THE VALENTIN0S – the story
of Lenny Valentino and a band that sleeps together to stay together.
In
England’s Dreaming, a seminal overview of the punk era, author Jon
Savage hailed the movement as “the head-on meeting of the gay and
amphetamine cultures”. While much has been made of the validity
of this claim, what cannot be ignored is punk’s lasting legacy.
Since the Sex Pistols kicked over the statues all those years ago there
have been hundreds of imitators and a few, just a few, who have approached
their greatness. From the era, bands like the Clash, Buzzcocks, Joy Division
and Kleenex spring to mind, Sonic Youth appear somewhere along the line
too and in recent years Elastica, the Hives, the Strokes and the Yeah
Yeah Yeahs have to be included. And, at long last, you can add another
name to that exclusive canon: The Valentinos.
The Valentinos are a teenage, angst-ridden, punk fourpiece from downtown
Moscow. They comprise Asbjorn (drums), Dimitri (guitar, vocals), Racquel
(bass) and Mikail (guitar, keyboards). Their debut single “Lenny
Valentino” (Finland State Records) is being hailed as an instant
classic over that way - “a one hundred and thirty three second slab
of perfect punk greatness” (SOK IT TO ME magazine) and plaudits
over here will surely follow soon. The band itself have been compared
to both the Hives and the Strokes but Russia’s ROCK YEAH magazine
puts it best – “listening to the Valentinos is like watching
your brother and sister being tied up together and being forced to make
love with each other on a railway line whilst a train rumbles towards
them”. Maybe ROCK YEAH knows more than we do for there have been
rumours for a while now that the band contain at least two siblings and
that they do a lot more than just share their instruments. As Asbjorn
puts it: “Where we come from it is no big deal to sleep together
once you are old enough to decide what is good for you. And it should
really be no one else’s business if you want to sleep with other
members of your family. Apart from your mother sleeping with your father,
of course. That is disgusting.”
The Valentinos have played only a handful of gigs in their native Moscow
together with a one-off performance in a transvestite slaughterhouse just
outside Amsterdam. Asbjorn laughs at the recollection. “Yeah, we
thought it would be full of pigs in dresses, standing in line and ready
to be slaughtered but it was the workers who were trannies. I guess they
had a positive discrimination thing going on and it just got out of hand.”
“Mind you, they were mad for it,” adds Racquel. “Though
the smell of sweat was over-powering me very much as I was on my period
and puking everywhere.” “That got us the biggest cheer of
the night,” claims Asbjorn
Be assured that the Valentinos are not just a one-trick pony and “Lenny
Valentino” is very much the tip of an iceberg of repertoire that
includes tracks like “The Day I Met The Memory Man”, “Trans-Siberian
Express” and “I Wanna Do It With You Now Now Now.” Their
take on punk is extremely individual, something they put down to their
age and the area they grew up in. “My dad remembers punk but I don’t,”
says Mikael, the youngest of the four who’s just turned sixteen.
“The Boomtown Rats came to play in Moscow when he was sixteen himself.
They were so shit, the audience tried to escape to go home and were shot
for civil disobedience. 220 killed in cold blood. My father only escaped
with his life cos he was poor and had gone to the gig in pyjamas and been
mistaken for the decadent westerner Rats keyboard player Johnny Fingers.
Of course it was hushed up like everything else and it’s only now
that people in the West are getting to hear about such things.”
Indeed. “Sfunny”, continues Mikael, “I must have been
one or two when Live Aid occurred and it’s difficult to reconcile
the man who helped save Africa with the one responsible for so many of
my father’s friends deaths. And it was only last week that I realised
that God Save The Queen was not about Freddie Mercury.”
The Valentinos will be playing in London in July to promote thethe story release of Lenny Valentino. The single will be released on Finland State Records on July 14th.
