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Fact #84574

When:

Short story:

Uriah Heep, the first major Western rock band to perform live in Russia, play the second of ten nights at Olympijskiy Stadium, Moscow, Russia, Europe.

Full article:

URIAH HEEP - THE FIRST WESTERN HEAVY ROCK BAND TO PLAY IN RUSSIA

(N.B. A shorter version of this feature by Johnny Black was originally published in Classic Rock magazine)

INTRO

The signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, by US President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, doesn't at first glance look like the most significant rock'n'roll event of 1987. Yet even as the world's two most powerful politicians were shaking hands on their historic peace accord in Washington DC, a bunch of grizzled metal road warriors from Brentwood in Essex were guzzling gutrot vodka and preparing to invade the very heart of Moscow. Mother Russia was about to collide head-on for the first time with heavy rawk'n'rowul, in the shape of Uriah Heep, and nothing would ever be the same again behind her Iron Curtain. Was there a hidden connection between Heep, Rayguns and Gorbie? Da! Da! Da!
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Laszloh Hegedus (Yugoslavian events promoter) : Yes, it is a very strange story indeed. Uriah Heep's career in the West was at a very low ebb when President Gorbachev came to power in Russia and started his policy of Glasnost in 1985, which was aimed at opening Russia up to the rest of the world. Yet it was Glasnost which made it possible for Heep to go to Moscow in December 1987 and play an unprecedented ten nights in the Olympic Stadium to 180000 people. They became the first heavy metal band to play in Russia and opened the way for everybody else.

Steve Parker (manager of Uriah Heep) : When I picked up Uriah Heep for management in 1985 they had gone from being one of the top pioneering metal bands of the early 70s almost to the level of playing weddings and funerals. I was starting to build them up again, but it was slow progress until the summer of 1987, when Lazsloh Hegedus rang me from Yugoslavia.

Mick Box (founder/guitarist, Uriah Heep) : We had a saying in the band which was, 'If the people can't come to the music, we'll take the music to the people' so we'd done a lot of gigs in Eastern Bloc countries, working with Lasloh. Russia, though, was always closed.

Artemy Troitsky (Russian rock journalist/author) : For many years, here in Russia, the only way to get rock albums was on the black market. Rock music was never banned, but it was never on radio, never on tv, records were not on sale, and even local rock bands were not recognized professionally. They could only play amateur shows in, for example, student dormitories or small clubs.

Mick Box : Because we were popular on the Black Market, we had heard about fans in Russia who had been sent to prison just for owning our records.

Artemy Troitsky : Here in Russia, Uriah Heep was always one of the most popular heavy rock bands. In Bulgaria, Uriah Heep were probably more popular than anyone else. Their song, July Morning, was like a national anthem for all Bulgarian hippies and alternative youth.
Over the years there had been occasional concerts by people like Elton John and UB40, but these were considered pop, clean and safe. Rock, however, was a different matter. Uriah Heep would be the first real rock band to play in Russia.

Lazsloh Hegedus : The Russian authorities in the 80s were deeply afraid of rock music, but they knew and trusted me because I had helped the American promoter Bill Graham to put on a show in Moscow as the closing event of a joint US-Russian Peace March from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It had Santana, Three Dog Night and others, but it was not a commercial show. It was invitation only. The Uriah Heep shows were the first time Russians could actually pay to buy a ticket for a rock show.

Steve Parker : When Lazsloh rang me up to ask if Heep would like to play in Moscow, I said yes without even asking the band. I realised it could be a huge worldwide publicity boost for them, even though there wasn't much actual money to be made. We did it more as an image-building thing, and because it looked like Russia would become a major market in the future. The last show they did before Moscow was in a 2,000 capacity club in Germany, so the Olympic Stadium was going to be a massive leap up.

Mick Box : We touched down in Moscow a little the worse for having drunk too many glasses of the celebrated Russian Tap Dancing Waters on the plane.

Phil Lanzon : It felt like we'd landed on another planet. The Russian media people had got right onto the walkway from the plane, and they pursued us right through customs and all the form-filling. It was a nightmare just to get out of the airport.

Steve Parker : Unknown to us, the Russian State press agency, TASS, had been sending out press releases, trying to turn the concerts into a global news story. It was all being tied in to the fact that Gorbachev and Reagan were having talks in Washington, so the concerts were being presented as part of the opening up of Russia under Glasnost.

