ustinov and the festival organisers Kusnirovich and Silva-Vega, as well as one concert promoter (Kazaryan) and one venue promoter (Kamakin). This meant that when Melnikova and her band released a new song or performed at a gig, Nesterov was likely to know about it very quickly; in 2019 indeed, Melnikova signed a deal with Snegiri for her new project Masha Maria.

An important fact is that many of the 2010 indi network ‘hubs’ are represented by the leaders of Anglophone bands: Sevidov (Tesla Boy), Brod, Gritskevitch, Makarychev and Xuman. These musicians were supported at each stage by the other members of the community in recording and distributing albums, organising gigs, participating at festivals and advertising. The ties among promoters, journalists and label owners served to create a hype around the musicians’ products.

Another characteristic of the indi network is the versatility of its participants. Different roles in the community were often taken up by the same person. Shank (Reference Shank1994, p. 131) has called a similar process of fluidity of roles ‘productive anxiety’: ‘spectators become fans, fans become musicians’. In the Russian case, the lines between fandom, musicianship and entrepreneurship were blurred, thanks to a process that we can term ‘multitasking enthusiasm’, a factotum fervour that, in the early stages of the industry, compensated for a certain lack of infrastructure.

Thus, the expansion of the network depended on the versatility of the people in the community. Poydo, for example, was the main editor of The Village (a branch of the influential fashion and music portal Look At Me, which Vasily Esmanov was in charge of), and the organiser of the influential nights ‘Idle Conversation’ at the club Solyanka, one of the focal indi venues of which Kompaniets was PR and in which all other key indi members were one way or the other involved (‘Idle Conversation’ had its own stage on Afisha's Picnic between 2007 and 2010 and its own column on Look At Me). Gorbachev was the music editor of Afisha, best friends with Lisichkin (the editor of Vice Russia), organiser of the indi showcases Sredy Gorbacheva (2009–2010) at Ikra (club managed by Tonkikh and Goldenzwaig) and collaborated with the head of Snegiri label, Oleg Nesterov, on the release of a compilation of new indi called No Oil. No Stress. No Noise (2010).

These are only a few examples. Maksim Dinkevich, himself a musician (Mraz’), editor of the magazine Sadwave, freelance journalist, concert promoter and co-writer with Gorbachev and Zinin of the book about the 1990s alternative music scene, Songs in the Void, has summarised the plasticity of the indi community thus: ‘you want to organise a gig, play it and then talk about it’ (Dinkevich, personal interview, 2017). Multitasking creates circularity, and out of this circularity the community expands and overflows.Footnote ¹⁴

Indi is English and English is Indi: Xuman Records

It was indi, and not pop or mainstream rock, that consistently adopted English as the language for song lyrics. This can be explained by the fact that English, in a landscape populated by classic rock in Russian (russkii rok), equated with a sense of anti-commercialism and alternativeness that in turn equated with ‘traditional’ indie values.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, the use of the English language in Russian popular music does not correlate with commercial success, and this point has been raised in previous academic studies. For example, Eddy (Reference Eddy2007, p. 186) observes that English in Russian popular music becomes less present as the genre becomes more commercial. In his investigation of Russian blues, Urban (2004, p. 9) came to a similar conclusion: blues in Russia is a niche genre, and ‘blues in Russia is almost invariably sung in English’. Therefore, English language and mainstream music are often inversely proportional in Russian music culture. The more a music style becomes alternative or independent, the more the artists choose to sing in English.

Moreover, indie in general is particularly bound to a concept of ‘locality’ (Kruse Reference Kruse2010), in which interaction within a community is more relevant than in mainstream rock or pop. The Muscovite indie network was, as we have seen, a tight community, and this community sought alternativeness and novelty, sometimes to the extent of being accused of snobbery.Footnote ¹⁶ Therefore, as these practitioners attempted to embody innovation, a new (to Russia) form of music – indie – was what suited them best. Aleksandr Xuman, owner of the Anglophone-only label Xuman Records, comments:

The community was indie in the sense of a Western-inspired and cosmopolitan culture that did not limit itself to music, but was rather an all-encompassing guide to a modus vivendi (micro-breweries, independent clothing shops, small venues, artsy clubs, etc.). This community had to reinvent its values (‘there was no indie before us’, as Xuman reveals) and in this, the use of English and indie music were indissolubly bound. English functioned as one of the main tools and manifestations of the international semblance that the indi community endeavoured to create: as a movement stretching out towards the Other, it also adopted the modus operandi of the Other, the music of the Other and the language of the Other as its logical finale (Gorbachev Reference Gorbachev2019). Such a systemic way of doing things included sound production and techniques of mixing and mastering, embodied by the Anglophone-only label and studio Xuman Records.

