Stephen Coates was wandering through a flea market in Russia in 2013 when he first picked up a piece of bone music.
He was the lead singer of a band called The Real Tuesday Weld, and he had just played a gig in St Petersburg. Now he was exploring the city with some local friends.
"I came across these strange records in a store full of strange things," Coates tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
When he held one of the records aloft, it revealed an image of two bony hands. It was made from an old X-ray. And he was intrigued.
Coates' Russian friends didn't know what it was, and the stallholder dismissed it. But being the avid record collector and musician that he is, he bought it.
Back home in the UK, he was unsure of what this phantom record would offer. Then when he played the single-sided flexi disc on his record player, he was surprised to hear the familiar tune of Bill Haley's 1954 song Rock Around the Clock.
He was perplexed to hear such an upbeat song on the morbid-looking record with its two skeletal hands.
"I realised I had to find out who made it, why they made it, and technically how they made it," he says.
"And those three questions sort of drove me over the next few years to try and discover what was going on."
Products 'of the enemy'
Later, Coates discovered that, in years gone by, the record he'd purchased at that St Petersburg flea market could have landed him in prison.
During the Cold War, certain music, such as jazz and rock 'n' roll, was banned in the Soviet Union. Many forms of music had been censored from the early 1920s until the mid-1980s.
"During the second World War, you could hear American and British music in Moscow. You could go to the cinema and see American films with jazzy soundtracks that turned young people, in particular, on to that kind of music," he explained.
"But when the Cold War started, the products of our culture became the products of the enemy. So jazz and rock 'n' roll became forbidden, along with lots of other types of literature."
It wasn't only Western music that was banned. The music made by overseas Russian dissidents was also outlawed. One of them was Pyotr Leshchenko, an iconic musician who played certain music styles such as the Russian tango.
"Those sounds became forbidden because the authorities feared that they would create the wrong kind of emotion, the wrong kind of feelings, in particular in young people," Coates says.
So the underground culture of making records on X-rays — so-called bone music or, as some Russians called it, music on the ribs – grew out of that hunger for forbidden music.
However, the bootleggers who made the original bone music didn't live in Russia.
Coates discovered that it was likely first developed in Hungary, after he started researching it at a Budapest archive.
"I was in the national library there and they brought a box up and … it was full of beautiful records made on X-rays and they were made in the 1930s," he says.
At that time, a Hungarian collective began recording music on X-rays, he says. And after further research, Coates found a sound engineer named Istvan Makai, who he believes developed the technique.
Coates thinks the records made their way into the Soviet Union through various means, including via prison camps.
Those who made this type of music in Russia took pride in doing it well, particularly the Golden Dog Gang, a group of music-loving bootleggers who were imprisoned in the gulags at one time for their work.
The bootleggers made their own machine to copy X-rays in 1946, after they found one that was smuggled into the USSR.
"They started to copy the music which they loved and were giving it to their friends … It very quickly became apparent that there was a huge desire for this stuff. So, they became the world's first underground X-ray bootleg record company," Coates says.
Why X-rays?
There were many X-rays circulating in Europe and the USSR after mass testing for tuberculosis post-World War II.
These X-rays contained a silver nitrate substance that could pose a potential fire hazard, which is why hospitals wanted to get rid of them.
"There had been a couple of big conflagrations in Soviet hospitals. So, the authorities said to the people who work there, after a year, you've got to get rid of the X-rays," Coates says.
He says members of the Golden Dog Gang were happy to take them.
It was a lucrative business at times, and because it was an underground culture, music lovers never quite knew what they were going to get.
"You had to meet the dealers on the street. And it wasn't like going into a record store where you could rifle through and make your selection … They'd give you a record, you're never quite sure what it's going to be until you got home. And quite often, it sounded desperately bad or didn't even play — that was part of the risk too," he explains.
"But the Golden Dog Gang, they took pride in making the best possible sounding records and some of their records still sound great."
Risky music
While researching for his book Bone Music, Coates met numerous former bootleggers. This included Mikhail Farafanov who had worked as a bootlegger when he was 17.
Now in his 80s and living in Moscow, Farafonov explained how he made and sold these records.
Farafanov had been a fan of jazz since he was a child so, as soon as he was old enough, he moved to Moscow and became a bootlegger.
He enjoyed introducing people to jazz , but the underground profession he had revelled in was also dangerous.
Once, when Farafanov was travelling, he was attacked on a bus because he was wearing a Western coat.
"He made enough money that he could dress like an American," Coates says.
After the death of Stalin, the popularity of bone music began to decline. This continued to decline in the mid 1960s when the reel-to-reel tape recorder became more prominent.
Nowadays, bone music is commonly found in archives, at flea markets or in the record collections of devoted music fans like Coates.
He reflects on the bone music era as a time when a tune could carry so much weight that people were willing to go to extraordinary lengths for it.
"I think it reminds us of a time when one song could matter so much that you'd take risks to make it, you would take risks to buy and sell it, and you'd even take risks to play it," he says.
"I think it's a testament to human endeavour."
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