Lublana je Bulana

In 1977 two friends from the Ljubljana suburb of Kodeljevo, Gregor Tomc and Peter Lovšin, decided to start a band. They had been listening to British punk, Lovšin was already writing deliberately provocative songs, and Tomc came up with the name: Pankrti, the Bastards. They rehearsed in the basement of the local music school, played their first concert at a school in Moste, and at first stuck to covers of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the New York Dolls. Among the first originals that caught on was "Lublana je bulana", whose title declares the capital sick. In 1978 it came out on the ŠKUC label as the band's first release. Pankrti billed themselves as the first punk band behind the Iron Curtain, and they were certainly among the first punk bands formed anywhere in a communist country. Their debut album Dolgcajt, meaning boredom, followed in 1980 and made them a cult band across Yugoslavia, helping to spread the Yugoslav new wave in Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade. John Peel played them on the BBC. The philosopher Tine Hribar later went as far as to argue that without the shock Pankrti caused in politics and culture at the end of the 1970s, the communist authorities would never have allowed the magazine Nova revija to launch in 1982. A short, rude song about the capital turned out to be the opening shot of something much bigger.