Wherever he appears, whenever he appears, this slender, elegant and measured man stirs the atmosphere: it is enough that, without too much announcement, with a guitar in his hands and saxophonist Ana Kovačić next to him appeared in Knez Mihajlova Street so that there was a crowd. Darko Rundek, poet and musician, has survived in these (and not only these) areas for almost half a century. A few things have changed - the color of his hair, for example - but basically he remains what he was: a great poet and a great musician. Before the concerts in Belgrade on June 5 and 6, we talk with Rundek about the recipe for artistic longevity, about the modern world that doesn't seem attractive at all, about how his songs are born and what they mean, about the group "Haustor" and nature, about artistic and civic engagement, artificial intelligence and non-intelligence, about theater and the student movement...
"WEATHER" Your lyrics and your music live on. On the first album you have a song called "I am changing.". Isn't the change a condition of duration?
DARKO RUNDEK: Now, are we talking about changing the work or the author? It can be said that the work changes in such a way that it can be read differently at different times. There is a wonderful story by Borges. There was a man who, I don't know, nineteen twenty-eight, let's say, started writing again Don Quixote. And in three years, he reached the end of the first chapter, but everything is correct, word for word, every punctuation is there. So man, the narrator tells him, is it taking you so long to write? And no, he says, I'm not copying, I'm rewriting it. Now that I'm writing it, it's a historical novel. When Cervantes wrote it, it was a contemporary novel and had completely different connotations. In this sense, therefore, the work changes in relation to the perspective from which it was written, and, of course, because it is read in different times, even though it is factually the same. The author, of course, changes because everything that lives changes.
Do you remember Borges? "Sand books"? You can never go back to the same page because it is always different, each new reading is different.
Now we live in a time in which fashions, orientations, political systems, a lot of things, are changing very quickly, the perception of the world is changing. It was different before. A few thousand years ago, in a more traditional society, a symbol meant the same thing for generations, stories meant the same thing. And now everything has accelerated. We will see what this will lead to, but historically speaking, this kind of acceleration is a new phenomenon. In fact, it is a new phenomenon, I think it is actually typical of the decadent phases of civilizations and cultures.
Yours "Ena", let's say, she experienced who knows how many interpretations, processing. You were recently with a group from Bihać, "Jall in the eyes", sang in French. Is it the same song you wrote over 40 years ago?
Well, not really. There was one translation, I think the translator's name is Galjašević, an excellent translation into French, but "Jall aux yeux", not knowing about it, got used to their own translation, which suited me less, was more literal, difficult to pronounce, less rhythmic. Well, then I sing my stanzas from Galjašević's translation, and they from theirs. They changed the harmonic structure a little, so, here, to some extent it is the same song, to some extent it is not.
Srdjan Sacher insisted that "Haustor" doesn't spin as many hits, while you - if this interpretation is correct - had a slightly different idea. Have you ever paid attention to who you are talking to?, Who are you writing for??
photo: lenka pavlović...
The first and biggest hit of "Haustor" was the song "Moja prva ljubav", written by Srđan Sacher. Did he write it with the intention of being a hit? I don't think so. He did it very sincerely. It is a song that does not meet the canons of a radio hit, it is too long and does not have the structure that is typical for it. Most of the song is an instrumental solo, there are practically no stereotypes in the text, and if something resembling a stereotype appears, it is in such a context that you cannot read it in general.
Sacher was and still is - from my perspective this is perhaps his greatest virtue - a good haiku poet. He wrote really beautifully about the moment, about a fine and synesthetic experience, about something that is typical for haiku.
Now, the claim you convey in your question, which suggests that I am more inclined to write hits than Sacher, I have not come across so far. If you make albums, singles, concerts, you objectively become part of show business. The conclusion is that, if you release an album, you should have at least one radio-friendly song on it that will attract the attention of a wider audience and the rest of the album, which is more adventurous and perhaps less appealing at first glance. On the first album "Haustor" that role was played by "Moja prva ljubav", albeit accidentally, because it was supposed to remain only a single. As the song "Working Class Goes to Paradise" was dropped from the album, it filled that vacant place.
