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Alexei Romanov:
“I have no right to be a dictator”
INTERVIEW · ARTEL MAGAZINE
Alexei Romanov on life on tour, his audience, and why he has no right to be a dictator.
Alexei Romanov on life on tour, his audience, and why he has no right to be a dictator.
Place: Akadem Jazz Club on Prospekt Mira, Moscow.
Time: the last day of spring.
A tray with food and fruit compote floats into the interview room. “Are you sure it’s for here?” our hero checks with the café attendant. “This goes to the dressing room.” The tray floats away.
Alexei, your concert schedule is packed. Today is your last public performance of the spring season. Does life on tour die down in summer?
In summer our audience is planting radishes and making jam. The main concert season is autumn and spring. Last year we toured more than 30 cities. I worked it out — that’s roughly half the circumference of the globe.
A third generation of listeners has now grown up on your songs. Is your audience settled, or do all sorts of people come?
The audience that comes to see us is prepared; we don’t have to tune them in or educate them. People come to us the way they go to, say, Chekhov. Our audience took shape long ago.
If the audience isn’t responding, do you adjust the program on the fly or change the order of songs during the concert?
We have a well-run-in program with dramaturgy built in advance. We don’t change anything.
At your concerts drunk fans have been known to start dancing in the stalls and even try to break onto the stage…
If some drunk fool turns up in the hall, God forbid you react to him. You start losing energy. But that rarely happens. Best of all is when the audience doesn’t get in the way.
Every concert takes a huge amount of energy. Do you only give, or do you get something back from the audience too?
If I only spent energy, I wouldn’t survive. The load is like an athlete’s. Of course, you can get by “through gritted teeth”, but that’s a bruising. So I must be getting something back — there’s an exchange of energy with the audience. Something comes from the cosmos too; I have to be plugged into something else. There’s always some outside recharge.
How do you recover?
On tour I try to walk as much as possible. You can find churches and interesting cultural sites on the internet. Every time I try to plan a walking route of an hour and a half.
Let’s talk about the beginnings. You had a band at school, didn’t you?
Of course, there was a band at school. Back then everyone was hooked — a mass madness called “Beatlemania”.
Did you only play the Beatles?
Anything and everything. Getting hold of music was a problem. We listened to Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and Radio Luxembourg. But not all of these stations had music programs. The only place you could really feast on good music was Voice of America.
Radio Mayak helped too. Not the familiar Mayak, but a radio station for long-haul ships. They played “Can’t Buy Me Love” [by The Beatles] on repeat, which is why I was always late for school. I’d turn on the radio when my parents left for work and couldn’t tear myself away.
What did you pick up those voices on?
A Kharkov-63 radiogram. It had a turntable, a tape recorder and a shortwave receiver.
And you plugged homemade guitars into it too?
But of course. Pickups cost 9 rubles each, and they sounded good, by the way. Homemade amplifiers, everything as it should be.
I still don’t understand much about it; a friend of mine was a DIY whiz and soldered beautifully. It all sounded terrible; the most decent sound came from KINAP amplifiers [made by the cinema equipment factory] — you could get hold of them at school and quietly plug in. A wonderful tube amp, and loud.
Could you be called “a lad from the working-class outskirts”?
We lived in a fairly decent area, in a five-story block. The area was settled by limitchiki — young workers brought in after the war to work at the Kuntsevo Mechanical Plant. A perfectly decent crowd.
How did you end up applying to MARKhI?
Our whole class was into mathematics. The teachers prepared us for university entrance using tough problem books. I was sniffing around the Baumanka [Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the leading technical university]. It was prestigious: space, big iron machines.
But my father was an architect, and he decided I should be nudged towards that profession. When I was still a child he took me to a drawing club. In the tenth grade I was already going on my own to the preparatory department at MARKhI.
Time: the last day of spring.
A tray with food and fruit compote floats into the interview room. “Are you sure it’s for here?” our hero checks with the café attendant. “This goes to the dressing room.” The tray floats away.
