St Petersburg band The Strange Games are tipped to
take part in the Indie Club's reopening night this Friday.
Last week the city celebrated the 50th birthday of Russia's best-known Beatle fan Kolya Vasin.
Most of the local newspapers devoted articles and interviews to the celebrity.
Vasin is quite a unique figure: he doesn't play, doesn't sing, and he's only famous for the fact that he passionately loves the Beatles.
Several years ago he wrote a book about rock music in Russia, but no publisher wanted to print it. But what made him so famous was his unbelievable consistency in his love for the Fab Four, who, he claims, he has listened to every day since first hearing them in 1964.
He also organizes Beatle birthday concerts (four times a year, as you might guess) and collects funds for his John Lennon Rock and Roll Temple, which he envisages as a huge building in the shape of a guitar. Expect his next extravaganza on October 9, John Lennon's birthday.
By the end of the summer the city's music life -- which started to stagnate in the hot months -- was much enlivened by the appearance of new venues and the re-appearance of some old ones, which had once declared that they were closing for good.
Along with the Indie Club, which will reopen on Friday and plans to open its doors once a month, some other venues have lately joined this list.
The promising Polygon Club has reopened after its one-year sporadic history of existing in strange places -- from a military base at Sertolovo, near St Petersburg to the Academy of Humanitarian Sciences at Kupchino, whose rector once was a DJ and a pop TV program presenter but now proudly calls himself an academician.
The Polygon's new location is at the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) House of Culture, on Vasilevsky Island, which once used to be a hang-out for St Petersburg's intellectuals, because it provided an opportunity to see Western art films, which one could not see anywhere else in the city.
The Polygon Club offer diverse acts -- from indie pop to thrash metal -- and will open two days a week starting from September 8.
The notoriously pompous -- bit Las Vegas-like -- Rock Around the Clock Club, also known as the Saturn Show Club, has thankfully been renamed the Rock Clock Club. And more important, it's started holding much more live rock concerts, keeping the entrance fee reasonably low -- at 10,000 roubles ($2) per person.
The venue is going to celebrate Madonna's birthday on Friday with performances by local female acts.
The Ispolkom (former Moskovsky Club) will offer a rare chance to see Kolibri (Hummingbirds), the popular, local all-women vocal quartet. This is a rare treat for St Peterburg since they prefer to perform at more lucrative Moscow nightclubs. Kolibri will be supported by the indie pop band Pep-see and the club's hosts -- new band Monkey Funky, which consists of most of the members of the defunct Latin pop group Voices of Youth and who claim that monkey funk is exactly what they'll be playing.
The Gora will also re-open on Saturday, after being closed for a short period, with a gig by the infamous Automatic Satisfiers led by the so-called father of Russian punk Andrei "The Pig" Panov. Some great moments of drunken chaos both on stage and in public are guaranteed.
For the addresses see "Rock & Jazz Venues".