Location: Orto bar / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Interview date: 26.11.2008
Despite the serious rock mileage they’ve already got behind them, Zagreb-based Vatra are still a young, modern rock band who released their fifth studio album “Sputnik” in mid-November this year (RockLine review of the album HERE). It came out on the Dallas label. That opened the door for a promo show in Ljubljana, organized under the wing of Dallas, and it was the very first live promotion for Vatra and the new album overall. So before the show, I sat down at the bar of Ljubljana’s Orto bar with Ivan Dečak, guitarist and vocalist, the real driving force, the number-one visionary and the leader of Vatra.
RockLine: How does it feel to be here in Slovenia tonight for the promo gig for the new album “Sputnik”?
Ivan: We’ll see how things unfold, how many people show up. Our album only just came out in Croatia, about 10 days ago. Tonight’s gig is actually our first one since the album release. The promo run in Croatia only kicks off on Saturday, 29.11.2008, with two gigs. First up is Rijeka, then Zagreb. And before both of those, we’re already presenting the album in Slovenia. I think that’s awesome.
RockLine: Do you feel the vibe here in Slovenia any differently, right now before the show, from what you’re used to back home in Croatia?
Ivan: It’s actually hard to say before a show. I hope people here watch MTV Adria too, because they’re giving us quite a lot of airplay right now. I also believe those border barriers between Slovenia and Croatia, the ones that were forced on us and that nobody ever asked us about, they just cooked them up themselves, are falling away. Now, with some important media showing up, like the MTV Adria I mentioned, those barriers are getting bridged successfully. I believe, or at least I hope, that our music has reached people here in Slovenia too and that they’ve gotten what we’re about.
RockLine: And the tradition of working with Dallas continues with the new record.
Ivan: That’s right. We put out our first record in 1999 on the Jabuka label, and I was seventeen at the time. Back then that label was putting out albums by Majke, Pipsi (Pips Chips & Videoclips, author’s note), Rundek, and they took us under their wing too. We were considered the youngest rock band in Croatia back then. They organized big events to promote music, like “Fiju – briju” and “Zagreb gori”. Those were the shows where we first introduced ourselves. Jabuka went under, people moved on to other things, and in 2002 we switched labels. At that point Dallas was the strongest label in Croatia, and that’s where we signed. So “Sputnik” is our fourth record in a row on Dallas.
RockLine: What’s new with Vatra on the new record “Sputnik”?
Ivan: Up to now we worked with the producer Denyken on all our records. He’s a strong, respected Croatian producer, and if I’m not mistaken he’s worked with some Slovenian bands too. We did a lot of recording here in Ljubljana’s Tivoli, in Aco Razbornik’s studio, since he and Denyken are good buddies, and so we mastered the latest album “Sputnik” with Aco Razbornik too, because I personally think Aco is the best there is for mastering. This is a guy who’s had a whole lot of rock n’ roll pass through his hands and he knows what he’s doing. Another new thing about this record is that we recorded it analog. So we steered clear of computers and digital tech across the board. We tried our hardest to get all that energy we have on stage onto the studio tape as faithfully as we could. No after-the-fact polishing of the sound. For the new record we also picked new producers. That’s Jura (Ferina, author’s note) and Pavle (Miholjević, author’s note.). This duo, known from the band Svatbas,… I don’t know, have you ever heard of Svatbas?
RockLine: No.
Ivan: They’re one of the art rock bands from Croatia. Anyway, these two are breaking through more and more as producers. Before this they handled production on records for Pipsi (Pips Chips & Videoclips, author’s note), and now they took on our new record. You can feel a determined step forward in our new sound, and we got the energy that normally explodes when we play live onto the studio recordings really effectively.
RockLine: A more live, raw-sounding package?
Ivan: Basically a kind of common denominator of how we show up on stages, whether that’s club gigs, bikers’ festivals, “bajkerijade”, various town squares… They carried that live sound of ours from the stage into the studio really well. What’s interesting about this record is the energy shock our new sound delivers.
RockLine: Tell me. Have you already lined up any deals right here at the start of the promo run for a wider tour, outside Croatia too?
Ivan: We always go back to the area of the former Yugoslavia. It’s that language zone where, even if we sometimes don’t fully understand each other when people talk in the different languages from the region, the fact remains that none of them sound harsh, too foreign or distant to us. That’s enough for people to come to the shows, where they can “đuskati”, dance. I mean, people come for a party and they’re not bothered by the “Č’s,” the “Ž’s,” the “Š’s”… When some Englishman hears something like that, he can only grab his head. Still, the English did invent rock n’ roll. Anyway, in the former Yugoslavia region a really huge number of people come to our gigs. This year we also played Exit festival. So we’ve gradually broken through in Serbia too. We’ve got a show in Belgrade coming up soon. We also play a whole lot in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while in Croatia we play non-stop. On top of that, Slovenia as a market is getting more and more interesting for us, a place where we’d love to bring our music. I think the crowd here listens to the modern rock that we soak up too. I’m thinking of that British rock represented by Muse, then Franz Ferdinand, Placebo, Arctic Monkeys. That’s music we really like too. So these are bands that weave elements of disco rhythms into rock n’ roll.
RockLine: From what I can see, Croatian rock bands are very highly regarded in Slovenia.
Ivan: If that’s so, it means a lot to us.
