The whole of Europe sang his "Julie" in 1983, and thanks to it, Danijel Popović went to Munich to represent Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest.
From the small town of Titograd, thanks to the love for music that he inherited from his mother, he started to build his career first in the former Yugoslavia.
After the Eurovision Song Contest, where he took 4th place, his popularity was so great that at concerts in Europe he had more audiences than the Swedish band ABBA, he was on the charts ahead of Bowie, Boy George's manager waited for him for days at the hotel, and country singer Chris Waters offered him an American career...
Although all this sounds incredible to many, these are the details of the musical life of Danijelo Popović, who is celebrating two jubilees this year - 50 years of career and 40 years of discography, and in honor of all this, he will give the audience new songs.
About career, music of the past and that which is popular today, album, hobbies for Magazin popović talks...
This year you are celebrating 50 years of career and 40 discography. When you look back, how did those five decades pass for you, because there were everything, successes, hits, failures...?
I can often say that it went by in the blink of an eye. I know it sounds like a cliché, but looking back, it really was a blink of an eye. That year, 1972, counts as the beginning of my professional solo career, because then I participated in the "Titograd Spring" festival and won two first prizes (I think they were for music and interpretation and another - for arrangement). The song "Cry" is a gentle, sad chanson and is entirely my work. At the age of seventeen, I was already a complete chanson player, which I think was significantly contributed by the influence of my mother Nadia, who played and sang chansons almost every day. Edith Piaf, Salvatore Adamo, Mireil Mathieu, Charles Aznavour, etc. listened to that music.
It was interesting that I regularly listened to that music at home, and from the immediate vicinity of our family home came traditional and folk music, from the garden of Hotel Crna Gora. That mix was special, but I, as a very young person, was already leaning more towards that Anglo-Saxon musical expression that French chansons carried.
I also had the first unofficial club in Podgorica, which I named Francisco Tarrega, after the Spanish guitarist and composer of classical music.
I redid the common basement rooms in the building where we lived, all by hand (I repainted all the woodwork, made a bar in the shape of an organ, covered the walls with wonderful materials, put carpets on the floors. Then my friends, future painters, brought their works. There we gathered, played music, recited, sang. It was such a beautiful space that no one touched us, not even the police.....They even knew how to say that it was nicer there than at home. The only thing was that we didn't have any sound system, i.e. music. I remember one summer day when I was playing and singing in the courtyard of the building, an Italian man came by. I guess he came to fix something on his car at the service station that was in the immediate vicinity, and while waiting, he listened. I don't know how it got to the point where I showed him the club. All I know is that he took a Stereo Voxon cassette player out of the car with speakers and gave it to us, and we connected it to some battery. It was a quadraphonic system where each instrument is heard through one speaker .
That's how the club got us music. The first song we listened to was “Proud Mary” (by John Fogerty), by Credence Clearwater Revival.
I also played in the groups "Nada" and "Enthusiasts". With "Enthusiasts" I went on the first big tour in the USSR.
Tours and gigs with various bands were my reality until 1982, when I recorded my first album "Bio sam naivan" for Jugoton. That's when I signed a contract with the same publishing house. A year later, the dice of fate came together and, after placing in Munich at Eurovision 1983 with the song "Julie", everything moves at breakneck speed.
The flood of variety caught me and I could either fight with it, or partially surrender to it. Show programs, concerts, tours, one album for "Jugoton" every year... I traveled Europe and the world up and down. In the unhappy nineties, everything seemed to stop, but: "Who cares about singing anyway", I thought. I retired to the studio and worked for others, often under a pseudonym.
Only in the second half of the nineties did things start, and after the Croatian Eurovision Song Contest where Minea performed with the song "Good boy".
When it became known that I was the author of that song, the entire Croatian music scene was suddenly at my door. At that time, I had four arrangers, four singers of backing vocals, four sound masters and I worked day and night, for well-known and less well-known names.
The group Mr President, who had the song "Coco jumbo" at the time, tried to reach me because they liked the song "Good Boy" very much and wanted to take it for themselves. However, as the contact went through their producer and my songwriter, time passed, almost a year. In the absence of a new hit, the group disbanded. I worked for Severina, Željko Bebek, Sandy, Minea, Jasna Zlokić, Nives Celzijus, Jasmin Stavros.
The XNUMXs were somewhat better, but I no longer had a team of people who would work with me on the development of my career (better to say, the continuation), so I had ups and downs.
Now I got started and made the decision to become active: musically and media-wise. This was influenced, above all, by my maturity and a deep reflection on the meaning of life and what it is that I want.
