British Musician Tells Story of Russian Records on Bones - The Moscow Times

The Moscow Times
By Sergey Chernov 05 May 2015 

In the Soviet Union, Western rock music was once so precious that at least one fan paid for it with his blood, said London musician Stephen Coates, who is in the middle of a project covering the unique phenomenon of music on “bones” or “ribs” — home-produced records on used X-ray film that were all the rage in the country before the advent of reel-to-reel tape records.

One of the project’s heroes, Rudolph Fuks, would donate his blood to earn money to get a record-making machine assembled for him by an acquaintance. Perhaps best-known as the producer of banned Soviet urban-folk singer Arkady Severny (1939-1980), Fuks was one of the leading figures in the era of X-ray records — producing and releasing Western music — jazz, rock and roll and boogie-woogie, which was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities.

“I think he told me that he went to hospital many times to pay somebody to make a recording machine, so in other words, in English you would say, ‘He gave his blood to make ‘bone,’” said Coates, speaking to The Moscow Times from London via Skype.  

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