Chimney Sweep Kaliningrad - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Kaliningrad’s Konig Power had the pleasure of Mick Hart listening, dancing, and drinking to their Deep Purple tribute. How did they rate his performance?

12 November 2023 ~ Konig Power Russia’s Ultimate Tribute to Deep Purple

I’ve learnt the hard way never to expect too much (Out of life, Mick? Please let me finish.) from tribute bands.

I learnt this lesson in particular during my Rushden Bowls Club years. Not that I have ever played bowls, mind, even if by age I was qualified then and am more-so qualified now. For us, the Rushden Bowls Club was a handy venue from which to run antique auctions and, occasionally, 1940s’ concerts and dances. However, since the club also functioned as an entertainments hosting centre, we were sometimes in the right place at the right time to catch several tribute band performances.

Needless to say, the professional quality of each band veered from downright dandy to downright dastardly. When they were good, they were good, and when they were bad, they were very, very bad.

Sadly, one or two ‘sank beneath the water like a stone’, and whilst this did not happen often, when it did it had you asking, “Why did I spend good money to listen to a bunch of wannabees butcher the songs of my favourite band, when I might just have easily stayed at home and listened to the real thing courtesy of YouTube?”

The answer to that rhetorical question is that the ‘real thing’ on YouTube is not the real live thing, and when the real live thing is not available, we go for the next best live thing, which, in case you haven’t guessed, is the tribute band.

And so, we come to a recent event, not staged at the Rushden Bowls Club or anywhere vaguely near it, but at Mr Smirnov’s Badger Club tucked away on the Kaliningrad outskirts. Would admission be dependent on the wearing of badger-head codpieces?

Konig Power Russia’s Ultimate Tribute to Deep Purple

The night in question was the 4^th of November; the tribute band in question was Konig Power and the band they were representing was Deep Purple.

As all you know-it-alls know, Deep Purple is an English rock band formed in the late 1960s. Together with British bands Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, they made a name for themselves as the ‘Holy Trinity of hard rock and metal bands”. Deep Purple started out as a psychedelic/progressive rock band, but later moved out and moved into hard rock and some say heavy metal. In its lifetime, the band has undergone numerous line-up changes and nuanced shifts in its musical style but has always maintained its place at the summit. The recipient of numerous accolades and coveted music awards, including, after an uphill struggle (which some believe was motivated by institutional cronyism) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Deep Purple, like their ageing peers Mick Jagger and his Rolling Stones, may not be as young as they used to be, but the pioneers of heavy rock continue to shine the light for new wave bands to follow.

A bit of heavy rock trivia
Deep Purple toured Russia on a number of occasions. It did so from 1996, and in February 2008 appeared in concert at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow.

During the 1970s (My, doesn’t that sound a long while ago!), when heavy rock was in its infancy, I cannot claim to have been a celebrant of it. I was certainly into heavy rock, as I was working in demolition, demolishing disused U.S. aerodromes built in England during the war, and I was also into heavy metal, as I was selling it on the side.

However, at some point during my early teens I turned away from commercial pop, having stumbled upon what is known today as psychedelic and progressive rock.

Bands like Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, featured on the periphery of my new frontier in music, but my inclinations ran more to the likes of Pink Floyd (strictly in their earliest incarnation), Emerson, Lake and Palmer and other truly progressive bands. Then, in 1971, a close friend and collaborator pulled out of his record collection a white album with nothing on the cover but a facsimile handwritten scrawl.

The artist’s name and the name of his band sounded rather silly (which appealed to me immensely), and I certainly had no knowledge of them. Had I missed them on Top of the Pops? That album was the Fillmore East. It was recorded live at the Fillmore in June 1971, and the band that was playing that venue was Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention.

I played the album and was immediately hooked. I hadn’t heard anything like it, because there had never been anything like it, and there’s never been anything like it since. Having played it more than sufficiently to drive my parents to distraction and annoy the neighbours no end, I then raced out and bought, in rapid succession, Freak Out, 200 Motels, We’re Only in it for the Money, Chunga’s Revenge and another half-dozen Zappa albums at £2.20 a pop from Peterborough’s Woolworths. It was an Overnight Sensation; Zappa had converted and, some admonishingly said, thoroughly perverted me.

