| Кино - Пачка сигарет The band was formed in the summer of 1981 in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia) as rock band Garin i giperboloidy (after Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi's novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin) consisting of Tsoi, Aleksei Rybin and Oleg Valinskiy. A year later, the name of the band was changed to Kino. Since rock music was considered a "bourgeois style" in Soviet Union, Kino, like the other rock bands, performed only in semi-underground clubs and at musicians' apartments (kvartirniks). In the summer of 1982, Kino's first album 45 (named for its length in minutes) was recorded as a collaboration with the band Aquarium. The album was slowly distributed through underground channels and gave a new fame to the group. The band's first real hit was the album Night released in 1986; the six songs from the album were included in the Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR compilation disc released in the US in 1986. At the beginning of the Perestroika era, the band gained more prominence, and the 1988 album Blood Type, together with the film Needle (Игла, Igla), which starred Tsoi, brought the band to the pinnacle of popularity. During the next two years, the band released another album and did shows in the USSR and abroad, attracting enormous audiences, until August 15, 1990, when Tsoi died in a car accident near Riga. The tape with the vocal track for the new album survived the accident. The album was completed by the rest of the band and ... |
