1995–1997 – The Heyday of Titanik

Oleg Tsodikov:
«We had assembled a great team, made up of people with vast work experience and a wide circle of contacts. Some of the people were into the creative side, some into business. There were endless arguments, a constant search for the truth, but in the end we always managed to find common ground.
Initially the team consisted of me, Alexey Haas and Oleg Krivoshein, who handled the finances. A few months before the opening Haas stepped away from the business, and I brought in Lesha Gorobiy, a man with great experience who by then had done the third Gagarin and Penthouse. Gorobiy brought in Dima Fedorov. He wasn't doing parties on his own yet, but he was a most talented artist and a man with a good sense of humor. We, unfortunately, weren't blessed with that gift. We could do, and did, everything, but we still lacked that Fedorov self-irony.
If it hadn't been for Krivoshein, we would have made the club fairly underground. Beautiful, certainly, but still a bit clandestine. Oleg Krivoshein, however, had his own point of view. He insisted that a club playing electronic music could be geared toward commercial success. When Titanik was being built, we didn't even think about that. Thanks to Oleg, Titanik outgrew its underground stage and grew into a commercial project, opening the way for electronic music as a whole.
I was the official general director and producer. Fortunately, after a few months I stopped doing administrative work and dealt only with the creative side.
Fedorov was responsible for the printed matter and the visual solutions for the parties. Plus, he helped Gorobiy with Happy Mondays and generated simply brilliant ideas. For example, the club's slogan «Immersion in Motion» was his invention. Then he had that gorgeous idea for the party «Kill Versace», which came up six months before the designer's murder. We didn't mean anything of the sort. It was just that at the time that very label had become incredibly annoying – all the markets were flooded with fake clothing bearing that name.
Fedorov, the only one of us, understood the technology: how to print on plastic or how to make a knife that cut a circle out of paper. Back then each of the promoters would come up with something unusual, literally sparking with ideas. That's why the Titanik invitations and flyers looked quite unusual. For New Year's, I think it was 1996, we collectively came up with an invitation in the form of a transparent box with heart-shaped candies that, on top of everything, rattled inside the box. People walked around the club with them, rattling away. Or, before the amateur model contest «New Face of Summer», we needed to somehow convey the youth of those girls. And so I gathered young, still unopened buds on twigs in a park, attached them to white cardboard with a minimum of text, and laminated it. It came out unusual and very beautiful.
At the start of our work we did the events all together. Later each of us began running his own projects. The very idea of authored parties, where one person carried his idea from start to finish, was born at Titanik. It was a continuation of the Gagarin traditions, when one and the same person could fund a party out of his own pocket and haul the chairs himself. It was the same thing here. You had to both produce – that is, conceive and develop the idea, push it to market, seek sponsorship money for it, write scripts, direct, cast the performers, come up with the decor and the music.
Gorobiy did the youth events. His ideas, like Happy Mondays, were incredibly successful. I dealt with the more «grown-up» parties.
Practically all of today's club events are a repetition of Titanik. You can argue with that, but it's a fact.
The ideas for some events came as if from outer space. And you'd get even more excited from anticipating the public's reaction. And when that reaction happened, and the public raised their hands and shouted at exactly that moment, you got extraordinary pleasure from it.
It's impossible now to recall all those parties. After all, we did two events a week. That's five hundred parties a year. But something has still stuck in my memory.
There was, for example, the party «New Year in Reverse». In summer, exactly six months after the real New Year, we repeated New Year with the appropriate decorations and upside-down fir trees. Many people are trying to repeat this now.
There was the story «A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, or the Radishchev Party». Once I went to Petersburg to see my friends from the Planetarium, and it hooked me so much that I decided to do a cultural exchange like that. I gathered Muscovites – DJs, fashion designers, dancers, models – put them on a train and sent them off to Petersburg. And I sent the same kind of people from Petersburg to Moscow. And while the crowd was traveling, they raised hell, then spent two fun days in Petersburg. And in Moscow at that time there was such a frenzy at the Petersburgers' performance!
