Sarajevo — Zabranjeno Pušenje got its name because Nenad Janković's mother told them to stop smoking in the basement
The band that would become one of the biggest in 1980s Yugoslavia was named by a mother's complaint. The young men rehearsing in the basement on Fuad Midžić street in Sarajevo were told to stop smoking. 'Zabranjeno pušenje' — No Smoking — stuck. The lead singer's stage name came from a neighbour's boy called Elvis, who was named when the rock star was alive and died the year Presley did.
The name of one of the most famous rock bands in Yugoslav history came from a landlady’s complaint about cigarette smoke.
The basement on Fuad Midžić street
In the early 1980s, a group of young Sarajevans, Nenad Janković (later Nele Karajlić), Zenit Đozić, Davor Sučić (Sejo Sexon), and others, spent their time in a basement (podrum) on Fuad Midžić street in Sarajevo. The basement belonged to Janković’s family. The young men smoked, played music, wrote sketches, and generally did what twenty-year-olds in a socialist city with limited entertainment options did.
Janković’s mother had a view on this. Per Handžar’s 2020 thesis: “The name ‘Zabranjeno pušenje’ came about because, in the basement on Fuad Midžić street, Janković’s mother would say to the people who were there — that is, to Zenit Đozić, Nenad Janković, and Davor Sučić — that they should ‘stop smoking’ (zabraniti pušenje) in that space, and it sounded perfect as a name” (Handžar, 2020, p. 53).
Zabranjeno pušenje, No Smoking. The name stuck. By 1991, the band had released eleven albums, all of them rooted in Sarajevo (Handžar, 2020, p. 62). Their first album was titled Das ist Walter, a reference to the cult Yugoslav partisan film Valter brani Sarajevo (Walter Defends Sarajevo), which was itself a Sarajevo story.
The Elvis problem
The other band of the New Primitivism movement, Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, had an equally Sarajevan naming story.
The frontman, Mirko Srdić, needed a stage name. Per Handžar: “Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors also had a distinctive name. Primarily because it was the name of a boy, one of the neighbours called Elvis, and he got the name at the time when the great rock star Elvis Presley died. They imagined him as the Elvis of rock’n’roll, and that’s essentially how the name was born” (Handžar, 2020, p. 53).
Srdić confirmed in interview: “Of course they were upset, and the one who was Elvis Jasmina Kurtović was changed to Elvis J. Kurtović” (Handžar, 2020, p. 53). The “J.” was all that remained of the real boy’s name.
How a basement became a movement
The New Primitivism movement, Novi primitivizam, was not planned. Mirko Srdić told Handžar directly: “We never thought it would become a real movement. We were already dabbling in music and humour by then” (Handžar, 2020, p. 116).
The founding members — Nenad Janković, Zenit Đozić, Branko Đurić (Đuro), Zlatko Arslanagić (Zlaja), Dražen Ričl (Zijo, Para), Mirko Srdić (Elvis J. Kurtović), Davor Sučić (Sejo Sexon), Boris Šiber (Šibi), Goran Petranović (Rizo), and Dražen Janković (Drale) — all came from the same Sarajevo neighbourhoods, gave each other pseudonyms, and “found themselves at the very beginning of creating their own movement” (Handžar, 2020, p. 52).
Later additions included Darko Ostojić (Ogi), Jadranko Džihan (Dado), Emir Kusturica (Kusta), and Davor Dujmović (Perhan). All the pseudonyms were based on “New Primitivist fantasy or even a mix of their neighbours’ names” (Handžar, 2020, p. 52).
The movement produced three things: a radio show (PRIMUS), a TV show (Top Lista Nadrealista), and two rock bands (Zabranjeno Pušenje and Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors). All three came from the same basement, the same friendships, the same Sarajevo streets.
Goran Petranović (Rizo) described the relationship between the two formats in a TV interview: “In the world it is New Romanticism, and with us it is New Primitivism”. Janković added that “New Primitivism never had a clear developmental media path”, unlike the organised Slovenian movement Neue Slowenische Kunst, whose most famous representative was Laibach (Handžar, 2020, p. 53).
What survived
The basement is gone. Fuad Midžić street is still there. The band exists in two parallel lineups: one in Belgrade around Karajlić, one in Sarajevo around Đozić and the members who stayed through the siege. The name, Zabranjeno pušenje, is still one of the most recognised in Balkan music.
And the origin story is still a mother telling her son’s friends to stop smoking in her basement.
Sources
- Erol Handžar, Top lista nadrealista kao medijski fenomen subkulturnog razvoja Sarajeva i njen utjecaj na recipijente (master thesis, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Sarajevo, 2020), pp. 52-53, 62, 116.
- Nenad Janković, Fajront u Sarajevu (Belgrade: Laguna, 2014).
- Related on this site: The PRIMUS radio slot, Four Sarajevans invented Yugoslav absurdist TV comedy, Crni humor.
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