You are the record holder for the number of sold audio carriers of only one project, "I was naive", which sold 1.200.000 copies in the territory of the former SFRY. How do all these data look to you today, when the discography is reduced to what is published on the Internet because albums are not bought? How much do they encourage you considering that you are preparing an album?
Now the situation for authors is much less favorable in every sense. However, I believe that quality always finds a way. I hope it will be the same with my new songs.
With this album, you want to present yourself as a mature author. Given that you did not, like other colleagues, change genres to adapt to trends, what will the new album actually bring?
This material truly represents me as I am. I can say that, with this maturity and mileage in music, I have the right not to make compromises in terms of approaching my compositions to something that could be called commercial. I don't want to be commercial. I actually want the audience, both my former audience and some new ones, to feel every tone, every emotion...and these songs carry a handful of them. They are honest, true. There is a part of me in each one. A heartbeat, a sigh, a smile or a tear. This is me: sensitive, emotional, altruistic; vulnerable yet strong; an artist with soul and heart. This is my story. A story about love, passion, pain, joy, a story about how the seal of untruth followed me: Kano Kastigan. It will bring an explosion and exchange of emotions, I hope. I wish that. I especially wish, dream and live for a solo concert in my hometown, one that I have never had.
It seems to me, for the first time, that I really have support: from the mayor of Podgorica, through the Secretariat for Culture to the wonderful, capable and kind Mrs. Snežana Burzan, the director of KIC "Budo Tomović". In the media in Montenegro, there are now some wonderful, educated, capable young people without prejudices, open to any kind of cooperation. I am lucky enough to be in contact with such people. First of all, to women. It gives me hope for a better tomorrow. I have always said that women should be the main ones in all spheres of life, especially politics. Women are the "key to life" on the planet.
When you were the most popular in the 70s and 80s, there was no internet, and in order to hear a song we liked, we would wait for it to be played on the radio. Today, radio stations don't make hits, views on YouTube count, which can often be bought, and anyone can record a song and reach an audience. How much did all this affect the fact that today music is seen less and less as art and more and more as entertainment?
When people ask me how trends in music are changing, I point out exactly that. Here is an example of the Eurovision Song Contest. Sensation is sought. Something that will provoke the audience and thus reach them. More and more people are moving towards the visual, and less and less towards the audio atmosphere, that is, the song is less and less important. That's the wrong way, in my opinion. It seems that melodiousness, metrics, rhythm, harmonies have been forgotten.
I may be of an older generation, but I want to sit down and listen to songs. With them to relax and enjoy. I don't want to watch/listen to a mix of anything and everything. You know when you have a little bit of everything left in the fridge, but nothing enough, so you start experimenting. Well, that's how trends work for me today.
Your name is often associated with the Eurovision Song Contest. Already in 1983, you represented Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Julie", and it is one of the best results achieved by domestic performers. Considering that the popularity in Europe came overnight, how did you deal with it then, because some who are not ready for that world take it all in the wrong direction?
I really achieved huge popularity in Europe in 1983, but it didn't really come overnight. A lot of things, after that performance in Munich, and one could say from the first bars of "Julie" fell under the rubric: "Believe it or not".
On the lists of music magazines in Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, I am in the company of names such as: Shakin Stevens, "Euritmics", "Kajagoogoo", Nena, David Bowie, "Spandau Ballet", Michael Jackson. Placed better than Bowie at one point. On Red Square in Moscow, as an announcement of my tour in 1990, there was a billboard with my image measuring 100 by 100m. The Zagreb concert management had to find a replacement for Ivica Šerfezi, who had large and successful tours in the USSR, but wanted to retire. I was in the plan because of my great previous experience, as well as my huge popularity. I was on tour for a month. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, nothing was the same.
In Norway, 41.000 people at a concert sing all the songs from the album "I was naive" together with me in my language. At that moment, a few days earlier in the same place, ABBA had 25.000 people. In the Faroe Islands I'm performing under some huge tent with Shakin Stevens. I released two albums in English for Ariola and Arco trading. Mr. Chris Waters, a famous singer-songwriter in the genre of country music, from Nashville, offers me to continue my career there.
Boj Džorja's manager waited for me in Zagreb, at the Dubrovnik hotel, for almost three days and left angry because he thought I didn't show up on purpose. I didn't even know it was waiting for me. They didn't tell me. The same thing happened with George Moroder, a great magician of disco and electronic music who wanted me to sing the song "Neverending Story" because of my vocal range and because I could sing falsetto with ease. Later, the song was sung by Limahl. I didn't realize how much of a star I was then. From one performance in Vienna, they had to take me out in some kind of sound box, because after I went on stage, total chaos ensued. The girls in the front rows were swooning. My children used to come to the door of the house where I lived in Zagreb to see if I was real, if I was eating, if I was sleeping at all.
