“Our stupid song is a response to human stupidity”, warns Croatian punk band Let 3

From our special correspondent in Liverpool (UK)

Six cranks with outrageous make-up and dressed as crazy military officers… The Croatian group Let 3 (pronounced “let tri”) will not go unnoticed, this Tuesday evening, during the first semi-final of Eurovision, broadcast live from 21 hours on Culturebox (channel 24). We bet that many French media will greedily throw themselves into their performance to reinforce their prejudices about the kitsch dimension of the competition and the “gag” performances.

“At first glance, we may look like a joke, but we’re not new to the business. We’ve always done that. We are not joking. We are serious as cancer, slips us the singer Zoran Prodanovic, alias Prlja, 58 years old. Our song is a little stupid but it is our response to human stupidity. »

“Too much is never enough”

In the text of Mama sc – these two letters are pronounced “chteu” – it is about a mother who buys a tractor, armageddon, a crocodile, a psychopath… On stage, the Croats also tremble in front of two dummy shells there Doctor Strangelove and end up in kangaroo briefs… “The too much is never enough, continues the leader of the group. No matter what crazy things you can do, they will always fall short of the crazy world you live in. »

The song can be unofficially interpreted as a satire on Vladimir Putin and a planet on the verge of implosion… “We are in Liverpool to say that we are opposed to all discrimination, whether it concerns origins, orientation sexuality, religions…, lists Prlja. In our career, we have always tried to react to the things around us. »

Let 3 was born in 1986, in Rijeka, a coastal town in the south of present-day Croatia. “She was the epicenter of the explosion punk and new wave during Yugoslavia’s last years as a country. We thought the best was yet to come, and then afterwards, there was this fucking war and all the horrors that the conflict created,” laments the artist.

With a first album released in 1989, Two Dogs Fuckin’ (“Two dogs fucking”, a title beaten trivially by, Angela Merkel will be, “Angela Merkel shits” in 2016), cult in Croatia, the group has built its notoriety nationally and in the Balkans. Anchored in the counter-culture, keen on outrageous imagery, sometimes bordering on pornography, he has regularly distinguished himself with happenings.

“We have always thought of our actions to provoke reactions”

Thus, in 2000, in Lubljana (Slovenia), while the American and Russian presidents, Georges W Bush and Vladimir Poutine were meeting, Let 3 inaugurated a 4-meter statue, representing a grandmother endowed with a gigantic penis in as a “fraternal gift to the peoples of the United States and Russia”. The same year, the members of the group staged their own execution in a public square in Zagreb (Croatia) in front of people dressed as mustachioed grannies. In 2009, in a manifesto read in Lubljana, they called for the “abolition” of the Catholic Church in Slovenia “or, at least, to reduce the number of apostles in the Catholic liturgy from twelve to six”.

“We have always thought about our actions to provoke reactions”, summarizes Prlja. Let 3’s participation in Eurovision gives it a new sounding board. Since Croatia’s first participation in the competition in 1993, artists representing the country have never attracted so much attention even before the start of the competition. When it is pointed out to the singer, his false mustache lifts: “I think that means that we have succeeded in our mission. »

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