Member-only story
This improbable album from thirty years ago has a special role in my journey of discovering and loving Western pop music.
The other day I saw this band, who I love dearly, mention this album on their social media. It’s thirty years old! I was thirteen when it came out.
Maybe my liking of this record isn’t “improbable,” but considering the circumstances — I spent my childhood in Soviet Moscow and it was just a couple of years since the Soviet Union collapsed — that I’d fall in love with this band, at that stage in their career, wasn’t exactly predictable.
In the early 1990s I listened a lot to Moscow’s first FM radio stations, especially “Radio Maximum, 103.7” and there was one song that completely blew my mind with creativity. I knew clearly — it was the best song I’d ever heard.
We started watching MTV too, and when I saw the video clip, well, I fell in love with this song and this band even deeper. With its lead singer too! It’s a struggle to describe the degree of admiration I experienced rewatching and relistening this song, countless times:
This! Weird, creative, unique, sexy, dark, joyful, authentic.
