Early Saturday, Piknik, one of Russia’s hottest rock bands, posted: message in your page in Vkontakteone of the largest social networking sites in the country: “We are deeply shocked by this terrible tragedy and we mourn it together with you.”
The previous evening, the band was scheduled to play the first of two sold-out live shows with a symphony orchestra at Crocus City Hall on the outskirts of Moscow. However, before Picnic took the stage, 4 armed men entered the vast hall, opened fire and murdered at least 133 people.
It appears that some of the Picnic crew were amongst the victims. On Saturday evening, one other note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte website informing about the disappearance of a woman who ran the band’s merchandise stands.
“We are not ready to believe the worst,” reads the message he said.
The attack on Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over 4 many years.
Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “rock monsters” and that its songs were inspired by classic Western rock bands, including David Bowie, and a range of Russian styles.
Since the release of their 1982 debut album “Smoke”, Piknik – fronted by the band’s vocalist and guitarist Edmund Shklyarsky – has grown in popularity, although its music is often somber with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage performances.
Kukulin said that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the band began performing with exciting light shows, computer graphics and other revolutionary touches. At one point in the Nineties, the band’s live shows featured a “living cello” – a woman with a reinforced string stretched by her. Shklyarsky played a solo on the bow.
This month, the band debuted a recent song online — “Nothing, don’t be afraid of anything” — together with a video of the band performing live in front of huge screens featuring continually changing animations.
Unlike some of its peers, Piknik “was never a political band,” Kukulin said, although that did not stop him from getting involved in politics. In the Eighties, Soviet authorities banned the group – like many others – from using recording studios, while Soviet newspapers complained about the group’s lyrics, including the song “Opium Smoke”, which authorities considered encouraging drug use.
In recent years, some of Russia’s most distinguished rock stars have left their country, fed up with President Vladimir Putin’s restrictions on freedom of speech, including regular attacks on live shows. Kukulin stated that Piknik benefited from this exodus because the band had fewer competitors in the Russian traditional rock scene.
Kukulin stated that, unlike some musicians, Shklarski didn’t support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Despite this, Ukrainian authorities have long banned Piknik from performing in the country because the group performed in occupied Crimea. IN interview from 2016Szklarski said he was not concerned about the ban.
“Politics comes and goes, but life remains,” he said.
Kukulin said that Picnic’s songs included “In Memory of Innocent Victims” — a song that might be interpreted as being about those that were politically oppressed under communism. Now, Kukulin said, many fans heard the song in a recent way, as a tribute to those that lost their lives in Friday’s attack.