Na To the Third World we trusted that the title song would fulfill the function of the "hit" that carries the album, but we missed it. On that album, which is highly regarded today, I finished the lyrics when almost all the music was recorded. The songs perhaps lacked a dynamic connection between the two layers, thus delaying his recognition.
Bolero brought a whole series of songs that became part of the cultural fabric of these areas, such as "Ena", "Sejmeni", "Shane", "Scarf of silk". Did I write those songs trying to appeal to a target audience? I didn't calculate that way. I wondered if those songs touched me in a place that I share with my human brothers and sisters. Can these songs shed some light on some common hidden longing through melodies and images that I have experienced in my imagination or in reality...
And the song "The working class goes to heaven"? Wake up at five and go....
... he actually wakes up at half past four in the morning, and leaves the platform at five...
...that song tells us that the working class is over, she is worn out, used. In those years, saying such a thing was not very common...
That song was written by Sacher, that is, that chorus, I wrote what followed, the game at the end, the boys in the blue caps and this black devil I invented. To this day, Sacher declares himself a communist, a Marxist. He still reads the situation through class structure and class struggle. But in the meantime, it seems to me, the contours of classes as Marx saw them have somehow been lost and, at the very least, the working class no longer has that class consciousness. At the beginning of the eighties, it could already be seen because that consumer mentality, mechanism, whatever you want, broke that class, the workers were no longer the working class, but became the consumer class. Yes, for cheap goods.
Do you think it is necessary for an artist to be engaged??
Well, art was basically divided into profane and sacred, so the sacred by definition is engaged in bringing us into contact with higher forces, and the profane - music for a wedding, after harvest or some work - is it engaged? I mean, if she celebrates love, dance, the joy of life... Is that an engagement? Music is always engaged, but that engagement does not have to be social, political, philosophical... That is not necessary, at least not for profane music. It is sacred, because it has a greater obligation towards its purpose.
Clear, but on the other hand, people perceive you just as an engaged poet and musician, and precisely in the political sense. A whole series of your songs are engaged.
I don't know why or how it happened. While people around me strived for happiness, for me the concept of freedom was always much more important, more important than happiness. It was not difficult for me to endure pain, if it was in the name of freedom. I would rather be painfully free than painlessly happy. So my engagement is for freedom, whatever that means.
photo: lenka pavlović...
Emigrants are also an important topic of yours. In 1991. you go to Paris and there you meet emigrants from all over the world.
Well, in my experience there is first a wave of emigration related to this war of ours, after that the war in Syria, a large wave of migrants from the Middle East, from the north of Africa, which is actually constantly encroaching. So I know that position from the inside, an immigrant in Paris. It was an interesting experience. Then I felt like a member of some new, stateless nation, and I liked that, I must admit. There in Paris, I didn't stay away from the French, but a good part of my friends were Americans, English, people from our area, life threw them there in various ways... I don't know, the idea of a nation that people swear by now seems to come from ancient times, but in fact it is from the nineteenth century. So I gradually began to identify with that stateless tribe, for example, which exists in the world's big metropolises by force of circumstances, more than with a nation in the narrower sense. On the other hand, there is some natural belonging to a certain landscape. Aboriginal people, for example, do not have a sense of ownership of a territory but a responsibility to maintain its harmony. The same is true of most traditional cultures. But, unfortunately, people would love to own the territory, some of them exhausted it to the end, and took little care of it. Earth, water, air, mountain, forest, arable land, river, if a person is connected with it from childhood by a true bond, it will not be easy to sell it for a handful of dollars.
Have you entered into discussions with the patriots?, nationalists?
