The Prehistoric Period

DJ Fonar on Moscow's first discos:
«In 1986 I was nineteen, and I came back from the army to 'civvy street' ahead of schedule.
I have to say that while I'd been away nothing in Moscow had changed. The discos went on living exactly as they had before I left for the ranks of the armed forces. They were evening events, usually held on Fridays or Saturdays at Pioneer Palaces or Houses of Culture. They lasted no more than two hours. The entrance fee was fairly nominal, a few miserable rubles, and that sum was then split between the disc jockey, the sound engineer and the lighting man.
Vinyl was a medium for aesthetes. The main sound source was reel-to-reel tape recorders. When a track ended, the disc jockey would solemnly announce the next one, coming up with his own intro patter for it. In other words, back then the disc jockey worked like a radio host, trying every way he could to liven up the crowd. As each new song was announced, the lighting man would switch on the strobes and homemade disco rigs made of shifting red-yellow-green-blue little lamps — in short, he made things pretty for the folks.
The musical selection at the discos was extremely varied — from the classic songs of Pink Floyd to the then-fashionable Modern Talking and Bad Boys Blue. But Italian pop dominated, all sorts of compilations like The Best Of Italo Disco. These were echoes of the San Remo festivals, which had left an indelible mark on our country's cultural life.
It was a special kind of chic to play non-stops — tracks recorded without pauses in a set order. Compilations of Beatles songs, of ABBA, of rock'n'roll tracks were super popular. It made an indelible impression on people. No one could figure out how it was done, and the audience's delight knew no bounds.
But the main highlight of these discos was the 'ladies' choice' dance, when the women invited the men. It was the peak of the evening, when emotions spilled over and real tears were shed. Usually a fight would break out afterwards, in the course of which the lads would sort out who had invited whom and why. That was usually where the disco ended.
Perestroika, though, was already leaving its mark on the discos. The Iron Curtain had fallen, and Western music was getting easier to obtain. Before that we bought all our recordings at the recording studios. New releases were delivered there, copied there, and then passed from hand to hand. But those studios had their own strict rules and blacklists. The band Kiss, for example, couldn't be duplicated, because two SS letters hung at the end of their name. Or if the word 'Moscow' so much as flashed by in a song, it automatically landed in the banned-music category. Now, though, you were allowed to buy music not underground, whispering with black-market dealers, but perfectly legally».

DJ Fonar on the first sound systems:
Every disco in Moscow had its own crew. These were established sound systems that set the musical policy of one venue or another. They did everything – selecting programs, recording them onto reels, hosting the discos, writing lyrics, chants and intros, doing recitatives between songs, staging routines... In short, everything that might be of use at a disco.
They were real stars. The outfit «Three Times Twenty-Three» thundered across all of Moscow — it got its name from the fact that all three of its members were 23 years old. There was the famous group «Disco 7» from Krasnogorsk. Legends were told about the duo «Lyogky Boom» (Light Boom), which was extraordinarily successful. Sergey Osenev and his partner, whose name I can't recall now, had graduated from the philology faculty of Moscow State University and caught the trend at just the right moment, one that soon became quite a hit. They started using hip-hop moves in their compositions. It was done simply. «Lyogky Boom» recorded tracks non-stop, matching them by tempo and rhythm, and laid percussion underneath them. And in the gaps between tracks they overlaid lyrics, very topical ones — about cinema, about politics, about anything at all. Then they'd send these recordings out to other cities, through those same recording studios, and two months later they'd travel there to perform, with tremendous success. That way they cashed in twice — once through the studio, and again through concert fees».