Joe's Big Toe

Lyapis Trubet­skoy are a sep­tet from Minsk, Belarus. Their brand of ska-punk was pop­u­lar in par­tic­u­lar in the late 1990s, and they are still pop­u­lar in karaoke bars around the former USSR. Their big hits include “Au”, “Ti kin­ula” (“You Dumped Me”), “Zel­en­olazoye taksi” (“Green-eyed Taxi”), “V plat’ye belom” (“In A White Dress”) and “Yabloni” (“Apple-trees”), and the band have released just short of 20 albums.

How­ever, the band have not been without their issues. They had an exist­en­tial crisis com­ing into the 2000s, with Mikhailok say­ing “One day to my hor­ror I real­ized that our group had become sim­ilar to what we were par­ody­ing and mock­ing. We were start­ing to blend into that pop-star crowd, but I’m not one of them and never wanted to be”. Mikhailok hit the bottle hard to deal with the split between his vis­ion and real­ity, until he gave it all up, and the band released Cap­ital. He con­demns the pre­vi­ous album as being full of too many dif­fer­ent musical styles, and too many attempts to get a radio hit. The band have recently been work­ing with a respec­ted Ukrain­ian pro­du­cer, and they respect him because he under­stands the scene. Per­haps the most telling quote from Mikhailok is this, “[w]hen I star­ted my career, I used to write songs that changed me and the world around me, but later I began to cre­ate stuff, that didn’t have any influ­ence either on me or the world. At best those songs could have been a soundtrack for some wed­ding or birth­day. And what is hor­rible is that at some point, I even used to be proud of that. But now I have come back to where everything star­ted from – to a mix of bit­ing satire and power­ful chords.”

After a quiet period from 2003 onwards, Lyapis Trubet­skoy star­ted pick­ing up awards again in 2007, and have been going strong ever since. The band released “Agit­prop” earlier this year.

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