Alexei, your concert schedule is packed. Today is your last public performance of the spring season. Does life on tour die down in summer?
In summer our audience is planting radishes and making jam. The main concert season is autumn and spring. Last year we toured more than 30 cities. I worked it out — that’s roughly half the circumference of the globe.
A third generation of listeners has now grown up on your songs. Is your audience settled, or do all sorts of people come?
The audience that comes to see us is prepared; we don’t have to tune them in or educate them. People come to us the way they go to, say, Chekhov. Our audience took shape long ago.
If the audience isn’t responding, do you adjust the program on the fly or change the order of songs during the concert?
We have a well-run-in program with dramaturgy built in advance. We don’t change anything.
At your concerts drunk fans have been known to start dancing in the stalls and even try to break onto the stage…
If some drunk fool turns up in the hall, God forbid you react to him. You start losing energy. But that rarely happens. Best of all is when the audience doesn’t get in the way.
Every concert takes a huge amount of energy. Do you only give, or do you get something back from the audience too?
If I only spent energy, I wouldn’t survive. The load is like an athlete’s. Of course, you can get by “through gritted teeth”, but that’s a bruising. So I must be getting something back — there’s an exchange of energy with the audience. Something comes from the cosmos too; I have to be plugged into something else. There’s always some outside recharge.
How do you recover?
On tour I try to walk as much as possible. You can find churches and interesting cultural sites on the internet. Every time I try to plan a walking route of an hour and a half.
Let’s talk about the beginnings. You had a band at school, didn’t you?
Of course, there was a band at school. Back then everyone was hooked — a mass madness called “Beatlemania”.
Did you only play the Beatles?
Anything and everything. Getting hold of music was a problem. We listened to Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and Radio Luxembourg. But not all of these stations had music programs. The only place you could really feast on good music was Voice of America.
Radio Mayak helped too. Not the familiar Mayak, but a radio station for long-haul ships. They played “Can’t Buy Me Love” [by The Beatles] on repeat, which is why I was always late for school. I’d turn on the radio when my parents left for work and couldn’t tear myself away.
What did you pick up those voices on?
A Kharkov-63 radiogram. It had a turntable, a tape recorder and a shortwave receiver.
And you plugged homemade guitars into it too?
But of course. Pickups cost 9 rubles each, and they sounded good, by the way. Homemade amplifiers, everything as it should be.
I still don’t understand much about it; a friend of mine was a DIY whiz and soldered beautifully. It all sounded terrible; the most decent sound came from KINAP amplifiers [made by the cinema equipment factory] — you could get hold of them at school and quietly plug in. A wonderful tube amp, and loud.
Could you be called “a lad from the working-class outskirts”?
We lived in a fairly decent area, in a five-story block. The area was settled by limitchiki — young workers brought in after the war to work at the Kuntsevo Mechanical Plant. A perfectly decent crowd.
How did you end up applying to MARKhI?
Our whole class was into mathematics. The teachers prepared us for university entrance using tough problem books. I was sniffing around the Baumanka [Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the leading technical university]. It was prestigious: space, big iron machines.
But my father was an architect, and he decided I should be nudged towards that profession. When I was still a child he took me to a drawing club. In the tenth grade I was already going on my own to the preparatory department at MARKhI.
“
If you stand on this side of the footlights, be so kind as to answer for your actions.
Do you remember your first guitar?
I built my first electric guitar myself. During my university entrance exams, as it happens. I made good use of the time meant for exam prep by making the instrument.
Were you so sure you’d get in anyway?
There was no time to be nervous. No time for self-doubt — it all went into the guitar. I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I did well in maths and physics. I got the pass mark, and that was enough.
The guitar turned out to be such a good instrument that it was… stolen. At the Institute, when our rehearsal room was taken over for elections. It turned out anyone could get in, and a lot of things were carried off, my guitar among them.
Didn’t they chase you out of there, didn’t they stop you rehearsing?
Oh no, why would they chase us out? They chased us out when we were making a racket in the assembly hall instead of studying.
