Balkan Express hit the 150 episodes mark last week and around this time we’re also celebrating our fourth birthday. We say around this time, because like all good cults and legends the exact date of spawning is shrouded in a bit of a mystery. But celebrate we will, specifically, by taking a look at the one and only Momčilo Bajagić – Bajaga.

In all honesty, Bajaga was once featured in Balkan Express, many moons ago. But that was in the before time, when texts of this here show were improvised and sparse. Today, we will do it right. Not in the least because it will soon be half a century since Bajaga hit the stages, even though he started out with other bands first.

After a brief initial period of going through bands like Donald Trump goes though lawyers, Bajaga joined Riblja Čorba, a Serbian hard-rock band with it’s controversial frontman Bora Đorđević and stayed with the band for six years and as many albums. It was during his time with Riblja Čorba that Bajaga started writing his own material which led to Momčilo quitting Riblja Čorba in 1984 and going all-in on his new band, Bajaga i Instruktori.

Bajaga i Instrukturi / Bajaga and the Instructors came about just as the Yugoslav rock scene was peaking. Quickly, they established themselves as cornerstones of Serbian rock music and became popular in the rest of the country, and internationally as well. One of the more memorable scenes was their concert in Moscow in 1986 in Gorky Park.

Back then, even the afternoon soundcheck was attended by more than 100,000 people, as Bajaga’s technicians played tracks by Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd, which was common in the relatively liberal socialist Yugoslavia of the 1980, but virtually unheard of in Soviet Russia. The concert itself, however, proved to much for the authorities and was broken up by riot police.

Bajaga’s cultural influence cannot be overstated. Although he was born in Croatian town of Bjelovar, he is considered a Belgrade native and came to define the city through his lyrics and his voice. He was also notable for taking part in anti-Milošević demonstrations and concerts in 2000, which led to the toppling of the Butcher of Balkans and his extradiction to the Hague tribunal. Most of all, his song and albums make regular appearances on every best of list of Yugoslav rock, ever.

To date, Bajaga and Instruktori released nine studio albums, with the latest one released in 2020. Granted, the lineup had changed quite a bit over the years and the band really looked as if it was going the way of the dodo in 1990s. But Bajaga always managed to cobble it back together, reinstate and reinvent its sound to give it another lease of life.

In addition to leading Instruktori, Bajaga also does solo projects, produces albums for other artists and writes film music. Which also gave us one of his most political hits, used for just about every regime change in the Balkans, ever since the soundtrack to the film Profesionalac / The Professional was released.

And that’s all the time we have for today. Check out Bajaga on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your music from and Balkan Express will be back next week.

—

Balkan Express brings you the latest and/or the greatest in music from the Balkans. On air every Tuesday at 11am on Ara City Radio, it is hosted by Aljaž aka @pengovsky who once did the world a solid and vowed never to sing again in public. Which is how he ended up doing radio.