Bernie Shaw (singer, Uriah Heep) : The Olympic Stadium was a huge ominous edifice, three football fields wide. We were to play to this hemisphere of 18,500 people in one half, while behind us, in the other half, the World Junior Hockey Championships were going on.

Lazsloh Hegedus : The Russians had none of the production necessary for a rock show, so I had to bring everything, sound, light, catering, lasers, absolutely everything, 2,500km across country in trucks from Budapest. It took several days and we had to have State Police outriders the whole way from the Russian border because, without them, the local police would have stopped us at every regional crossing and taken anything they liked the look of.

Dealing with the Russians was very complex. We had to negotiate everything not just with the management of the venue, but with the Communist Party, central government, the Moscow local government, the military, the KGB…

Mick Box : We had KGB guys assigned to us from the start. They'd follow you into the toilet, and if we got into a car to go somewhere, four of these huge, tough-looking beefcakes would pile into a little Lada to follow us, squashed up against the windows, which really spoiled the image.

Bernie Shaw : It wasn't really til we hit the stage on the first night that we realized the audience was not allowed to stand on the floor in front of us. They had to be seated. So there was about 100 metres between us and the first pair of eyeballs. And right around the perimeter of the audience, were 300 armed soldiers – AK47s, fur hats, trench coats, the whole nine yards – with their backs to us. We were playing to the backs of their heads.

Lazsloh Hegedus : We hadn't known that the first night audience were all invites-only. It was attended by organized parties of people from the factories and schools, who arrived in bus-loads, very smartly dressed, suits and ties, the real Young Communists.

Mick Box : They were also prevented from dancing, so they more or less just sat there. They could clap and sing along…

Phil Lanzon : One of the shocks was playing July Morning, because as soon as I started the intro, it was like everybody was having a big one – 20,000 people going absolutely bananas. I was so stunned, I almost stopped playing. They could only get our records on the black market, but it was as if they all knew the songs.

Mick Box : Even so, they were still 30 metres away, so it was hard to play to them. Luckily, we'd just started using radio mikes, so Bernie and me went running out across the open area to try to shake hands with people in the audience.

Phil Lanzon : While they were doing that, I stopped playing and wandered to the side of the stage to get a better view, but they didn't have any stage markings, so I walked right over the edge, fell down, missed a generator by about two inches that could have killed me. I hobbled back onto the stage holding a bottle of vodka somebody had given me, because that was the only way to overcome the pain.

Mick Box : The vodka was amazingly strong. We used it to clean our cymbals with. Used to bring 'em up a treat.

Bernie Shaw : I was able to push through the line of soldiers, because they didn't know what to do. I was quite confrontational. I'd stick the mike in their faces and try to get either a little bit of conversation or even a remark out of them, and they would not. They were under orders to shut up and keep control.

Mick Box : We had spotlights following us as we ran around, and I heard this screeching, 'Meeek! Meeek!' and when I looked up, this guy was running down the aisle so frantic that he couldn't stop because of his momentum and he actually took off, looked like a starfish in mid-air. I instinctively pulled my guitar up to protect myself, and he crashed into me, and his teeth went – SMACK! - into the back of my tobacco sunburst Gibson Les Paul, and then he slid down and hit the floor.

He knocked me flying as well, so I tried to get on with my runabout, and he got up off the floor, so excited he obviously didn't feel any pain from his smashed teeth, and he did the rest of the run with us. His teeth marks are still visible in the back of my Gibson.

Laszloh Hegedus : They went down as well as could be expected but it wasn't satisfactory, and at the end of that first night the band was very unhappy and disappointed.

Phil Lanzon : At the end of that night I was bundled into a taxi and told I was being taken to see the Moscow Olympic doctor. As well as the driver, I had a young and very silent KGB man with me. The streets were deserted at that time of night as we drove on and on, until this young lad finally spoke aloud in broken English. He said, 'Why you want people to stand in front of stage?' He didn't look at me. He said it looking out of his window. Then he said, "This is not good." I just freaked. I had no idea where I was going. I didn't know if I was really being taken to the doctor, or if I was being taken away and I'd never see the band again. Fortunately, it turned out to be the doctor, but the whole atmosphere was very strange.

Steve Parker : Every day we had to have meetings to report to the venue management, old thick-set blokes, and some military, in this smoke-filled boardroom. So I would go in and tell them how unhappy the band was with all the police and militia everywhere. Gradually we got them to reduce the numbers of military.