The indie and Anglophone community assembled along focal sites: just as Solyanka and Ikra functioned as hubs for clubbing, Afisha and Look At Me as encyclopaedias and taste-makers, Pompeya, Tesla Boy and On-The-Go as inspirational bands, so Xuman Records functioned as the nest of the production of Russian Anglophone music, and it would be impossible to imagine the ‘Anglophone Wave’ in indi without it. Like Malcom McLaren's clothing shop that acted as the epicentre of British Punk, Xuman Records functioned as the catalyst of the Russian Anglophone Wave, nurturing the sound of Pompeya, On-The-Go and many more groups that followed that trend since: EIMIC, Glintshake, Ivan Dorn, Mana Island, Dezery, and Hospital passed through the doors of the studio-house located in north-east Moscow.Footnote ¹⁷ The logotype of the studio consists of four hands holding each other in a square, and stands for solidarity – one of the primary intents of the studio since its conception – while the name is a play on words and reads like ‘Human’ (in Russian the letter ‘x’ is pronounced ‘kh’), emphasising the mutual support amongst all various music professionals that the label aspired to shape. To this extent, the studio has bedrooms for the recording artists, so that they can live where they create and, at least in the beginning, the label did not require a contract with the artists (reminiscent of Tony Wilson and Factory Records) – collaboration was done on reciprocal sympathy and common vision (Skolkov Reference Skolkov2009c).

In order to achieve a similar sound to Western indie equivalents, Aleksandr Xuman imported high-quality equipment from the US and hired one of the most promising sound engineers in the indi world at the time – Korney Kretov. The sound of indi, in many aspects, would become the sound of Korney, ‘as if brought here [to Russia] from the outskirts of London where dubstep and grime originated’.Footnote ¹⁸ Korney collaborated on almost all indi's influential releases since 2009 as a sound-producer, mixing and/or mastering engineer. And given the success of the first works by Pompeya and On-The-Go, Korney's sound generated demand, amongst other indi bands, for the Xuman studio and for more of that sound. As engineer/producer Andrei Tropillo did in the 1980s with Leningrad rock, Korney invented a sound using the studio as an added instrument: ‘the task of the sound engineer is to make songs better’ (Korney in Prorokov, Reference Prorokov2013). And just like Tropillo calibrating his bands’ sound to bands like Joy Division and The Cure, so Korney calibrated his sound to the Other, that is, to contemporary Western indie-rock bands like Daft Punk, MGMT, Arctic Monkeys and Foals.

As further proof of multitasking and circularity, Xuman entered the loop of the indi tusovka not only with his label, but also with his eponymous band Xuman, which he then promoted through his label and using the resources of the indi community. For example, the first compilation of indi songs by the label in 2009 had its own release party in Solyanka during one of the ‘Idle Conversation’ nights. Before that, Look At Me had already dedicated a long interview to Xuman (Skolkov Reference Skolkov2009c): ‘Look at Me wrote about us, and all our label history began’ (Xuman, personal interview, 2016). Out of this hype the studio itself became one of the crossroads of the community:

The aim of the label was to promote ‘good, clever, but not commercial music’, not necessarily limited to the domestic market (Xuman in Skolkov Reference Skolkov2009c). As Xuman admitted in our interview (2016), the project was ambitious: ‘we believe that sooner or later a Russian artist can become successful abroad’. To this extent packaging a ‘Westernised’ product was not only a challenge, but a mission. Once the sound was attuned to those standards, the next element to adjust was the lyrics: it was not enough for English to be simply a marker of belonging to an imagined community of international artists; the English had to be flawless. David MacFadyen, one of the finest connoisseurs of the contemporary indi scene, has revealed that listening to Russian bands singing in English could be a struggle: ‘I often have to look for lyrics of songs performed in English simply because I can't understand the original’ (MacFadyen in Gorbachev Reference Gorbachev2015). Intelligibility is normally an important principle in the dissemination of a music product, and for Xuman this was dependent on good English pronunciation. This, for Xuman, is ‘innate’ and belongs to good hearing skills: ‘you can tune a note if they [the singers] are out of tune, but you can't teach someone to sing in English’. The presence of an accent, he argues, is off-putting for a supposed Western audience, as well as for the local Russian public:

The singers of the Anglophone bands analysed here sound ‘native’ (at least on record), and their English is very difficult to locate geographically. An unrecognisable accent was in line with the image that Xuman – and more broadly the entire indi community – was striving to render: that of a Westernised – almost ‘Swedenised’ – Russia, in which evident elements of Russianness (not only the Russian language, but also the Russian accent in English) were removed. Russia could now become a non-Anglophone country producing Anglophone music that could appeal to domestic and international markets indistinctively. And even though such music did not significantly impact Western audiences, for reasons that range from difficulties of transculturation to a convoluted industry dominated by actual Anglophone countries, it spread widely in the local territory.