Photos of 70s Rock Bands Defying Communist Rule

This article was originally published on VICE Romania.

For Romanian young people living under Communism, the biggest night of the week was “Youth Thursday”. Hosted by youth clubs in schools, universities and factories, the dance nights launched some of Romania’s biggest rock and jazz bands of the era.

Unsurprisingly, Romanian authorities weren’t all too keen on the rock band boom of the 1960s, but they did tolerate it – that is, until a band or a band member stepped out of line. But as Nicolae Ceaușescu – who served as head of state from 1967 to 1989 – clamped down on cultural freedoms, artists had to use clever strategies to defy an increasingly stifling system.

In 1969, underground event space Club A opened in Bucharest. Originally catering to architecture students and their guests, the club held rock gigs, modern dance performances, poetry, folk and jazz nights. Incredibly, the club is still going today, and is still run by students. 

A year after opening, Club A organised Bucharest’s first ever music festival, which was technically a competition between rock bands. The festival lasted six days and took place at venues all over the city.

While music charts in the US and throughout the West in the 1970s were dominated by Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and The Beatles, Romanian musicians were ordered to play music according to the taste of “the most beloved son of the people”, Nicolae Ceaușescu.

The communist leader had returned home from a tour of China and North Korea, impressed by what he’d seen: tens of thousands of young people going crazy for the communist ideology. Ceaușescu wanted to adopt the Asian model for Romania, with patriotic music a central element of the plan. He also knew what he didn’t want: decadent Western music.

In 1971, singing in English was banned in Romania. Ceaușescu’s famed July Theses speech attacked creatives and intellectuals, calling for strict cultural reform. It also demanded that bands only highlight the positive aspects of Romanian life at the time.

But rock bands quickly found solutions to skirt the rules. Songs were written with lyrics based on classical poems, or with no lyrics at all. Bands would also use obscure Romanian translations of hits from overseas to bypass the authorities’ gaze. If songs were written in Romanian, they would often use totally nonsensical words that sounded like English when sung. Groups also ditched the term “rock”, which was considered subversive, instead identifying as “instrumental-vocal musical ensembles”.

All of this helped to keep rock music alive under the extremely restrictive conditions. The era, immortalised by the Romanian Rock Museum’s archive, celebrates not only the bands which defied the times, but also the spaces that helped them thrive.

Scroll down for more images from the archive.