RockLine: I’m sure the Slovenian crowd won’t leave you hanging tonight.
Ivan: You know how it is with us in Croatia. Our rock scene is small and all the bands know each other well. Take Vatra, Let3, Hladno Pivo, Urban, Pipsi… we’re all connected somehow. The bands I just listed besides us have been around longer, both in terms of age and in the sense that they’ve been active on the rock scene a lot longer than Vatra. Whenever we talk with them, they say playing in Slovenia is great, so they’ve already broken through that wall and the crowd here has already embraced them. We at Vatra have also played here at Orto bar a few times already. Sadly, a gig like that can’t compare with promoting a band through MTV Adria airplay, or giving statements to the media and interviews, like the one the two of us are doing right now. So I hope that with this kind of promotion we’ll bring our music closer to people in Slovenia even more successfully.
RockLine: Hmmm. I lost my next question…
Ivan: Ha, ha, ha… No problem, take a swig of beer. It’ll definitely help you.
RockLine: Great idea, ha, ha, ha…
RockLine: You mentioned the Croatian scene earlier and named a few bands. How did you plug into that scene, how do rock bands in Croatia work together?
Ivan: In 1999, when the Vatra story begins, the “mainstream” scene in Croatia was leaning toward “dance” music, bands like Colonia and so on. Rock n’ roll wasn’t exactly doing great here at the time. Five years went by and something showed up on the scene, what we call the “novi – novi val”. So not the “new wave”, but the “new-new wave”. Basically these are bands that formed during the war and have now managed to carve out their profile. Besides Vatra, that’s Ramirez, Elemental, TBF, Edo Maajka. Okay, Edo Maajka managed it a bit earlier than the rest of us. So right now a new wave of bands has taken shape that the Croatian crowd is welcoming with open arms. And I think the conditions are ripe to spread that to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia too, where the crowd sometimes practically screams us off the stage with excitement. A lot of interesting bands from Bosnia come to us as well. All the bands are connected with each other. But I have to admit there still aren’t many bands from Slovenia coming to play gigs in Zagreb. I don’t know why that is, although I know a couple of Slovenian bands that I follow through MTV Adria and they sound really interesting to me.
RockLine: Was the start of Vatra’s career tough?
Ivan: Vatra’s roots come from the small town of Virovitica, which is somewhere halfway between Osijek and Zagreb, close to the Hungarian border. It’s a town of 20,000 people. That’s where our whole story began. The original one. We moved away from there, and we’ve now been based in Zagreb for about 10 years. But I have to thank those Virovitica roots, because we’ve held onto them, and they give us a special rebellious identity that’s still in our music to this day, and that makes us different from bands that come straight out of Zagreb. It’s interesting that all the biggest bands in Croatia come from the periphery and not from Zagreb. But then we’re forced to travel to Zagreb, because everything is centralized, like it probably is for you in Slovenia, where all the band promotion usually happens in Ljubljana. To get to the media, to make important connections, you just have to go to the center… That difference, which we developed in complete isolation within a big city, helped us a lot with getting recognized and, indirectly, with popularizing our music in Croatia.
RockLine: Is Dallas already thinking about releasing a Vatra live album or a live DVD in the near future?
Ivan: Talks are going on right now. Next year we’ll celebrate our first 10 years together. To mark that, we’ll organize a big concert in Zagreb, where we plan to record our show for a live album release. So a CD and DVD should come out at the same time to commemorate the anniversary. Along with those releases, we’d add some extra material we’ve never put out before.
RockLine: Lay out Vatra’s short-term goals too, what you’ll be tackling in the near future?
Ivan: After this promo show here in Ljubljana, there’s a gig on Saturday, 29.11.2008 in Rijeka, then on Monday, 01.12.2008, in Zagreb. That’s the day of the fight against AIDS, and it’ll be a massive concert spectacle with acts like Massimo Savić, Vatra, Pipsi and Ramirez. We’ve got plenty more confirmed shows through December, which is the month when everybody plays live a ton anyway. In January next year we lock ourselves away in our “hole” and rehearse like crazy, and in February a big tour follows, which we’ll kick off with a show at Zagreb’s Tvornica, followed by shows in Rijeka, Split and Osijek, and in March we hope to make it back to Ljubljana and maybe organize a short tour of Slovenia too.
RockLine: So the main focus will be promoting the new album “Sputnik”.
Ivan: Yes. Full throttle. And we also hope that Dallas, who are fully standing by us and supporting us, will keep up that kind of support right through to the end of this promo run.
RockLine: So what can we expect from Vatra tonight at Orto bar?
Ivan: Tonight we’ll play a kind of retrospective cross-section of our career.
RockLine: So you won’t be playing only material from the newest album?
Ivan: No. We’ve included our other songs in the set too, the ones that are among our better-known “single” releases. Those tracks have already been on radio and TV in the past, so I hope people here know them at least a little. From the new record we’ll play just two songs. Those are the first two singles, Eskim and John Travolta. Other than that, expect us to play a kind of “best of” Vatra in the 40 minutes we’ve got.
photos (Vatra concert, Orto bar, Ljubljana, 26.11.2008): Aleš Podbrežnik
You can read the full report from the promo concert by Vatra and Morso at Orto bar, on 26.11.2008, HERE.
Thanks also to the Dallas label crew for making the interview with Vatra possible .
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