On his YouTube channel, Peđa Radović preserves forgotten gems of Yugoslav music from the 1950s to the late 1980s, with over 900 songs and more than 80 million views.
From Radojka Šverko, through Luna to Tihomir Pop Asanović and numerous other performers, the virtual curator preserves from oblivion some of the big names that ruled the domestic scene many decades ago, and sometimes finds himself in the role of DJ, making his own selection of their prominent songs.
Ahead of one such, now traditional, performance on January 13th at Belgrade’s “Strog Center”, he tells Euronews Serbia that it all started with his interest in Yugoslav covers of Western hits from the 1960s.
– In the second half of the 2000s, I first discovered those covers, and then a DJ collective from Ljubljana, “Tekine radosti”, as well as “Dr Smeđeg Šećera”, whose mixes also interested me in further research – explains Radović.
Being a journalist by profession, he relied on his expert approach to find long-forgotten tracks, but also, as he says, “the patience of his ears.” The result was a channel with selected Yugoslav music of all genres from the late 1950s to 1991.
Radović pointed out which songs attracted the most public attention:
– Of course, the last in the series is the song “Ne budi me”, by Ms. Nena Ivošević, whom I would like to congratulate on this occasion. That song has found its way back onto the airwaves, thanks to TikTok. I must mention that DJ WC7 from Niš was responsible for it, who about ten, and probably fifteen years ago, pulled it out of oblivion, edited it and used it in his DJ mix. In addition to that song, I should also mention the song “Ostavi trag” by the supergroup Septembar, which gained interest from the foreign public mostly because the American producer 9th Wonder sampled it for the famous rapper Kendrick Lamar. And finally, I would like to mention the inevitable party wish, “Mirno idem krivim putem”, by the Sarajevo group Rezonansa, and I can already thank the algorithm for that.
Although he has not been contacted by the musicians whose songs he breathed new life into, their children have.
– They are delighted. They thought I was some older guy, maybe their parents’ age. There was a rumor that I have a basement with a million records that I have been collecting for years and that I take out a selection from that dusty basement and post it on the Internet – says Radović.
Although he has to dig a lot deeper to get to new and old materials, he continues to expand his collection.
– I would call it a disease, a person simply gets addicted to buying records – says the interlocutor of Euronews.
Source: ba.ekapija.com
