In Search of Tito’s Punks

The book traces the story of how a song recorded in 1981 by a young punk rock band from a cultural backwater on the English-Welsh border, and released on a tiny independent record label, became famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito. Why was it 30 years before the members of the band found out? How did this ‘socialist’ country have one of the most vibrant punk scenes in the world?

Gloucester, England, 1981; multi-racial, teenage street-punk band, Demob, recorded and released what would become their best known and most enduring song, No Room For You. A rasping vocal told the story of the 1979 closure of a short-lived, punk rock venue at a disused motel on the edge of the provincial city. Depending on your mind-set, the lyrics were either a howl of rage at the injustice, a wail at the loss, or a love-song to an era.

More than three decades later, the author – and Demob’s bass player in 1981 – set out to follow the song across a country that no longer exists. On the road he heard the life stories of the heroes of Yugoslavian punk and the punks themselves; from the Tito era, through the disintegration and wars, forced displacements and permanent exiles, to today’s turbulent ‘reconstruction’. Who were ’Tito’s punks’ and who are they now?

An unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present, seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue, part history, the book is both, and neither, of those things. Rather, it is a mural and soundtrack of a journey through a time and place which no longer exists.

The latest addition to the Global Punk series from Intellect.