A look at the vibrant punk scene that exploded in Yugoslavia during Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s final years.

In 1981, Demob, a young multiracial punk rock band from a stagnating provincial English city, recorded 'No Room For You,' a song that sold a few thousand copies before fading into history. The bass player was eighteen-year-old Barry Phillips, and in 2011, he received a Facebook message letting him know that the song was famous throughout the Balkans and had been covered by notable Yugoslavian punk bands. Hoping to understand how Demob’s song had taken root in the communist-era Balkans, Phillips traveled to the former Yugoslavia to learn about the punk scene that emerged in the waning years of Josip Broz Tito’s rule. From Ljubljana to Rijeka to Novi Sad, Yugoslavia boasted one of the most dynamic punk rock and new wave scenes in the world. Rooted not only in western punk rock but also local Balkan folk music, its regional varieties each had a discernible DNA fused with Slavonian Tamburitza, Bosnian Sevdah, or the Dalmatian a cappella, Klapa.

In Search of Tito’s Punks includes interviews with Pankrti (Bastards), Darko Rundek, KUD Idijoti (Cultural Idiots), KBO!, Atheist Rap, and other heroes of Yugoslavian punk and post-punk music, as well as cultural commentators, journalists, filmmakers, authors, and punks. Phillips learns of border “walls” and Brutalism, discovers the world’s first fascist micro-state, sees the legacy of the NATO bombings and the impact of “turbo-capitalism,” and hears the recurrent echoes of genocides and the Holocaust. He also describes a gig where the entire village, including the mayor, came out to party with punks, and uncovers an unlikely relationship between Yugoslav music fans and an independent record shop in Wales.

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.