Aquarium (band)

• 1. Introduction

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  Aquarium, the Russian rock group formed in Leningrad in 1972, began not in a rehearsal studio or a record label's offices, but in a small country venue where two university friends played their first tentative set in March 1973. At that concert, they may have earned 50 rubles in cash, or perhaps nothing at all depending on which version of the story you believe. The band's very name carries the same ambiguity. Boris Grebenshchikov, the founding singer who remains the only original member still standing, has offered several different explanations over the years: a Budapest street pub called The Aquarium, a word-association session, or maybe a glass building that looked like a tank. What is certain is that the name stuck, and Aquarium went on to become one of the founders of Russian rock. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a band that was banned, publicly disgraced, and shut out of official Soviet culture for over a decade eventually sell more than a million copies of a single album? And what does it mean when the band that started as two friends in Leningrad ends up performing at the Royal Albert Hall in London?

• 2. Two Friends in Leningrad

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  Boris Grebenshchikov was studying applied mathematics at Leningrad State University when he and Anatoly Gunitsky, a playwright and absurdist poet, founded Aquarium in 1972. The original lineup also included Alexander Tsatsanidi on bass, Vadim Vasilyev on keyboards, and Valery Obogrelov handling sound. In late 1973, guitarist Edmund Shkliarsky joined briefly before going on to lead Piknik. The same year, bass player Michael Feinstein-Vasiliev, the first professional musician the band had ever included, came aboard. The following year brought keyboardist Andrew Romanov, who went by the nickname Dyusha. Romanov was so inspired by rock flautists Richard Meier and Ian Anderson that he retrained as a flautist entirely. Alongside these musical developments, the band threw themselves into amateur theatre in 1974, performing absurdist pieces on the steps of the Engineers' Castle. When the group came under professional direction, Grebenshchikov grew disillusioned with blending rock, poetry, and theatre. He steered Aquarium back toward pure music, though the complete break from theatre did not come until 1977. George left the band around this time, and the following year cellist Vsevolod Gakkel joined.

• 3. The Soviet Underground

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  Rock and roll was strictly regulated in the Soviet Union throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Only a handful of artists managed to gain approval and a contract with Melodiya, the government record label. Aquarium spent years competing fiercely for that recognition without success. Their solution was the apartment concert, or kvartirnik. These intimate gatherings took place in private flats, usually performed acoustically because a loud electric set risked the neighbors calling the Militsiya. The compressed space forced an unlikely closeness between the band and their audience; listeners sat quietly, sometimes recording the performance on a simple tape recorder. This underground circuit was unique to Soviet culture and drew comparisons to the Russian bard tradition. The band's early recorded output came from similarly improvised means. While on holiday in January and February of 1974, Grebenshchikov and George recorded Aquarium's debut album, The Temptation of St. Aquarium, on home equipment, with unpredictable sound quality. The album was thought lost for decades before turning up in 1997 and finally receiving a CD release in 2001, included in a book titled Prehistoric Aquarium. The masters themselves are gone. A second album, Parables of Count Diffusor, followed in the spring of 1975. The third, from 1976, took its title from a line in an Arseny Tarkovsky poem.

• 4. Scandal at Tbilisi

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  On the 25th of February 1976, Aquarium gave their first concert of what became a regular live schedule, with Grebenshchikov, Gakkel, and Dyusha Romanov performing together. Just weeks later on the 10th of March, they appeared as a surprise guest act at the Tallinn Festival of Popular Music, playing four acoustic songs and winning the prize for the most interesting and varied program. But the moment that genuinely thrust the band into the consciousness of the Soviet rock world came in 1980, at the Tbilisi Rock Festival. Grebenshchikov lay down on the stage during the set and made provocative movements while playing the guitar. The entire jury walked out in protest. Aquarium was accused of promoting homosexuality and indecency; Grebenshchikov was additionally accused of implying incest through a changed lyric in the song Marina, though the source suggests this may have been an accident of technique rather than intent. The festival banned them. Back in Leningrad, Grebenshchikov lost his job and was expelled from the Komsomol, the Young Communist's League that working Russians were expected to join. None of that translated into prizes, but the Tbilisi performance turned Aquarium into a symbol of Soviet alternative culture. The band continued recording, most often at live concerts or in a self-assembled underground studio the members disguised as a Young Technicians Club, until 1987.

• 5. Glasnost and the Mainstream

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  Glasnost, the policy of openness that reshaped Soviet public life in the second half of the 1980s, opened the door for underground rock acts that had been shut out for years. Aquarium stepped through it. They were allowed into large concert halls, appeared on state television, and contributed soundtracks to several films, most notably Assa in 1987. That same year they recorded their first album for Melodiya, the label they had spent over a decade trying to reach. Official distribution made all the difference: the album sold well over a million copies within a few months. A notable exception to the band's standard recording method had already appeared in 1983, when Radio Africa was secretly made using a government-owned mobile studio after someone bribed a technician to allow access. After the mainstream breakthrough, Grebenshchikov recorded in English and toured with different backing lineups. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he released music in 1992 under the name The BG-Band, with an album called The Russian Album consisting of melancholic folk songs influenced by his travels across Russia.

• 6. Beyond the Soviet Stage

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  Dyusha Romanov's outside work offers a window into how far the Aquarium orbit extended even in difficult years. In 1991, Romanov appeared on screen as narrator in Leningrad Television's Khraniteli, a two-part adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. He also composed the film score, which Aquarium performed. After Grebenshchikov returned to calling his touring project Aquarium in the early 1990s, the band ranged well beyond Russia. Tours reached Eastern Europe and communities of Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany, Israel, and the United States. In 1996, Aquarium and DDT co-headlined the VladiROCKstok festival in Vladivostok, where Grebenshchikov famously invited thousands of fans out of the grandstands and down to the stage. By 2007, the band performed for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In 2008 the Aquarium International project brought together more than 20 musicians from around the world. The same year, their album Loshad' Belaya, or White Horse, was released as a free download in mp3 format, with listeners invited to pay whatever they chose, echoing Radiohead's approach to In Rainbows a year earlier. By 2017, the band's lineup included Boris Grebenshchikov, Andrey Surotdinov on violin, Alexey Zubarev on guitars, Alexander Titov on bass, Liam Bradley on drums, and Brian Finnegan on flute.

• 7. Sound and Influence

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  Aquarium drew on a wide range of Western rock. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, T. Rex, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and Roxy Music all fed into the band's musical vocabulary, alongside new wave and reggae. This breadth showed up in complex compositions and lyric themes that stretched from Celtic references to Indian cultural imagery. Former members shaped the band's sound distinctly: Dyusha Romanov's flute gave the band an unusual texture for Soviet rock, and cellist Vsevolod Gakkel introduced orchestral weight. Sergey Kuryokhin, also listed among former members, was one of the most inventive musicians in the Soviet underground. Critics have noted that heavy lineup turnover across the decades made later Aquarium incarnations resemble a Grebenshchikov solo project more than a band. Yet regular radio play of old and new material, and albums that continued to sell, kept the band's profile alive in Russia long after the Leningrad apartment concerts had become history. A 2020 remix album paired Aquarium recordings with Lee "Scratch" Perry, a collaboration that placed the band's catalog in dialogue with Jamaican dub, one of the styles that had quietly shaped them decades before.