It was the English version of the song "Julie" that topped the charts in many countries. You tried and came very close to going to the Eurovision Song Contest in 1991 with the song "Daj obuci levisice". But that year, Bebi Doll represented us in Italy with the song "Brazil" and was the last. Didn't your previous success recommend you for this competition and how much intolerance was already felt in the Balkans and that war would break out?
If I had gone to Rome in 1991, I'm sure I would have won. First of all, the song is a hit, has an infectious rhythm and is easy to remember. We had a perfectly rehearsed stage performance and we truly looked, even by today's standards, world class. If I had appeared on the stage in Rome, the mere fact that in 1983 I finished the competition in fourth place, only one point below the third-placed Sweden (the same Karola Hegkvist who won in Rome), would have already given me a certain advantage. Unfortunately, even that evening in Sarajevo, there was a smell of impending accidents. The victory was then stolen from me. But even now, from this perspective, it is not the most terrible. It is terrible that this is the year in which the disintegration of the state began, the years of misery and sorrow, the years of suffering.
It was during those war years, at the peak of your career, that you retired from the music scene, and decided to continue playing music, but through work for others. How inspiring was he and did you meet another Daniel then? Did you then regret that you did not use the success of the Eurovision Song Contest to leave the Balkans?
I didn't retire. I was kind of forced to do it. I thought "Who wants to sing now?". But I had a family, I had to live. I have perfected myself in every sense. I worked on learning and working on myself as much as possible related to the creative process, from the creation of music to the final product. I've been getting some equipment. It wasn't easy. I figured it was better to work under a pseudonym. It was like that until "Dora" in 1995 and Minea. There were various situations, but I came out stronger from each one. Today I can say that I have a good swimming costume. I did so many things that, for example, I did my last released album from 2014, "Fantasia", from start to finish completely by myself: music, guitars, lead vocals, backing vocals, programming, arrangements, mixing, sound service, production, eight months in his studio.
You signed a hundred-year contract with Jugoton (now Croatia Record) a long time ago. Are the clauses from that contract respected and did you do well with it, or would it be more in your favor today?
For Jugoton, I had signed a hundred-year, one could say, lifetime contract. However, in the unfortunate nineties, it was stopped. Almost all of my material came out for one publishing house. I have always been loyal to Jugoton. Fortunately, Croatia Records, as the successor of Jugoton, recognized this new material as quality and stood behind me.
As you said yourself, you worked for others, so your songs were sung by many artists. How hard is it to hit the sensibility of someone you work for, while sometimes having to tame your ego?
When I work for others, I always try to understand what would suit someone best, to feel someone's sensibility. However, working with someone does not depend only on you, on your will. It also depends on how willing the other party is to accept suggestions, advice, and even criticism. I am very disciplined, self-critical, punctual and a workaholic. I expect the same from my collaborators. Of course, this interaction also depends on the direction in which everything will go. In a way, whether I will be inspired and motivated enough to make a song.
Without support, I could not organize a concert in my hometown
Although you were born in Titograd, as you discovered, you never had a concert in your hometown, even when you were at the height of your popularity. Do Montenegrins forgive success and is it only someone else's fault or partly yours because you could have organized it yourself with the help of a friend?
I couldn't organize it myself, that's for sure. Why am I telling you this? I remember, on one occasion, I was sitting in the cafe of the Montenegrin National Theater with my sister. My sister worked there. I don't know how it came about that she suggested to me to start the story/idea that I should hold a concert there. I begged her not to. Not to ask anyone, because I already knew the answer. Now you will ask me: How did you know? I knew. It's an unusual premonition.
She asked her boss at the time (the director of the theater at the time), and she unapologetically replied, in front of me, as if I wasn't even present, that only Đorđe Balašević and the group "Perper" could sing there.
This story has nothing to do with the mentioned performers. It has to do with the attitude and attitude towards me. As if I wasn't born and raised in Podgorica. It was as if I had never been theirs. That's sad.
Physical work relaxes
In addition to music, you can make furniture, but also restore old ones. Is it your escape from music today or do you have another hobby?
Physical work relaxes me. Whenever I feel stressed, I do something concrete. Every space I lived in, I knew how to completely remodel in a month. I fixed my cars myself and did all the minor repairs. I paint, draw, read, write a biography.
I like to be informed, and I follow all regional televisions, more precisely, I watch the news on all televisions in the area of our Balkans. I like to watch a good movie, especially science fiction. I walk regularly. I love nature. I am altruistic. Cosmopolitan.
Bonus video:
