Blond, not so tall, and looking middle-aged and tired, a man slips onto the chair of a fancy café in Kyiv. He sighs, keeps his voice low. The cheerful and lively Oleh Skrypka people see on stage is hardly recognizable, except for his memorable facial features.
As the front man of the enduring alternative-rock band Vopli Vidopliassova – whose name draws inspiration from a Fyodor Dostoevsky character – Skrypka, 49, is often viewed as a hardcore Ukraine patriot. But he did not come dressed in a typical embroidered shirt.
“I am a patriot, but not a ‘hurrah-patriot’ as people usually think,” he smiles sadly, implying he is not someone who wears his patriotism on his sleeve. “I’m also not a revolutionary kind of guy. Revolutions add some drive to life and I don’t need this – my drive is on stage.”
Skrypka first encountered the world of stage music at four and has never left since. He went to music school at seven, but it took many years more to start a music career. VV was founded in 1986 when Skrypka was a senior at Kyiv Polytechnic University. After their first concert in 1987, the band’s popularity grew with each day. A year later the first European tours started, and for five years the band lived in France recording albums. More than twenty years later, the band’s has made twenty albums. But Skrypka’s has a much wider range of activities: he founded several popular festivals, owns a production studio and recently opened a restaurant.
Back in 2010 Skrypka started the Vyshyvanka Parade, an annual event in which people gather for a walk in the city dressed in embroidered shirts. He promotes Ukrainian folk symbols and ornaments in the hopes they will make their way into mainstream fashion. Kraina Mriy, an ethnic and folk festival of music and crafts, features a fashion corner for folk-oriented designers.
“The artist must see the potential of the public’s interest. Something that doesn’t have that potential can’t be successfully popularized,” he says, explaining why embroidered garments have gained in popularity.
However, Skrypka himself doesn’t wear them daily. “I actually do not have many embroidered shirts, maybe five. I was photographed wearing them a couple of times, and now these pictures are everywhere,” he says.
Speaking of his ever growing and evolving Kraina Mriy, his pet project, Skrypka calls it a “construction of art and the creative world that every person and every artist dreams about.”
He continues: “The problem is that there is no festival culture in Ukraine. People came to see the headliners at the end of the day and think this is what a festival atmosphere is, but it’s not. A festival is noon to 10 p.m. of high quality activities.”
He doesn’t allow lip synching at his festivals’ performances, including his newest project, Rock’N’Sich, which took place in early June, and his ethnic-folk music festival on Andriivskyi Uzviz. These latest projects drew criticism because he organized them in cooperation with Kyiv city authorities. Accusations and mocking followed a news reports that Skrypka received $37,500 for the Andriyivskiy Uzviz festival, and $150,000 for Rock’N’Sich from the city.
Responding to accusations, Skrypka said he was proud of this collaboration.
“Finally our authorities do what they were supposed to do a long time ago and I am sorry for people who don’t understand that,” he stated. Such misunderstandings are painful and offensive, he adds.
In his statements, Skrypka is sometimes controversial. He insists that anything that doesn’t bring in money is a bad idea, but emphasizes that ideology comes before business.
To explain his latest last startup, a contemporary Ukrainian cuisine restaurant Kanapa (couch), Skrypka says he was irritated by the fact that there were no decent places to take his foreign friends for real Ukrainian cuisine. He compares the existing ones to “mid –class cars that are not always authentic.” The restaurant opened on 19 Andriivskiy Uzviz on May 25.
“I thought we would need to fight for customers, but we appeared to be very successful,” Skrypka says, smiling proudly.
Despite a busy schedule Skrypka still has time to make TV appearances. For the last two years he’s been one of four coaches for The Voice of Ukraine TV show. While many say Skrypka owes his recent popularity to the show, he claims his main achievement is promoting Ukrainian songs.
“I managed to increase the number of Ukrainian songs in the show by four times,” he says.
Even though Skrypka treats the show as a chance to develop Ukraine’s musical potential, he doesn’t believe it has a successful international future.
“We have very high potential but very low ambitions and one drop can’t get out of the fountain, we need to constantly move up,” he explained. “We can change that, of course, but we should at least want the change and we don’t.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at @Iskrynka.