I remember that in about 1997 we brought Paco Rabanne to Moscow and showed his metallic museum collection. It was a very complex, labor-intensive, and quite expensive project. And a very successful one. Paco himself was very pleased, even though we managed to change the script of his show and the music. We made it better.
The budget for shows like that was no joke, but as a rule the sponsors covered everything. We came up with whole concepts for them, something advertising agencies get huge money for today. It seems we were the first club to start working seriously with sponsors. It was a cycle: we'd find them, they'd approach us on their own. In the first years there was simply a queue for us. Thanks to Titanik, Philip Morris even launched a new «party» brand, Marlboro Music, which then took on a life of its own and went out to the regions. But in the end it was shut down. Because at Philip Morris they told me it had come to be associated with Titanik rather than with Marlboro. There were also Finlandia, Evian. You can't remember them all, there were many.
We held various events aimed at different audiences – more upscale or more youth-oriented. Depending on that, the entry price varied. There was a cover charge, as everywhere in Moscow back then, and it was around 10 dollars for the regular events. The club held about a thousand people at once. Full houses were a regular occurrence. In the two years I worked there I never once saw an empty dance floor.
At Titanik, a fully commercial club, there was a face control system in place. Its task was simple – to let only beautiful, positive people into the club. Of course, it was impossible to realize this scheme a hundred percent in real life. Because it can always turn out that some unattractive person is somebody's friend or just a good guy. In general, the best face control is the owner of the club or the party organizer standing at the door himself. That's still the case today.
We had our own system. First, a large number of club cards were issued. Second, we handed out invitations and readily put people on guest lists. Sometimes this ended rather sadly: at some very costly events 75 percent of the public came in completely free. But that's Moscow. Here people often feel themselves part of the process and always have the option to call the owner or the promoter and get into the club for free.
I'll say it again – at Titanik there was always a fantastic mix of the most incredible public. The bohemia came to the club, businessmen came, beautiful girls and foreigners. And also the «bulls» (gangster types). It was an amazing situation when these people first found themselves in an environment akin to cosmonauts in training. Sixteen kilowatts of Turbosound hitting them in the gut, lasers blinding their eyes, and right there aquariums bubbling with colored water. The lights turning on and off. It was genuinely cool. You wanted to be there. Here you physically felt yourself elevated above reality.
These people were simply unfamiliar with such an environment, and they literally went into a trance. And they liked it. Little by little they adapted to this milieu and understood that a new wave had come, one capable of completely changing their lives.
So it turns out that Titanik made this club pastime, once underground, commercial. Thanks to this club a new generation of people formed, a generation of clubbers. It developed gradually and grew into the club life we know now. This music started being played on the radio. And the funniest thing is that the commercial success arose largely thanks to the underground. We tried to mix familiar forms, like a concert or a fashion show, with unconventional things the public didn't know about back then. I remember a show when, at the height of the most bourgeois event, I brought Petlyura with Pani Bronya out onto the stage. And the people in gold chains were surprised to exactly the degree I'd planned when I set up that provocation. And it went over with a bang.
Pulling off that kind of provocation with the music was not easy. All club promoters still have a big problem – most often the invited Western star simply doesn't suit our clubber. It's very rare that the public actually likes him. We invited all sorts of DJs. There were, of course, successful bookings. That mainly concerned the Mondays. The very format of those parties implied that people were ready for musical experiments, and a DJ, even with heavy music, was easily received by the public.
But on the commercial days the foreigners «didn't work». There were cases when a DJ played 15 minutes and was pulled off. Because the people didn't like him. Here the residents saved the situation, playing what today is called commercial house. The main ideologue at the time was Nikk, who played exactly that kind of music. Ivanov played more subtly, often quite hard. And Tekhnik was a DJ you could rely on at any moment, with very dependable and correct music».