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Photo and video report
Roll call during a breakdown
There were several technical pauses that evening, and Spirin filled them by talking with the audience. While the equipment was being fixed, he held a roll call, “like artists usually do when there’s a breakdown at their concert.” There were guests from Ljubljana on the balcony, Montenegro in the hall — “Montenegro, scientifically speaking” — and, of course, locals from Belgrade.
Spirin explained why the tour started here: now in Serbia every street is Freedom Street. That is the title of one of Tarakany!’s main songs. Later he asked who in the audience supported the students — student protests have been going on in Serbia since late 2024 — and concluded: “The students are lucky — the whole people are on their side.”
Zappa Barka itself also survived a relocation. For twenty years the float stood on the riverbank in the city center until in June 2024 its electricity was cut and it was towed away from the center along with other floating clubs. Now concerts take place by the Nebojša Tower, the 15th-century tower at the foot of the Belgrade Fortress. Spirin noted that performing on a boat is “a pleasure, but in summer it’s even nicer.”
A tour that was disrupted
Tarakany! appeared in 1991 and were initially called Kutuzovsky Prospekt — after the Moscow street where the musicians lived. Then they were Four Cockroaches, and since 1997 they have used the current name with an exclamation mark. Spirin took the microphone shortly after the first album and became the author of most of the songs.
For the thirtieth anniversary in 2021 the band was preparing a major tour. According to Spirin, concerts began to be canceled one by one: promoters received calls asking them to cancel shows, and he himself was fined for a video appeal in support of Navalny. In April 2022 he disbanded the group. An interview in Novaya Gazeta Europe then ran under the headline “I no longer believe in punk rock.”
Spirin left Russia back in 2021, lived in Budapest, then moved to Argentina, and in 2024 was declared a "foreign agent." He didn’t write songs during the first year and a half of the war, and in the autumn of 2023 songs, he says, began to appear on their own. He released the mini-album Chem konchaetsya Rodina, his first solo album Goryachaya voyna and a covers album of anti-war songs by Russian musicians, Chuzhie. In the summer of 2025 he returned to the stage with an electric program and already then played at Zappa Barka.
Hits and news from Kyiv
The announcement promised “a chance to return, even if only for a couple of hours, to the old, pre-war, happy times.” Hits did indeed sound: “Prichina dlya nenavisti,” “Meshki s kostyami” from the album MaximumHappy, “Zheltaia zvezda.” “Welcome to the small world of Russian rock, friends. I hope you missed this most cheerful musical genre in the world,” Spirin joked.
But the war still rose onto the stage that evening. Spirin said he wrote one song at the turn of 2014 and 2015, after events in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and two minutes before going on stage the musicians read the news that all of Kyiv had been blacked out. By the merch table there was a notice with a QR code collecting donations for generators for civilians in Ukraine. According to Spirin, such an action will take place at every concert on the tour, and 10% of merch proceeds — that evening and at the next fourteen concerts — will go there. “We are having fun here tonight, but at the same time we remember that Russia is waging a bloody and dishonorable war against Ukraine,” he said at the end of the main set.
For the encore they played “...And Nothing but the Truth” from the band’s latest album 15. Spirin recalled that he wrote it under the impression of the verdicts in the cases of Set and New Greatness, and the video was filmed at protests in January 2021 when Navalny was detained after returning from Germany.
The evening opened with a Russian-language band that a year ago played a joint song with Spirin on the same stage and dreamed of returning now with their own program. Toward the end Spirin also remembered the local Russian-speaking scene: “These guys live among you.” The concert had already reached its third hour, and the next day, he said, the same songs awaited friends in Moldova. He said goodbye to Belgrade again — “for a year, a year and a half, two, maybe a few months, who knows.”