So, onto this recent tribute concert, where I was going not, as I have intimated, as a dyed-in-the-wool Deep Purple fan but as an open-minded listener with a knowledge of and interest in heavy rock and heavy metal music.

The night before the gig, I had a nocturnal gig of my own ~ insomnia, which ended in a dose of Nytol. Throughout the day of the concert, I was not up too much. It was all I could do to scan one of my old hand-written diaries, the 1976 edition, for storage in the ‘cloud’. It is an ongoing and laborious task, scanning the pages of diaries (I am sure you do it all of the time.) but the upside of it is, it does not entail much mental effort. So far, I have scanned diaries spanning the years 1971 to 1976; only 25 years to go before I catch up with the time when I swapped my pen for a keyboard.

The point is, just in case you think I’ve forgotten what the point is, that my insomnia had left me with a not unusually dull and heavy background headache, which Nytol had exacerbated: just the thing one needs, I thought, when attending a heavy rock concert! But, to quote my old friend Frank, “I was born to have adventure …” So off we went, headache and all.

On our way to the Badger Club, we stopped off at a nearby bar where I sunk a pint of beer. It seemed to do the trick. Doesn’t it always? I cannot for the life of me begin to understand how non-drinkers get over their headaches!

Konig Power

The Deep Purple tribute band that we would witness this evening goes by the name of Konig Power. The line-up consists of: Yuri Koenig, vocals; Viktor Markov, guitar, solo and backing vocals; Dmitry Isakov, bass guitar; Alexander Nazarov, keyboards; and Alexander Kazbanov, drums.

Yuri Koenig, lead singer and founder of the band, may be Russian but he sings his Deep Purple cover songs in perfect English. Before launching into his act, Yuri came to our table and in conversation revealed the sixteen or seventeen tracks that the band would be playing this evening. They must have been among Deep Purple’s most famous hits for, with one or two exceptions, I seemed to know them all.

During our conversation, Yuri revealed that as well as Deep Purple, he was a lifelong fan of the Beatles. This did not surprise me any, as the greater percentage of Russian folk over a certain age seem to have a perennial soft-spot for the mop-top band from Liverpool.

My sister was a Beatlemania victim. I suppose in the Beatles’ hey days it was hard to be anything else. Youth culture at the time was simplistically split into two cult camps: you either went with the Beatles or favoured the Rolling Stones. I leant towards the Stones, but my favourite ‘commercial’ rock band of that era was neither of the big two, it was the third spoke in the music scene’s wheel, the one and only Kinks, and out of that 60s/70s trio, it remains so to this day.

None of the groups that I have just mentioned fall into the generic category occupied by Deep Purple.

Deep Purple’s music is heavy rock, and if any of you reading this are unsure as to what that is, ~ maybe because you have suffered the inconvenience of having been born too late, when there is little more to listen to than rap-crap mediocrity ~ it is heavy and it rocks.

The opening chords of Konig Power left no doubt in anyone’s mind what brand of music it was. The ‘heavy’ passed like a shockwave through our bodies and the building in its entirety actually, physically rocked.

Konig Power Kaliningrad Deep Purple TRibute Band

Indeed, so heavy, strident, loud and utterly surprising was the initial amplification that had my badger’s head codpiece not been properly secured by a pair of lady’s suspenders, I would have run the very real risk of losing it. It could have shot right off! As it was, I discretely adjusted it just in time to hear Yuri cry what he had no need to cry, “I want to smash this wall!” He very nearly succeeded, with the help of my flying codpiece.

My codpiece was not the only victim of the band’s explosive intro. The dramatic opening chord seemed also to have blown away Smirnov’s leather outfit, for, having put away his pipe ~ I didn’t know he smoked one? ~ he appeared from the back rooms of his TARDIS looking every bit the caveman in a short-sleeved furry waistcoat open from chest to midriff. Aleks is one of those alpha guys. He has a hairy chest. My shirt was well done up.