It sounds as if there was no time to study architecture.
No, I had to study — I even got a grant, 43 rubles. Lunch cost 40 kopecks, and a perfectly decent one at that. 10 kopecks for travel, 30 kopecks for cigarettes.
And did you buy records with the rest?
No way! That was out of the question; at most you could ask to hold a record for a while. I gave the rest of the money to my parents; I lived with them.
Did you know that MARKhI was a breeding ground for musical and other creativity?
I had no idea. When I first turned up there, I was struck by how cheeky the senior students looked. Trousers made of curtains, tarpaulin jackets, homemade sailcloth caps. Not architects but some sort of Indians. It blew my mind. Back then I was a good boy in a tie and a jacket.
When did your first jeans appear?
My uncle played cello in Barshai’s orchestra [Rudolf Barshai, violist and conductor, who 70 years ago founded the USSR’s first Moscow Chamber Orchestra], and he brought me a pair of Montana jeans from abroad, I think. That was in my second year. I wore them to shreds; they rotted away on me.
Do you remember your graduation project?
A microchip assembly plant — a cutting-edge industry at the time. I designed a multi-story building with sealed workshops and an administrative annex.
And when I was working as an architect while studying in the evenings, I took part in designing the famous 600-meter “horizontal skyscraper” on Varshavskoye Shosse. That’s the NITsEVT building [the Research Center for Electronic Computing Technology, where the first Soviet computer was developed]. My own design there is the fuel and lubricants store that stands in the courtyard. Though I’m not sure it has survived.
Where were you assigned after graduating?
I was assigned to Goskhimproekt [the State Union Institute for Special Structures for Chemical Industry Enterprises]. It wasn’t very interesting: chemical plants are a kilometer and a half of iron. The only civilian structure is the checkpoint. There’s nothing for an architect to do there.
And then one day, standing at the window, you wrote the song “I Rejoice”. Such mature works are written at the height of a creative career, and you were just starting out…
It’s not a signature piece at all — more of an improvisation. Like everything else, really. One clear winter day, sitting at a drawing board and looking out of the window, I thought: “Blimey, and this is it until retirement. I worked it out — yes, Alexei Dmitrievich, that’s no fun.”
That’s how the song was born. In the next room, while the draughtswomen were out shopping, I used the typewriter and typed up my poems to make them look respectable. I wrote in pencil. I still do. If a text is no good at all, you can rub it out. The eraser is still my favorite tool.
What shaped your literary taste? Teachers, self-education, your parents?
Well, my parents above all, of course. Back then there was nothing you could buy except books. Even coats were bought on credit. A child’s coat cost thirty rubles, a serious expense for a family. Today that would probably be thirty thousand.
My parents had an excellent library, and so did my grandmother; there was plenty to dig through. A three-volume Pushkin, published in 1955, has lived with me for many years. It contains the whole core of Pushkin’s poetry. I started reading with prose. My first book was Kipling’s Mowgli. Then came Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance [the story is part of the cycle Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka].
Does inspiration come by itself? Or is creativity hard work?
There are masters of a high caliber, such as Ilya Reznik, for example. They can write gorgeous lyrics for stars to order. I’m not capable of that; I have to be struck by inspiration, and that happens two or three times a year.
And if not — well, fine. Real creativity happens in an altered state; it drains your energy, and I don’t much like that. Pushkin, for example, wrote at the card table, which is an altered state too. He’s in a panic — and to distract himself he had to rhyme a couple of lines.
The lyrics of your songs sometimes “float”; there are different versions, and often no “canonical” one.
Say we go into the studio to record. You stand before the barrier, the moment when everything is about to go “onto tape”. Suddenly I realize that something isn’t right, and I have to edit the lyrics on the fly. Now, admittedly, with digital recording it’s easier — you can even fix a single word in the final take.
Sometimes, after a while, I may no longer be happy with the excessive pathos of a poem; something more lyrical is needed. That means a different guitar is needed too. Or the key is too “snotty”, and something harsher is required. Sometimes it’s the other way round: the lyrics come across as too “boorish”, and I want to turn them into something lyrical.
