On stage Oleh Skrypka is an irascible, bleach-haired, trombone-voiced, large-boned whirlwind of arms and legs whose dancing talent lies in his ability to take the most awkward and imperfect pose and make it look easy.
He is the front man for Vopli Vidopliassova, Ukraine's oldest rock group of any note and today one of its most popular - one that mixes the unusual with the comic and the traditional.
It is a band and a style that are difficult to pin down.
One journalist simply called us "a musical psychiatric ward"
Vopli Vidopliassova, with its unmistakable sound and vivid, comic-like stage personality, is the Ukrainian rock act that has the talent and originality to make a successful go of it in the West.
We reached a degree of fame in Paris in the mid-1990s before retreating to Kyiv when lack of management and marketing halted our movement upwards.
In person, Skripka, who plays the trumpet and the accordion in addition to taking care of the singing responsibilities and whose on-stage persona evokes images of a somewhat huskier Iggy Pop minus the helter-skelter outlandishness, is soft-spoken, and thoughtful, and portrays a subtle vulnerability. He is the unusually named group's main composer and wordsmith, and its central character.
The band's designation, Vopli Vidopliassova, was taken from a pseudonym used by a hero of a Dostoyevsky novel. The members of the group were looking for something that would express their artistic and creative inclinations, and decided the name and what it represented embodied it all. It was, however, not only a term that was difficult to pronounce, but difficult to remember as well, which long ago led fans to simply dub the boys "V.V."
