Western music may have been changing the world in the 1950s, but if you happened to be in Russia you were out of luck. State censorship was in full effect in the Soviet Union, and purchasing a western recording was close to impossible. But a few industrious music fans invented a way.
Stephen Coates, the leader of a British band called The Real Tuesday Weld, happened on this secret history by accident. Several years ago on a tour stop in St. Petersburg, he was strolling through a flea market when a strange item caught his eye.
"I thought, is that a record? Or is it an X-ray? I picked it up, and it seemed to be both," he recounts. "I brought it back to London, and I was fascinated by it. So I started to dig, and that has led me on a very strange journey."
Coates is now an obsessive of what is nicknamed 'bone music' — makeshift LPs etched into used X-rays, providing a disguise for their contraband contents. He's collected his findings in a new book, X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone.
According to Stephen, around 1946 the Second World War was over and a guy retunred to the Soviet Union with a war trophy, a recording lathe. It's like a gramophone in reverse, which you can use to write the grooves of music onto plastic. People who came into his shop observed what he was doing, and made their own machines.
They would start off with a regular X-ray, put a plate on it, draw around it with a pen and cut it out.
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