How do the band members feel about this reshaping of songs? Do they agree?
What matters is that we play as an ensemble, and any new arrangements have to suit everyone. I can’t be a dictator; I have no right to. I have neither the will nor the nerve for it. I can insist on my own way, but for that I have to be one hundred percent sure I’m right.
The drummer will play it this way — that’s his decision. I can suggest options, but the last word is still his.
I’ve worked with professionals for a long time, and I listen to their arguments. I prefer learning to teaching.
Is being a professional routine, or the highest quality of work? Can one be an amateur “in the good sense”, a devotee of “creative flight”?
I don’t think there’s a line between these concepts; there are just foolish extremes.
You can be a professional in the worst sense of the word. Conductors have what’s called a “flip book” — a booklet with cut-up pages of fragments of violin parts, a kind of mosaic. When you need to do an orchestration quickly, you don’t have to invent anything; it’s all been invented already. It’s like a rhyming dictionary. All the musical moves are standard, and the musical vocabulary is quite simple. That’s professional routine.
Amateurism in the worst sense is complete irresponsibility, when a performer doesn’t bother to remember what he played last time. It looks like great fun — I’ve been guilty of it myself at times. “I don’t remember what I played, I’ll make it up as I go.” That approach can let you down. If you mess up yourself, that’s not so bad; it’s worse if you spoil someone else’s work and let your bandmates down.
When I go out on stage, that is already professional activity. Even if it’s just a house concert, there’s a line — it’s a stage. If you stand on this side of the footlights, be so kind as to answer for your actions. That’s the first thing a professional should learn.
I built my first electric guitar myself. During my university entrance exams, as it happens. I made good use of the time meant for exam prep by making the instrument.
Were you so sure you’d get in anyway?
There was no time to be nervous. No time for self-doubt — it all went into the guitar. I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I did well in maths and physics. I got the pass mark, and that was enough.
The guitar turned out to be such a good instrument that it was… stolen. At the Institute, when our rehearsal room was taken over for elections. It turned out anyone could get in, and a lot of things were carried off, my guitar among them.
Didn’t they chase you out of there, didn’t they stop you rehearsing?
Oh no, why would they chase us out? They chased us out when we were making a racket in the assembly hall instead of studying.
It sounds as if there was no time to study architecture.
No, I had to study — I even got a grant, 43 rubles. Lunch cost 40 kopecks, and a perfectly decent one at that. 10 kopecks for travel, 30 kopecks for cigarettes.
And did you buy records with the rest?
No way! That was out of the question; at most you could ask to hold a record for a while. I gave the rest of the money to my parents; I lived with them.
Did you know that MARKhI was a breeding ground for musical and other creativity?
I had no idea. When I first turned up there, I was struck by how cheeky the senior students looked. Trousers made of curtains, tarpaulin jackets, homemade sailcloth caps. Not architects but some sort of Indians. It blew my mind. Back then I was a good boy in a tie and a jacket.
When did your first jeans appear?
My uncle played cello in Barshai’s orchestra [Rudolf Barshai, violist and conductor, who 70 years ago founded the USSR’s first Moscow Chamber Orchestra], and he brought me a pair of Montana jeans from abroad, I think. That was in my second year. I wore them to shreds; they rotted away on me.
Do you remember your graduation project?
A microchip assembly plant — a cutting-edge industry at the time. I designed a multi-story building with sealed workshops and an administrative annex.
And when I was working as an architect while studying in the evenings, I took part in designing the famous 600-meter “horizontal skyscraper” on Varshavskoye Shosse. That’s the NITsEVT building [the Research Center for Electronic Computing Technology, where the first Soviet computer was developed]. My own design there is the fuel and lubricants store that stands in the courtyard. Though I’m not sure it has survived.
Where were you assigned after graduating?
