KORTATU IN WARSAW PART 1: REDS AT RÓBREGE
The Róbrege festival took place every autumn from 1983-90. It was originally founded by the late Robert Brylewski (a legend of the Polish underground scene associated with Warsaw punk and reggae acts such as Kryzys, Armia, Izrael and Brygada Kryzys), Sławomir Rogowski and Paweł Rozwadowski and organised by the Hybrydy student nightclub located in Złota street, not far from the Palace of Culture and Science. The location of the actual festival was the tent of the Intersalto Circus in nearby Towarowa Street right in the heart of Warsaw.
As the website of the Palace of Culture and Science informs us, “the event has its origins in the period of martial law, when young musicians were active against censorship … From the very beginning, the idea of the festival was to search for young rebels in the music scene who did not expect commercial success and whose music had a positive and authentic message.”
Of course, official statements have to be handled with some caution. Martial law was lifted and censorship relaxed in July 1983, whereas the first Róbrege festival took place in October 1983. In fact, 1983 was the year that the government embarked on a cultural charm offensive, showing greater tolerance towards the native alternative scene and inviting western acts to play in the People’s Republic – indeed, alternative acts were in greater demand because big western rock bands were asking too much money. It has been argued, not implausibly, that this was to create a safe outlet for the rebellious energies of the Polish youth, which might otherwise be steered in a political direction. London’s UK Subs, for instance, were able to absolve an 11-date tour of Poland alongside local new wavers Republika as early as in March 1983. Although martial law hadn’t even been lifted yet, Charlie Harper & Co played to their biggest ever audiences: 10,000 people in Lodz, 24,000 in Warsaw.
How did Kortatu’s invitation to the festival came about? A contact from Warsaw, Iwo Swierzewski, tells us about a kind of cultural exchange between Poland and the Basque Country. One day, Marino Goñi – or possibly someone else from the Basque Soñua label – showed up in Warsaw with albums by Kortatu, La Polla Records, Barricada, Baldin Bada and other such Basque Radical Rock artists under his arm. He was introduced to the director of the state-owned Tonpress label, Marek Proniewicz, and Marek Wiernik, a well-known TV and radio presenter. One result of the meeting was the reissue of the Polish alternative band Klaus Mittfoch’s debut album on Soñua – another was Kortatu’s invite to play at the Róbrege festival in Warsaw in August 1987.
Skinheads
By that time, a rather different ‘alternative scene’ had also emerged in Poland. An article in the youth magazine Razem bore the headline: “Bald heads, beer, the clattering noise of marching steel-toe boots, the crackling sound of breaking bones: here we come – skinheads”, and the main text continued along similar lines. While some readers recoiled in horror, certain sections of the punk scene were fascinated. Piotr Wierzbicki, then the editor of Warsaw’s influential QQRYQ punk zine (1985-93), remembers: “When skinheads first started appearing in Warsaw around 1985, all of them were ex-punks. Skinhead especially appealed to punks with strong hooligan attitudes. They only had the faintest knowledge of skinhead culture: they knew what a skinhead looks like and that they had to be violent to the max. Some took to this like fish to the water because they were basically thugs.”
Although there are unconfirmed rumours that an early crew existed in Szczecin as early as 1981, it wasn’t until 1985-6 that skinheads started appearing en masse. And while one shouldn’t read too much into the anti-social nazi posturing that became fashionable among some early Polish skins, there was at least a certain right-wing tendency, not least thanks to the ‘information’ contained in the aforementioned Razem article: “The Polish youth press wrote about skinheads in a scandalising tone, saying that skinheads were fascists by definition”, Piotr tells me. “For many skinheads in Poland this was the only information they had, so some of them became nazis. Others, though, simply stayed at the level of ordinary thugs.”
