Date: Friday, 7 Feb 2025
Venue: Kranjska Gora, main square
Performers: some kid with an acoustic guitar, Plavi orkestar in their original lineup
“Still need a bit more practice”
During a short break in Kranjska Gora I was checking what interesting things were happening, and a concert by a mysterious band on the main square had been announced for Friday. One of the guys with us handles sound for events across Slovenia and abroad — he made a few calls, and that’s how we found out that Plavi orkestar were doing their so-called production rehearsals ahead of their mega reunion tour right there in Kranjska Gora. Apparently at the mayor’s request, they were repaying the hospitality with an unannounced gig. So off we went.
Like it or not, Plavi orkestar was a significant part of our youth, and to this day no self-respecting party ends without everyone bellowing the evergreen Bolje biti pijan nego star out of tune — even though, sadly, the crowd is by now both drunk and old. The return of original guitarist Mladen Pavičić – Pava had raised my interest a notch, because Pava was, at least in my view, a sort of Andy Taylor (the original guitarist of Duran Duran) of Plavi orkestar — a rocker who ended up in, and helped shape, an ultra-popular pop band, more or less by force of circumstance. As a result I was hoping they’d play only tracks from the first four albums (or better yet, the first two cult ones) on which Pava had played.
After a kid on acoustic guitar growled his way through a couple of hits, the band members pushed through a reasonably large crowd with Loša leading the charge. They kicked things off straight away with Kad ti ljubav ime prozove, which is apparently (according to Loša) the most-played Plavi orkestar track in Slovenia. Well, you learn something new every day (or evening). That song also evaporated the hope I’d mentioned in the previous paragraph. As you can see from the setlist below, Pava has quite a few tracks to learn that come from the period after he left. The band felt slightly unconvincing — there was a lot of mic-in-the-crowd action, probably because Loša was saving himself for the first proper concert of the aforementioned tour, on Valentine’s Day in Zagreb. Pava ripped through the distortion a few times with a grin and warmed my old heart a little. Given that he was standing on a stage for the first time in 35 years, he did a pretty decent job — but he (and everyone in the band) still has some practising to do before they can wow the crowd on the tour. Even so, the mileage of the Ćeremida twins in the rhythm section showed, as did the well-preserved boyish voice of frontman Saša Lošić – Loša. It helped enormously, of course, that the crowd knew every hit by heart and happily grabbed onto the slightly tired sing-along cues. A somewhat unfortunate version of Dneva ljubezni snuck in along the way, but I have to admit that bouncing around to choppy Balkan rhythms with familiar melodies ringing in your ears is a pretty decent way to spend a bitterly cold evening outdoors. Definitely the highlight of this half-concert was the accidentally immortalised Suada — a song that Pava and Loša apparently wrote on the spot at the demand of an angry, folk-song-hungry audience at one of their very first gigs, where they’d mostly been playing covers of old punk classics.
Digestible — and duly digested.
Songs played (not in the correct order):
Kad ti ljubav ime prozove
Ako su to samo bile laži
Od rođendana do rođendana
Odlazim
Suada
Ljubezni dan
Kaja
Zelene su bile oči te
Sava tiho teče
Text: Igorac
Photos: Mateja and Igorac
