Pripyat Disco "Edison-2"

On April 25, 1986, the head of the disco, Alexander Demidov, went to the city department of culture of Pripyat. As was customary in Soviet times, he brought for the approval of party officials the playlist of the next youth party. The event was scheduled to take place on Sunday, April 27. But on the night from April 25 to 26, the reactor of the fourth unit of the Chernobyl NPP blew up. History was divided into "before" and "after". And the hall of the Palace of Culture Energetik, where one of the best dance floors in the Ukrainian SSR was located, was empty forever.

"On April 27, 1986 there was to be a theme night "Melodies of Peoples' Friendship", - says the founder and head of Pripyat disco "Edison-2".

Before the dancing, the secretary of the Chernobyl NPP party committee was supposed to speak. But he didn't make it.

One of the songs to be played that April night was the East Berlin band Berluc's hit "No bomb" with the lyrics "No Bomb, no radioactivity!". Realist publishes a list of hits from the failed disco, as well as Alexander Demidov's recollections of nightlife in the city of power engineers.

The City

Life in Pripyat flowed in a special way. It was one of the best towns with special welfare: goods, food, cigarettes, which you cannot find in big cities.

In the '80s there were a few discos in the town's schools. Ours was the center one. In winter it was held every week in the Palace of Culture Energetik. In summer, it was held in the open air.

Tickets cost 1 ruble 20 kopecks, while admission to "ordinary" discos cost 50 kopecks. Our event was quite complicated: the program changed every week, three big screens and six slide projectors were used, posters with artists and their albums were shown. The pictures were of girls, nature, urban sketches, abstracts.

Repertoire

The repertoire of the disco largely depended on the willingness to take risks. Officially, music by Soviet composers was supposed to play on the dance floor - about 70%. The rest was music from socialist countries. It was basically unreal to dance to it all. Therefore, we had to cheat. Before each disco, every week, you went with a list of songs to the culture department. There it was reviewed, signed, i.e. lithographed.

The list also included songs that were not played at the disco afterwards. Party officials had little understanding of music, what mattered was the paper. That is why we often played AC/DC, Scorpions, Deep Purple or the forbidden band Pink Floyd, who had opposed the war in Afghanistan (1983, "The Final Cut" album, the anti-war song "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert". - R°).

Fartsovka

Western records in the '80s were spreading in the USSR quite quickly. There was a lot of work with "fartsovka". If some music was released abroad, say, at the beginning of the year, in Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad it was already appearing in spring. We searched for music for the disco on our own. The Palace of Culture Energetik was only responsible for selling tickets, opening the hall, and then closing it. So our phono library was kept, as everywhere else, on enthusiasm.

Someone recorded music from Promin [Ray] Radio or Voice of America, someone from TV. There were people in the country who recorded in movie theaters when they showed something like "The Taming of the Scoundrel" with Celentano. We used to go to concerts in Kiev Palace "Ukraina". We had connections with the administrator, but it was forbidden to record music there. But we secretly took pictures and then exchanged slides with guys from other discos.

Lights

Every Soviet disco solved the question of light music as best it could. Almost everything was 100% homemade. In the beginning it was hand-painted bulbs. The light music equipment gave different combinations, "a running wave," for example. Somehow we got the lamps from railroad semaphores or lamps from poultry farms. The light was powerful.

Dancing

We had our own dance group. The girls performed "aerobics. Tight suits, leg warmers, headbands - it was very popular then. People looked at the dancers and repeated the movements. Everything looked simple enough, the main thing was synchronicity.

Dancing at Soviet discos is a reproduction of what you could see on TV, in the cinema. Foreigners often came to Pripyat for scientific conferences. When they came to our dance floor, you could peep some fashionable moves.

Kilowatts

We brought enough decent money to the palace of culture, so there were no problems with musical equipment, in principle. For such large discos the equipment was bought officially. Our hall is big, so we had 2-3 kilowatts of power in total. Some bought the equipment with their own money. For example, our Pripyat VIA "Pulsar" bought something on which some big bands and rock clubs played.

Breakers

Officially the disco started at 20:00. In the summertime no one came until it got dark, so we usually started closer to 21:00. The disco ended at 23:00. Mostly people were from 14 till 30 years old. Pripyat was a city of young people. The vigilantes and police were on duty every time, because many progressive youths gathered at one point. In winter, up to 500 people (every hundredth resident of Pripyat. - R°) gathered in the hall of the "Energetik".

In case of a fight, we would stop the music and call the police. I remember the time when the first "breakers" started to appear. People in uniform would come up and ask us to turn off the music. They thought it was drunk people who were partying hard and wiping the floor with themselves. We had to explain: it was a break, a dance of progressive youth in socialist countries.

Salary

I was paid 120 rubles - the standard salary of a cultural worker. I had to do side jobs - weddings, youth nights at schools... There were opportunities to earn money. The money was spent on records, lights, and film for slides.

We weren't DJs by modern standards, of course. Even though we called ourselves disc jockeys, we were essentially doing the MC's job. You're the person with the microphone. You lead the program, talk between songs, hold contests, wind up the audience, fill in the pauses while they change the reel, for example.

Themed parties

We were one of the first in Ukraine in the mid-80s to organize the so-called "theme discos". Well, for instance, "We Fly Aeroflot". Everything was designed in such a way that the songs were specially selected, and the program was like a virtual trip.

I talked about the bands whose music was played. Now it's hard to imagine where we got this information in the first place. In the 1980s it was easier: the newspaper MK started publishing information about foreign performers; even in the wonderful magazine Krugozor [The Outlook], in the middle of reports from Siberia or Kamchatka, there was music news from the socialist countries.

Regalia

"Edison 2" twice took second place in the All-Union competition of trade union discos. In the All-Ukrainian competition of the Disco Review Committee in '84 we took third place. We are the only disco that worked after the Chernobyl accident in the thirty-kilometer zone.

In 1986, on May 9, two weeks after the tragedy, we played in Polesskoye. The Pripyat residents were partially evicted to this town, where the cleanup workers lived and worked. Then there was the pioneer camp "Skazochnyy" [Fairy-tale], where the nuclear workers lived, and the village of Dityatki.

Dorn

I led discos until 2002, until I got bored. Now there are few modern artists that I like. I listen to Okean Elzy, DDT, Mashina Vremeni, Deep Purple, mostly music from the 70s and 80s. I listened to Dorn at one time - he worked at our TV station in Slavutich in the youth editorial office. But now his music has become a kind of club music.

2017 Author: Yevgeniy Rudenko Photos: personal archive of Alexander Demidov and Alexander Sirota Source + other photos: https://realist.online/pub/tilda/pripyat-zazhigala-ogni-kakimi-byli-diskoteki-v-pripyati-pered-avariej/page794588.html

The playlist for the disco
scheduled for April 27, 1986

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