I preferred to stay away because people need identification, from the neighborhood, the football club and beyond. Well, if it's a natural human need, it would be completely inappropriate of me to insult it. I mean, I really wouldn't want to insult Croatian nationalists, Serbian nationalists, French nationalists, or any of them. While they attach themselves to some positive values and if that helps them to identify with some kind of virtue. And if they become aggressive, which is often the case with nationalisms, then they are no longer sympathetic to me.
Are you an anthropological pessimist or an anthropological optimist??
If you mean the fate of the human species on this planet, i.e. its biosphere, then I am a pessimist, but miracles are always possible. Our survival on this planet is connected to the interwoven fabric of all living things.
Some artists have the privilege or curse of being socially exposed and having access to the media. It's a big responsibility. They can pave the way for ideas that are not part of the dominant discourse, they can advocate for those groups of people who do not have access to the media, they can even be the voice of those who do not have a voice: such as animals, wild and domestic, rivers, forests, soil, air... They are all part of the great community on this planet and neglecting them is neglecting ourselves. We are in the middle of the sixth great extinction, we have killed more than half of the insects, birds, earthworms with pesticides and herbicides, there is less and less wildlife, the habitats of all other living creatures are increasingly being covered with concrete, mountains are collapsing and grinding in search of minerals and ores. This is particularly relevant in Serbia. Glaciers are melting, overheated oceans have less and less plankton that are used to produce oxygen, and all of this goes under the radar. mainstream media... Or, even worse, much worse, people have become insensitive to it, completely separated from nature as if they are not part of it. Climate changes are the result of such human activity and only intensify the collapse of life on earth.
You are active in the environmental movement?
These days, Sanda and I were at the mouth of the Mura into the Drava, which flows into the Danube, and we looked at the already almost completed mega chicken farms near the river, with a capacity of two million heads per year. These industrial farms threaten the reserves under the protection of UNESCO. It is about the Croatian Amazon, whose animal and plant wealth is breathtaking and represents perhaps the greatest Croatian natural treasure. That area is part of the transboundary biosphere reserve, and NATURE 2000. Basically, an illegal eco-bomb, actually owned by the Ukrainian bookmaker king. The day after that, we took part in a protest in Sisak against similar megafarms and megaslaughterhouses in the Sisak-Moslavina County. It seems that under public pressure the investor withdrew. Such projects, which were rejected by many European countries, not wanting their pollution, we must also reject, if we do not want to become the sewer of Europe. In a similar way, in the case of lithium, for example, they will not mine it in Germany, but they want it in Serbia.
Let's get back to the music.. Do you deconstruct the rhythms? You don't just go along with what's called world music without any cover.
Well, but world music is a deconstruction in itself. Not to mention techno music, which, if you know how to count to sixteen, you know everything in advance. So yes world music, which relies on traditional music, offers a lot of repetitive circles that make up a rhythmic phrase. There was a fairly authentic African band that came to play in "Močvar", in Zagreb, a club where lesser-known bands come to play. They were excellent, understandable and authentic.
Do you think we better understand the music from the area where we were born, but from other sides?
Probably. Probably because of all that we could hear in Yugoslavia, we were very proud of how many different melos there were. When we played "Makedo", it took a lot of effort for us to relax and start improvising in it as a basic measure. On the other hand, I used to be surprised at how much oriental music I can actually play in my head, without ever having much of a direct connection with oriental music, I don't know where that came from.
We can't bypass the theater.
Actually, there are many things that connect me to the theater, but the longest and strongest connection is with Sanda Hržić, a longtime colleague, in some respects a teacher, advisor and wife. The mother of our son. A lot of thinking crystallized through our communication, many books came to me through her. So my theater experience is also related to our collaboration. I have always been more inspired by non-verbal theater, which is connected to traditions of mime, ritual, theater of cruelty and movement and all parallel theater traditions, theater of masks, comedy of art in which there is a lot of improvisation. However, I did a lot of music for dramatic performances, due to circumstances, a lot of them were in Paris. And for many of Sanda's directions. And for the performances of the "Act" company, in English in France. She brought actors from England, they played in France. It was a stripped-down theater, it traveled a lot, and music played an important role. There was also scenography and emotional support. The English actors are musically educated and worked well together on the songs. And I enjoyed doing that.
