Cobra

ALTAI ROCKETS

The art-house espionage of Werner Herzog, Tarkovsky and The Ipcress File. The seedy glamour of old Soho. The bombing of Belgrade and the looting of South London council estates. And the communist junkyard of the Altai Republic, the Balkan region where Russian test rockets fall in farmer’s gardens, unable to reach the coast.

These are the building blocks of Altai Rockets, the long-gestating brainchild of London’s Nick Bergin, Nathan Fisher and Graham Bonnar alumni of bands such as Sophia, The Tears, and 'Brian Jonestown Massacre. They began regular Friday night sessions at Nathan’s Crouch End flat, where high on copious amounts of wine and bizarre guitar tunings. 

Before long they had songs running the gamut of noir rock styles from krautrock noise drone to indie epic to folk Spiritualized. And, crucially, they all wrapped Nick’s lyrics of personal anguish in a dark, paranoid Eastern Bloc intrigue. Altai Rockets were launched.


The result is a raining bombardment of bleak beauty. ‘Searchlight’ is the sound of a South London riot strafed with police helicopter spotlights, building to a huge noise crescendo to make My Bloody Valentines knees tremble. 
‘La chere’ is a Debussy-like classical rock wonder inspired by Paul Auster’s story of a sea-bound prison break-out that turns cannibalistic. ‘How The Mighty Have Fallen’ is a lush Spiritualized homage slumped, bedraggled and heartbroken, in Soho dive bars and Dostoyevsky taverns. And ‘Revolution Eyes’  takes the same locked-in desolation to war-torn eastern Europe.

“It was inspired by that radio station that transmitted through the NATO bombings of Belgrade,” Nick explains. “They were illegally transmitting Milosevic. People would be out in the streets after curfew and in the drinking dens for 24-hours because they weren’t allowed out and it used to get out of hand in there.”

About to get out of hand? That’s Altai Rockets themselves, set to explode onto the live scene.Bunker down in the beer halls, comrades, the countdown has begun.