30.04.10:  Mumiy Troll's Ukrainian tours.

This week, the Ukrainian Verkhovnaya Rada (the Parliament), with fights, smog grenades and egg-throwing, have confirmed the treaty which seemed unreal just 6 moths ago – about Russian Black Sea Fleet stay in Ukraine (Crimea) for another 25 years. At the same time, the Russian Mumiy Troll band was rolling through Kharkov, Lugansk, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa and Kiev playing concerts. The concert program has a part specially devoted to the new song, named Smog: “Smog or smoke / Something un-homely breathes / North Sea or Crimea / What is that step / That'll make alien to us everything?'

The Smog song and its video clip of a Navy theme entered the new Mumiy Troll's album, Redkie Zemli (Rare Lands), and had almost predicted the events in Ukrainian Rada, long before they actually took place.

Before the concert in the Hall of Sports of Kiev, Ilya Lagutenko said: “In the song, I indeed tried to express my view on the military sailors' destiny. In particular, I though how sometimes the Fate separates a crew that once was a single whole. I myself served in the Russian Pacific Fleet, and our small unit indeed was and stayed a family-crew – Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians… It's very difficult for me to understand some things that are happening nowadays. Smog in the song and smoke in Ukrainian Rada are, surely, a coincidence. I didn't expect such a prophecy from myself.'

Who knows what other Ilya Lagutenko's music “prophecies' are going to come true?љ

However, the events in Odessa went in a way Ilya couldn't forecast. “The city of blooming acacias by the Black Sea' met the band in an un-homely way: right from the make-up room, the band director's laptop and technical administrator's passport were stolen.

“The laptop had the drafts of our new songs, so if it is not returned, we'll have to compose them once again, because we don't remember the lyrics and the notes,' – thus Ilya Lagutenko was asking from the stage to return the stolen things.

The investigation is now ran by the employees of Odessa's Shevchenkovskoe police department, and the band, having thus paid the original “Odessa's custom duties', continued the tour. However, E. Subbotin, the band's technician, had to visit the Consulate of Russia to receive a certificate confirming his identity – he couldn't resume the trip without it.

Translated by MAXiS