In Search of Tito’s Punks
On the Road in a Country That No Longer Exists
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Intellect Books
Published:16th Jun '23
£29.95
Available for immediate dispatch.
The book traces the story of how a song recorded in 1981 by a young punk rock band from a cultural backwater on the English-Welsh border, and released on a tiny independent record label, became famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito? Why was it 30 years before the members of the band found out? How did this ‘socialist’ country have one of the most vibrant punk scenes in the world?
Gloucester, England, 1981; multi-racial, teenage street-punk band, Demob, recorded and released what would become their best known and most enduring song, No Room For You. A rasping vocal told the story of the 1979 closure of a short-lived, punk rock venue at a disused motel on the edge of the provincial city. Depending on your mind-set, the lyrics were either a howl of rage at the injustice, a wail at the loss, or a love-song to an era.
More than three decades later, the author – and Demob’s bass player in 1981 – set out to follow the song across a country that no longer exists. On the road he heard the life stories of the heroes of Yugoslavian punk and the punks themselves; from the Tito era, through the disintegration and wars, forced displacements and permanent exiles, to today’s turbulent ‘reconstruction. Who were ’Tito’s punks’ and who are they now?
An unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present, seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue, part history the book is both, and neither, of those things. Rather, it is a mural and soundtrack of a journey through a time and place which no longer exists.
The latest addition to the Global Punk series from Intellect.
'It’s a terrific read, equal parts travel memoir, rock’n’roll history, and bittersweet recollection of a country fractured and dismantled, seamlessly integrating past and present, politics and culture, and the alternating voices of the author and a variety of fascinating characters he meets on the way. Musicians and businessmen, artists and thugs, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and all the rest, thrown together and then torn apart, each with their own story to tell, by turns hilarious, inspiring, and tragic. Engaging, thoughtful, and shot through with a certain melancholy, much too sharp to be dismissed as mere nostalgia, for a time and place seeming lost forever. In Search of Tito’s Punks is one of the more interesting and original rock books to come along in some time.'
-- Simon Harvey, Ugly Things Magazine'Barry Phillips has written a very important book here. It is important for understanding Yugo Punk, and has clear relevance [...] to the study of punk generally. More than that, by focusing on lived punk lives rather than on the politics, geopolitics, and the imagined primordial ancient hatreds that are held to define the Balkans, Phillips has made a significant contribution to Yugoslav and Balkan studies.
This is an excellent book, an eye-opener both for those interested in the Balkans, and those interested in punk. And beautifully realised in print, paper, and card by the Punk Scholars Network, who clearly take book production as craft very seriously. Very punky. A must-read.'
-- Mike Diboll, Toxic Grafity'A mosaic of essays and interviews...one that provides the book with an air of accessibility.
The interviews offer interesting insight to the modes of spreading and disseminating punk ideas and music in Yugoslavia (primarily through the records bought in the West, but later on a basis of local social networks) and thus invite a more general reflection about the travel of ideas in a pre-globalized world and its main actors. [...] Phillips’s book can also be read as an attempt to include the history of Yugoslavia in the mental map of western left-wing imagery and as an expression of nostalgia, which is present not only in the narrators’ talks, but in the author’s essayist passages. Indeed, one of the most powerful among them is Phillips’s reminiscence of his meeting with Yugoslav veterans of the Spanish Civil War in 1996 [...] In Search of Tito’s Punks represents a very readable introduction to the topic, enriched by a multidisciplinary and intertextual approach that offers a great number of references to other cultural texts.'
-- Marta Harasimowicz, Punk & Post-ISBN: 9781789387315
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
260 pages