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Jonathon Bousfield on the Heyday of the Iconic Yugoslav Record Label, Jugoton

Jonathon Bousfield recounts the rise of Jugoton, the iconic Zagreb-based Yugoslavian record label that both brought Western music to Yugoslavia and later was at the forefront of the massive post-punk and new wave scenes in the region.

What is a song without a sleeve? Jugoton’s place in art and pop

Zagreb record label Jugoton didn’t just nurture a unique music scene. It also set new standards in Croatian design

During the Seventies and Eighties Jugoton served as a prime conduit for the flood of original music coming out of Croatia, and the label became synonymous with local pop culture at its most innovative and authentic.

Almost thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold-War divide still colours our perceptions of cultural history. People in Western Europe had all the sex, drugs and rock and roll; people in the East just gritted their teeth and carried on queuing for sausages. The former Yugoslavia, with its quasi-consumerist version of Communism-Lite, stood somewhere in the middle. But what if we re-drew the continent’s historical geography according to which countries had the biggest record industry, which countries underwent a punk-rock revolution in the late Seventies, or which countries produced the largest proportion of Eighties’ synthesizer bands? By any of these criteria, the Croatian capital Zagreb would have to be moved into the same camp as London, Manchester or Berlin; while large tracts of Mediterranean Europe would find suddenly themselves on the far side of the Urals.

Yugoslavia enjoyed a popular-culture boom in the Seventies and Eighties and much of its most exciting music was released on Jugoton, the Zagreb-based label that became synonymous with the restless energies of the local scene. The company didn’t just play the leading role in nurturing local rock-and-roll talent; it also set new standards in Croatian design, producing album covers that became every bit as canonical as the music contained within. Trawling through the Jugoton archives today reveals how popular music and its increasingly stylish packaging served as mirrors of a changing society, and goes some way to answering the question of just why Yugoslav socialism could boast so much in the way of wop bam boom.

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