I was assigned to Goskhimproekt [the State Union Institute for Special Structures for Chemical Industry Enterprises]. It wasn’t very interesting: chemical plants are a kilometer and a half of iron. The only civilian structure is the checkpoint. There’s nothing for an architect to do there.
And then one day, standing at the window, you wrote the song “I Rejoice”. Such mature works are written at the height of a creative career, and you were just starting out…
It’s not a signature piece at all — more of an improvisation. Like everything else, really. One clear winter day, sitting at a drawing board and looking out of the window, I thought: “Blimey, and this is it until retirement. I worked it out — yes, Alexei Dmitrievich, that’s no fun.”
That’s how the song was born. In the next room, while the draughtswomen were out shopping, I used the typewriter and typed up my poems to make them look respectable. I wrote in pencil. I still do. If a text is no good at all, you can rub it out. The eraser is still my favorite tool.
What shaped your literary taste? Teachers, self-education, your parents?
Well, my parents above all, of course. Back then there was nothing you could buy except books. Even coats were bought on credit. A child’s coat cost thirty rubles, a serious expense for a family. Today that would probably be thirty thousand.
My parents had an excellent library, and so did my grandmother; there was plenty to dig through. A three-volume Pushkin, published in 1955, has lived with me for many years. It contains the whole core of Pushkin’s poetry. I started reading with prose. My first book was Kipling’s Mowgli. Then came Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance [the story is part of the cycle Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka].
Does inspiration come by itself? Or is creativity hard work?
There are masters of a high caliber, such as Ilya Reznik, for example. They can write gorgeous lyrics for stars to order. I’m not capable of that; I have to be struck by inspiration, and that happens two or three times a year.
And if not — well, fine. Real creativity happens in an altered state; it drains your energy, and I don’t much like that. Pushkin, for example, wrote at the card table, which is an altered state too. He’s in a panic — and to distract himself he had to rhyme a couple of lines.
The lyrics of your songs sometimes “float”; there are different versions, and often no “canonical” one.
Say we go into the studio to record. You stand before the barrier, the moment when everything is about to go “onto tape”. Suddenly I realize that something isn’t right, and I have to edit the lyrics on the fly. Now, admittedly, with digital recording it’s easier — you can even fix a single word in the final take.
Sometimes, after a while, I may no longer be happy with the excessive pathos of a poem; something more lyrical is needed. That means a different guitar is needed too. Or the key is too “snotty”, and something harsher is required. Sometimes it’s the other way round: the lyrics come across as too “boorish”, and I want to turn them into something lyrical.
How do the band members feel about this reshaping of songs? Do they agree?
What matters is that we play as an ensemble, and any new arrangements have to suit everyone. I can’t be a dictator; I have no right to. I have neither the will nor the nerve for it. I can insist on my own way, but for that I have to be one hundred percent sure I’m right.
The drummer will play it this way — that’s his decision. I can suggest options, but the last word is still his.
I’ve worked with professionals for a long time, and I listen to their arguments. I prefer learning to teaching.
Is being a professional routine, or the highest quality of work? Can one be an amateur “in the good sense”, a devotee of “creative flight”?
I don’t think there’s a line between these concepts; there are just foolish extremes.
You can be a professional in the worst sense of the word. Conductors have what’s called a “flip book” — a booklet with cut-up pages of fragments of violin parts, a kind of mosaic. When you need to do an orchestration quickly, you don’t have to invent anything; it’s all been invented already. It’s like a rhyming dictionary. All the musical moves are standard, and the musical vocabulary is quite simple. That’s professional routine.
Amateurism in the worst sense is complete irresponsibility, when a performer doesn’t bother to remember what he played last time. It looks like great fun — I’ve been guilty of it myself at times. “I don’t remember what I played, I’ll make it up as I go.” That approach can let you down. If you mess up yourself, that’s not so bad; it’s worse if you spoil someone else’s work and let your bandmates down.
When I go out on stage, that is already professional activity. Even if it’s just a house concert, there’s a line — it’s a stage. If you stand on this side of the footlights, be so kind as to answer for your actions. That’s the first thing a professional should learn.