Bernie Shaw : In between shows, there would be fans at the stage door, but formal contact between us and them was frowned upon, so we would have confrontations with the soldiers, telling them to fuck off, because we were there to sign autographs for these kids. Unfortunately, it was freezing cold, like minus 26, so the ink in their ball point pens would freeze solid. So they'd stand there with their imitation Bic lighters, heating up the pens until the ink was warm enough that we could sign their bootleg copies of our albums.

Steve Parker : Jim Hughes, one of the road crew, had formed a bit of a relationship with a Russian girl, and one day, even though she had a pass, one of the KGB guys tried to drag her outside. Jim, quite a big bloke, just punched him, knocked him to the ground.

We all just froze. We thought we were going to jail but absolutely nothing happened. They didn't even approach Jim about it. We could never figure out what was going on. There was this constant oppressive presence, but in situations like that, they didn't seem to know what to do.

Mick Box : Whenever we could, we'd go out into the streets of Moscow and visit the markets. It was so cold, the river was frozen over and people were fishing through holes in the ice. They sold ice cream on the market in little packets, because it didn't need a fridge to keep it frozen.

Bernie Shaw : It was disgusting. Tasted like frozen Philadelphia cheese. But you had to buy everything on the markets because there was nothing in the shops. You'd go to a bakery and they'd have one loaf of bread. They'd get seventy in the morning and they'd all be gone by seven am. They'd still stay open all day but they had nothing to sell.

Mick Box : We'd had several boxes of 10 x 8 pictures printed up to give away as promo, but people would take them off us and then use them as currency. They could trade a signed Uriah Heep photo for a fur hat.

Steve Parker : One of our biggest problems was that we were making a video of the shows, but the audience was so far away, and so static, that it looked awful. We needed to have young kids in front of the stage to make it look like something people would recognize as a real concert.
We had discovered that there was one independent radio station, and somebody organized for them to announce over the air on the Saturday (Dec 12) that if anybody could get themselves down to the stadium in the afternoon, they'd see a free show by Uriah Heep.

Lazsloh Hegedus : The security guys were not around in the afternoon, so they had no idea what was going on.

Steve Parker : So the middle of the afternoon comes round, there's nobody in front of the stage, and the stadium officials were telling us that nobody had turned up. Then someone else gave us the nod that we should have a look outside the back door, so we did, and there was about 500 normal-looking kids out there, waiting patiently, but wearing jeans and t-shirts and long hair. It was almost surreal to see them after having got used to the audiences we'd been seeing every night.

Mick Box : We did a full show for them at our soundcheck. They went absolutely crazy. They couldn't believe they'd got in for nothing. That was the best show we did all week.

Steve Parker : We filmed it and then cut it together with footage of the huge crowd in the seated areas. It looked pretty good, I thought.

Bernie Shaw : It was not uncommon to meet girls who would ask you to marry them, just so they could get out of Russia. I was introduced to an absolutely beautiful ballerina called Maria Zagozhaiba and she invited me back to her tiny one-bedroom apartment. Remember, this was a time when families of five people would live in a one-bedroom apartment, so she obviously had connections.

I lost my heart to her. In the morning she went out to the market to buy some fresh fruit and when I told her it wasn't something I would eat, she broke down in tears. They just didn't have anything of decent quality. It opened my eyes to how the other half of the planet was living.
We, however, were treated very well. After each show, we'd go back to our hotel where we had these beautiful old-fashioned suites, but when one of the crew phoned his girlfriend in England, he was telling her how cold and grey and awful everything was, when suddenly there's a click and a Russian voice interrupts and says, 'Please do not discuss such matters on the international telephone.' They were bugging our phones, listening to everything.

Mick Box : Some of the Hungarian crew, pissed out of their brains on vodka, searched for the bugs in their room. They found a big bolt sticking up under one of the carpets, so they rolled it back and unscrewed it only to hear a loud crash from down below. The bolt had been holding up the light fitment in the room below and, just like in that scene from Only Fools And Horses, it smashed onto the floor, except this was real life.

Laszloh Hegedus : The shows got better and better as the days went on. At the beginning the soldiers had been very scared and they kept their distance, they did not want to get involved, and they looked to the band like aliens. Gradually, though, they got under the influence of rock'n'roll, and became much more friendly. By the last show, they were moving together with the audience and watching the concert.

Mick Box : We've done loads of Russian tours as a result, and we're still popular over there but, if I'm honest, even though our albums are now officially on sale, we've never really seen much cash coming back from it. It's still almost impossible to police that sort of thing.