5. APRIL '81

The second live album of BIJELO DUGME was recorded at the end of the tour promoting the last album "Dozivjeti stotu". It all happened on 5th April 1981 in the Kulusić Club, Zagreb, hence the title of the record. The poor result was again tried to be covered up by marketing tricks. The old associate, graphic designer Dragan S. Stefanović came up with 3 photos of a little girl set against the white background, depicting her trying to wear an adult woman's robe. One of them displayed the child nudity and that particular one is missing on later CD reissues, like 2004 City Records remaster edition. It's interesting to see how certain things are taken or understood differently in different periods of time. During the release in socialist Yugoslav society the child nudity was barely mentioned in the media and no one simply paid much attention to it! But now, in the so- called democratic countries of the former Yugoslav Federation, the notion of child abuse and paedophilia, thanks to the globalisation of human evil nature, is ever-present so I guess that was the reason for deleting the photo. Another marketing trick by Bregović was the alleged limited edition of "only 20 000" copies, with each individual copy having a "running number". For a megaseller rock band like DUGME this may have indeed been a rather limited circulation, but subsequently many reissues have crossed that limit anyway.

What lied behind these marketing nonsense was a rather poor collection of badly performed and technically sub-standard songs. Old rock songs are re-arranged in the Ska manner, synthesisers are awful, Bebek vocal sounds like he had not sleep for days, and the whole musical performance suffers from almost amateurish mistakes. Only "Ne dese se takve stvari..." with its re-arranged strong Bo Diddley-like rhythm and the cover of INDEXI's old hit "Sve ove godine" in Ska tempo are worthy mentioning.

This album proves that DUGME had considerable problems in recording a decent live record during their career, since the previous "Koncert kod Hajdučke česme" was also a letdown. It seems that "5th April '81" has only one redeeming quality - its documentary value - so I am not giving the worst rating. I save them for the things to come...

PERSONAL RATING: 1,5/5

P.A. RATING: 2/5