Based on his early impressions, Piotr even penned an anti-Oi article for the fifth issue of QQRYQ in 1986. “It was a ridiculous piece”, he says, “a testament to how little we knew behind the Iron Curtain. Because the skinheads proliferating by 1986 were shouting ‘Oi! Oi!’ while also identifying as nazis, I condemned Oi per se in my article: I wrote that it had nothing to do with punk since it was fascist”. Very soon, though, Piotr got hold of information to the contrary from Jarek, a recent skinhead convert from Sosnowiec and co-editor of Poland’s first skinzine, the ultra-violent Fajna Gazeta. Jarek was also a member of an early Polish skin crew that made a point of being ‘anti-political’ rather than nazi. “They were horrible thugs, though”, Piotr recalls, “even if they were mostly fighting metalheads rather than punks”.
And so, with some assistance from Jarek of Fajna Gazeta, the embarrassed Piotr wrote another QQRYQ article entitled ‘Oi!’, in which he tried to set things right. QQRYQ readers now learned that bands like 4 Skins, Blitz or Criminal Class had nothing to do with the likes of Skrewdriver, that some Oi bands had appeared at anti-racist festivals, and that the Oi movement was already more or less history in Britain – even if it was only just starting out in Poland.
Kortatu on TV and radio
By spring 1987, Piotr had become acquainted with the exotic ska punk sounds of Kortatu from Irun, Basque Country, who had two albums under their belt: “In the run-up to Róbrege, Marek Wiernik played their records on his Cały ten rock radio show, which meant that a lot of people got to hear them because all punks were listening to that programme. It was one of the few sources of new underground music.” Thanks to Iwo Świerzewski of the Radioactive Rat YouTube channel, we can present a snippet from Marek Wiernik’s radio show playing Kortatu in 1987 – find it at the bottom of part 3.
Were people aware that Kortatu were linked to skinhead culture? “Hardly anyone knew what kind of band it was”, Piotr continues, “Ska wasn’t very popular yet, so the music sounded strange. Our only information was that Kortatu were a Basque band, which we also found strange.” But Trojan, a skinhead from Upper Silesia who attended the festival, not least to see Kortatu, tells me: “Kortatu were popular with Oi skins in Poland – although mainly for their music. Their political background was secondary and, in any case, obscure to most of us”.
In August that year, Kortatu arrived by train at Warsaw Central station, a stunning design completed in time for Leonid Breshnev’s visit in 1975. There, they were picked up by Dolores Palomero Ortega, who would be their interpreter and tour guide for the whole duration of their Warsaw visit, which lasted about 2-3 days. Although Dolores would later work for the Spanish embassy in Warsaw and still does today, she says there was no embassy involvement in Kortatu’s visit: a friend had privately asked her to help out since they weren’t many Spanish speakers living in Poland back then.
Kortatu were driven to a television studio, where they pre-recorded a short interview for a music programme called 102 broadcast every day at 7.20pm just before the evening news. Since only two TV channels existed in Poland at the time, a large audience would follow the daily 10-minutes music show as a matter of course. The interview can be seen in two parts below: in the first, Kortatu briefly introduce themselves, which is followed by some light-hearted chatter with Dolores interpreting. Make sure to switch on the English subtitles we’ve made for you:
In the second part, they give a clenched-fist salute and sing the ‘Eusko Gudariak’, the republican anthem of the army of the Basque Autonomous Government in the Spanish Civil War: “We are the Basque Soldiers, we are ready to give our blood to free the Basque country”.
Some latter-day commenters have suggested that the ‘incident’ provoked a similar response to Bill Grundy’s interview with the Sex Pistols on British television 11 years prior. But Dolores remembers no such problems: “The TV interview was a joke”, she tells us, “The two TV hosts were very well-prepared and knew all the important singers and bands in the world – after all, they had been presenting the pop charts on state radio for 40 years. Nobody saw the group’s behaviour as disrespectful. I think they found it rather fun and spontaneous”.