You tried your hand as a director and actor.
As a director in the theater I was not particularly comfortable because I have no pedagogical gift and my relations with the actresses were not easy. When I worked as a radio director, the relationship was great, we would do a few rehearsals, it was much more relaxed. But as a theater composer - it works great for me, because I still have experience as a director, a certain dramaturgical education, I've acted a little bit myself, so probably from all that experience I can make music that serves a dramatic purpose better than someone who comes only from music, so that dramatic purpose is like a limitation for him.
How a song is born? Do you have a song in your head first?, and then the music comes, or you have a musical motif to which the words are then attached?
I actually wanted to write poetry because I had to fill in the melody that came to my mind, so songs are mostly created from musical motifs, and then from nonsensical syllables that illustrate the future text. Consonants follow the rhythm of the phrase, vowels follow the melody and emotion. They appear spontaneously and as if by chance, but the germ of the future text is crouching in them, which begins to spin meaning through similarity and sonority. Exciting process! And that's how some songs are created. And some, less numerous, are sung by themselves, quickly and easily.
In the theater, you still have a set frame.
In the theater I am good at creating songs and that makes me happy. Fortunately, I compose verses well, so when I need to describe a character or a situation, they are quite witty and cute songs.
"The soul dies of silence.", you wrote.
Yes, that's my line, but I don't think it's entirely accurate. A friend asked me: "How could you write that?" Because there is nothing better for the soul than silence. I know that from my own experience. But the song is not about silence in which there is no thought and listening, but rather neglect, abandonment, it is a silence in which souls die because there is no attention and love. And silence as silence is good for the soul.
You said in a conversation"I feel a great responsibility towards language and words, I work on it until I think that something worthy of exchange with other people has settled there. And I know when I've written something that has to take time". When you know the song is finished?
I love it. deadline, then I know it's over. He forces me to make some definite decisions and that pressure is often creative.
(laughter) You have a song called "The scullion and the stew". (For younger readers: Stipe Šuvar was a Croatian and Yugoslav politician whose ideas changed the secondary education system. He was greatly disliked for that).
photo: lenka pavlović...
In the meantime, I heard very nice things about Stipe Shuvar. I have to admit. And I hear them more and more. He was a symbol of some kind of brutal school reform in which our wonderful civilized high school should be turned into a vocational school for apprentices, which will, as it were, wipe out our glorious culture. And actually, through the testimonies of the people he was a professor of, I hear nice things about the breadth of his insights, honesty, wit, pedagogic gift and what happened to him after the collapse of the socialism project. He was and remains a principled, smart man devoted to the search for a fairer and more humane society. It seems to me that self-governing socialism was probably one of the most advanced social concepts ever attempted in practice. Unfortunately - I see this in France, for example, where local self-government is held up, which really has a lot of power - it's not that you can't change the situation, it's that people can't deal with it, and that's a problem. Self-governing socialism could work wonderfully if people were really allowed to participate in bodies in which they could decide on the common good, in which they could choose, take rules and relationships into their own hands. But "someone does it for me" prevailed. Simply, a large number of people do not want to deal with the common good.
Nature is a common good.. Ecology takes an important place in what you do.
If it weren't for Sanda, there wouldn't be nearly as much engagement. We're a team where sometimes my social exposure comes in handy to promote things that aren't necessarily what I'm known for, because it's worth advocating for them. And people can't even deal with their own municipality, let alone the welfare of humanity. Well, I guess until they burn out, I think, and then it turns into some scurrying again. That's the way things are. If there were wise people at the top of the hierarchy who would evaluate decisions based on their impact on the well-being of the future seven generations... When communities are smaller, then people can come to an agreement more easily because they share their fate with nature every day and it is quite normal that they will not do anything bad to the plants, animals, air, land and water on which they are directly dependent for their existence. Aboriginal culture has lived flawlessly and without major changes in harmony with their territories and all their other inhabitants for 40.000 years.
