Tallinn, April 1988: the blue-eyed soloist of Velikije Luk, Ivo Uukkivi, drinks beer.

NB! Not my text. The feed on Facebook rolled forward. The Facebook post itself.

TALLINN, APRIL 1988. With a blue eye in his head, Ivo “Munk” Uukkivi, the soloist of the punk band Velikije Luk, is sipping beer. Munga’s eye turned blue in a fratricidal war, more precisely when he was fighting with his bandmate Raivo Pilt. “Raivo and I had a fight in front of the Kadrioru Ice Hall after performing at the Noorte Muusa festival,” Munk recalls many years later. “Raivo must have wanted to beat me to death with his solid wood bass guitar, because he hit it with full force, but I missed his head and he hit a park tree, which caused the bass to go flying. You can imagine what would have happened if the head had been left. After the bass was hit, we continued manually. That’s where the eye color came from. But in the morning, neither of us remembered why we fought…”
April 1988 was already a pretty good time for punk musicians. If a year or two earlier, punks were accused of shaming the socialist youth of Soviet Estonia and militias chased punks through the streets, now punk bands were already given generous recognition and rewards. So, for example, in April 1988, the Estonian Leninist Communist Youth Association (ELKNÜ) led the Estonian Leninist Communist Youth Association (ELKNÜ) and held the three-day alternative music festival Noorte Muusa in April 1988, where JMKE won the main prize and the audience prize, the Brotherhood was crowned with the “Punktäht`88” award, and Velikije Luk’s dish received a special prize from the “Kultuur ja Elu” magazine. And the special award for “Culture and Life” was expressed in the same gift box of drinking glasses that Ivo Uukkivi is holding in the accompanying photo.
Those crazy times come alive again! Already on March 6, the inexplicable (time) story of Velikije Luk will be released in cinemas in director Indrek Spungin’s crazy documentary “Happiness is to live in a country”. Watch the official trailer of the film here: https://youtu.be/oQS35YgZuTU