And indeed, the two presenters (the one with the ‘tache is the aforementioned Marek Wiernik) look amused in the interview that was broadcast the same evening, even if they were wary that the Spanish embassy might file a formal complaint for Kortatu’s performance of ‘Eusko Gudariak’. “I told them that the embassy wouldn’t say anything because it was none of their business”, Dolores explains, “and besides, ‘Eusko Gudariak’ had been sung in the Basque Country on many occasions without any police intervention”. After the recording, Kortatu were keen to watch the broadcast on TV, so Dolores invited them over to her house. Since her husband had prepared Spanish omelette, they happily accepted.
It’s true that Dolores didn’t translate everything the band said during the recording – most notably, when vocalist Fermin revealed that he sometimes farts on stage. Would that have been an unforgivable cultural faux-pas? Maybe not – but Dolores skipped some of Fermin’s comments that she felt weren’t appropriate for a prime-time programme on national TV. What’s more, it was “quite difficult to translate the nonsense they were saying, firstly because it was my first time as a translator and also my first time on a television program.”
Nothing to do with stifling state censorship, then? “Bands from all over the world came to Poland, from the Rolling Stones to Soviet groups”, says Dolores, “and while censors interfered with the lyrics of Polish songs, they didn’t interfere with bands that came to visit.” She adds: “Keep in mind that Poland, in some cases even to this day, is a generally very culturally conservative country, and I imagine that today some of this behaviour might be censored.”
Kortatu spent the night in student accommodation in Górnośląska street just west of the Vistula River. They gave another interview on a radio station, and it has been said that they caused another scandal by provoking the ‘apparatchik’ interviewing them. But this notion might have more to do with preconceptions about the Polish People’s Republic than with reality: according to Fermin, the radio station was in fact run by would-be dissidents, and Fermin provoked them with pro-Cuba slogans. Read our interview with Fermin for more details.
Kortatu liked Warsaw a lot, Dolores tells us. But did they get a real idea of what life was like in the socialist country? “The truth is that someone from western Europe visiting Poland at that time didn’t see much difference”, she offers, “there were other products in the stores – but foreigners, in general, liked them very much and had a great time.” Sadly, she had no photos taken with the band – but she still has her pass for the Róbrege festival (pictured above).
Reds at Róbrege
The first day of Róbrege was usually dedicated largely to punk, the second largely to reggae, the third to new wave, post-punk and experimental music. Kortatu were booked for 22 August – the reggae day. And so Piotr of the aforementioned QQRYQ zine was one of many punks heading to Warsaw’s town centre to watch Kortatu alongside homegrown reggae acts like Izrael, but also a bit of hardcore punk from Warsaw’s own Dezerter. He had a chat with the Kortatu lads, which he remembers as short and awkward: “They didn’t speak much English, or maybe their accents were just too weird for me to understand. And I wasn’t exactly a language genius either… In any case, I took their address, and we agreed that I’d interview them for issue 10 of QQRYQ by mail”.
What did the punks make of the fact that a ‘red’ band like Kortatu was scheduled to appear at what was widely perceived as a countercultural event, though? Piotr of QQRYQ thinks that „hardly anyone knew that Kortatu were reds. Marek Wiernik only played music on the radio, and he didn’t particularly bother to explain the ideology behind it”. People were left in no doubt about Kortatu’s views, though, when they cheerfully explained their stance in the next issue of QQRYQ: “We like the band Redskins very much, both musically and lyrically, and we’re on the left ourselves”. When asked what he thought of Poland, Kortatu’s Iñigo Muguruza offered: “In my opinion it’s a country that has always suffered a lot, and because of this people have moved closer to things that I’m not keen on. For example, Catholicism and pro-Americanism”.
Piotr was less than impressed: “I did understand that they had their own problems, different from ours”, he remembers, “but we thought it was total madness. And this didn’t apply only to them, but to large sections of the western scene in general. We lived in a country where having a passport was a privilege. There was censorship and intrusive propaganda. The Security Service and special militia units (ZOMO) were on the rampage, human rights violations were rife, and on top of all this the economy was in tatters. Behind all this was the Communist party (PZPR) with its exclusive monopoly on power. Meanwhile, from what we heard from the West, it seemed that a lot of people were fascinated by Communism, which we thought was total idiocy.”
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