I will quote you again."We have a large selection.", you say, "between an atomic disaster and the general collapse of life on the planet. " Now we have come up with artificial intelligence that is, it seems, after the atomic bomb, man's most ambitious attempt to destroy himself. Does that scare you?? What is music losing? (or gets) artificial intelligence?
Man has already done enough damage with his intelligence (laughs), that he does not need to increase it artificially. Creative music with artificial intelligence gets some more effective aids at the level of studio technique, recorded sound and the like. The music industry, on the other hand, can produce cheap ready-made clothes more cheaply... But I'm afraid that all together, this is moving us even faster away from meaning and beauty and mutual respect.
"Regular encounters with poetry", you said, "they get us out of the rut of automatic thinking and perception, and then the actions. Banality ceases to be the only reality. "
I said it well. Give me, please, write it all together (laughter).
Are you still reading??
Well, to be honest, I haven't been reading lately. When I read new news on this phone... There is always something new that I am following, that interests me, I don't know, quantum physics, astronomy, ecology, and therefore when the algorithm records me that I am the one, then it delivers the contents to me and by the time I do that, I don't have time to read anything else (laughs). And yes, I'm still reading Rilke now, Stories about dear God. I sometimes read that out loud to Sandi. Beautiful short stories!
You are unequivocally, public, supported the student movement. Regime, however, harasses people from the region who do this publicly at the border.
They haven't touched me yet. I haven't had any problems, but if that's the general trend, I don't know why it wouldn't be. Well, I wouldn't like anything bad to happen, I'm glad I didn't have any inconveniences, but I want to support the students, because I really, most sincerely, have to.
About Rundek
I have to admit that the only music activity that I fully feel and understand,
That's what Darko Rundek does.
It's nice to sing at weddings, or wherever,
But if you don't sacrifice your talent, gift and work for a higher purpose,
You are only a more or less talented musician, but not an artist.
Darko Rundek is exactly that, not an entertainer of the masses,
But someone who frees them.
You don't need an expensive sound system, a stage, just him and the guitar are enough.
And all those magical rhythms, lyrics and voice, which trigger the primordial.
Rundek is always where the fight is.
If they're polluting Una, he's there.
If they are polluting Serbia, he is there.
If they are killing animals, he is there.
If they are harassing migrants, he is there.
Somewhere aware that a man is a man, regardless of religion and nation.
He has a song for everything, because he is a song.
One of the few incomparable ones.
Who did not flatter, flirt,
He didn't even need to fill the biggest halls.
He always sang for the chosen ones, and that can only be done by those for whom money is not the first priority, but something deeper.
And those are the messages you send and the music.
I was watching him support the students yesterday.
What more do you need?
"Oh Carmela, there are no more fascists..."
Rundek performs like a modern samurai, who uses a guitar instead of a sword.
A symbol of resistance and disobedience.
A symbol of insubordination.
Where rebellion is not hysteria, but conscience.
Few have managed to combine alternative and universality like him.
And where he is, you are safe there.
Una is safe.
Serbia is safe.
The animals are safe.
Everyone is safe.
Many artists become caricatures of themselves over the years.
Rundek became more and more Rundek over the years.
And that, after almost half a century on the stage, is the most difficult.
Few have succeeded in doing so,
To teach us what it means to grow old with dignity,
And stay the same.
Because the spirit remained the same.
And it flies like a flag of freedom,
Over all of us.
Few with whom, as with him,
We all become one.
And, if I know anything, I know that one of the few,
Who will not betray us, or sell us.
Never.
Not just because he doesn't want to, or can't,
He doesn't even need it.
Everything is already there.
Because it has itself,
And that primordial spirit of freedom,
which when you find, you don't need anything more.
Stefan Simić, writer, Facebook, 10.5.2026.
