AVIA's most recent line-up with feminised brass.
The Indie Club -- one of the first music clubs to open in the city -- is gearing up for its anniversary night.
The event at the club, which reopens on September 1, is billed "Indie Club's Anniversary Night." It's a strange billing when you consider that the club was in fact launched an uneven three-and a-half years ago, in early 1992.
Launched eight months after the TaMtAm by Nikolai Gusev, singer and keyboard player with local band AVIA and rock promoter Peter Sytenkov, the Indie has become the second venue in the city where you can listen to live rock music on a regular basis.
Inevitably the two clubs were constantly compared. Sytenkov now says that while TaMtAm was oriented toward more experimental and radical sounds, the Indie centered on more "optimistic" music. However, like its name suggests, the club's style runs from the mainstream.
He also insists that since the Indie used to hold concerts less frequently than the TaMtAm, it could pay more attention to quality and professionalism when choosing acts.
In their desire to entertain, the club's organizers have somewhat neglected the need to communicate with the audience. It was impossible to talk in the club while music was booming in the foyer and the DJ was calling people to dance.
Still, many people are nostalgic about the venue, which is another reason for re-starting the Indie.
With mostly rock and indie pop bands on the bill, the managers showed some broadmindedness, inviting experimental and avant-garde artists such as Saimkho and Dror Fehler.
When the local experimental music festival "Open Music" met financial problems in 1994, the Indie Club offered its premises for the event, and kept the festival afloat for another year, albeit on a smaller scale than before.
Throughout its existence the Indie Club played host to a number of acts, including Britain's Nitzer Ebb, Holy Joy and The Work, and America's MDC. The club also brought bands from all parts of the former Soviet Union -- from Kaliningrad's reggae band Komitet Okhrany Tepla to Magadan's art rock groups Missiya, (Mission) Antitsiklon (Anticyclone) and Vostochny Sindrom (Eastern Syndrome).
The Indie Club was closed in the summer of 1994. Sytenkov considers the club performed, first and foremost, an educational function -- organizing concerts for bands which the management deemed good enough. "In the beginning there was no other club apart from the TaMtAm and us. Now there are lots of clubs in the city, so our educational mission has ended," he said.
Now the club is restarting its activities at the same place --the old constructivist building called the Lenin Palace of Culture -- which was the first Soviet "palace of culture" built in the city. Recently the building was renamed the Troitsky Culture Center.
Managing a rock club in St Petersburg is not big business -- most clubs can't even afford to pay their performers. Sytenkov, who has organized the popular and profitable Studebaker Parties at various venues around the city over the past 12 months, says that the Indie Club is "something for my soul."