The first track of the evening was Deep Purple’s signature tune Smoke on the Water, based on the 1971 fire at Montreux Casino*.

Understandably, it is a powerful song, requiring a lot of clout from the vocalist, and for guitarist Dmitry Isakov a tightly scripted performance to live up to a guitar riff which has gone down in rock history as one of its most memorable.

*Do you not believe in coincidences?
Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water song is reputed to have been inspired by the burning of Montreux Casino in 1971. My favourite band is The Mothers of Invention. My favourite album is The Mothers of Invention live at the Fillmore East, recorded in 1971. The casino burnt down as a result of a Mothers of Invention fan firing a flair gun during a Mother’s of Invention concert. I wasn’t there. I have an alibi. On the night in question, I was sitting quietly at home playing roulette and blackjack whilst listening to my Fillmore East album. I think I was wearing flared trousers and smoking a cigar.

This, then, was the moment of truth. It was the first track of the evening. Deep Purple’s headline song, the one that would sort the tribute men from the boys.

Success! I am pleased and relieved to report; Bravo!; and a standing ovation! Konig Power had not disappointed. We could settle in for the rest of the evening. Yes, I will have a glass of vodka.

It has to be said that lead singer Yuri Koenig excelled himself. He has a good, strong, voice, with a flexible range and tempo and had no difficulty in oscillating between the low growling guttural notes and clean, high-pitched screams which characterises the Deep Purple sound.

A vital clue as to how he reaches those high notes could, I quietly ruminated, be the very tight trousers that he was wearing. They looked like a pair once owned by the Bee Gees. I didn’t say a word. However, you, being less diplomatic than I, might have been tempted to say, “Pardon me for asking, but were you ever awarded the Badger’s Head Codpiece with Two Golden Globes?” I’m rather glad that you were not there.

Guitarists, Dmitry Isakov and Viktor Markov gave dazzling displays of nimble fingers, which were expressively more than capable of drawing perfect musicianship from the instruments they were wielding. I tried to work out how they did it, how they were doing it so well and doing it so rapturously, but just like seasoned magicians with professional cardsharp skills, if it wasn’t simply down to their fingers, it must have been up their sleeves. Their extraordinary and excellent playing hit the spot like it ought and certainly contributed to ‘smashing’ Yuri’s wall, as though smashing walls to them was second nature.

A heavy rock group without drums a-rockin’ is almost as inconceivable as a globalist without tentacles. Manning the drums this evening was Alexander Kazbanov, who effortlessly, or so it seemed, brought it all together in an assured style and with a classic sense of timekeeping that his alter ego, Ian Paice, could only have applauded.

Whether his keyboards colleague, Alexander Nazarov, wanted to or did distort the sound of the organ he was playing in emulation of his Deep Purple counterpart, the legendary Jon Lord, is not for a novice like me to say, but the rhythm he produced rode along with the heavy rock beat without becoming lost in it, either utterly or partially, adding, not subtracting, and holding its own quite comfortably within the epicentre of the storm of sound.

In fact, there was nothing to complain about in the band’s rendition of the band they loved to play, and nothing by way of syncopation that failed to fit the tribute bill.

Whilst Konig Power paid homage in the best and most professional way to every Deep Purple song to which they treated us, by far the most accomplished in my opinion was the last song of the evening, a reprise of Deep Purple’s signature tune, namely Smoke on the Water. Already sung and sung well, beyond the level of prosaic competency, the striking difference between the earlier rendition and this, the evening’s sign-off track, was the well-appointed inclusion of Mick Hart guesting on chorus vocals.

Mick Hart with Konig Power's lead singer Yuri Koenig singing 'Smoke on the Water'

Although it could be argued that Konig Power had no need to add this particular cherry to the icing on their cake, all I can say in response to that is stand by Wembley Stadium, and yes, if they ask me nicely, I’ll sponsor a toilet door . I’ll even throw in a photo of me as well.

You know, it’s true what they say about fame: it can quickly go to your badger’s head!