Name: Bone Music
Start: 2025-12-04T17:00:00+00:00
End: 2025-12-04T18:30:00+00:00
Location: Geoffrey Manton Lecture Theatre 5 ground floor

A talk about the secret underground culture of music lovers who defied the censors in the Cold War-era Soviet Union
About this Event

Join us for this hybrid research event on Gothic music and underground subculture. This is a free public event, open to all, which will be hosted by the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies.

For those joining in person, refreshments will be available from 5 pm and the talk will begin at 5.15, with Q and A at 6 pm.

For those joining online, you will be emailed the Teams link 3 days ahead of the event and earlier on the day of the event. Please join at 5 pm to check your connection, and the talk will begin at 5.15.

BONE MUSIC

They are images of pain and damage impressed with ghostly sounds of pleasure, fragile photographs of the inside of citizens engraved with the music they secretly loved, skin-thin slivers of DIY punk protest illegally traded in dark alleyways and hidden corners.

Stephen Coates tells the story of Bone Music. During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film.

Who were they? Why did they do it and how was it even possible? Based on years of interviews and oral testimonies, Stephen presents the stories of the original Bone bootleggers, their customers and persecutors, evoking their spirit of resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment.

STEPHEN COATES is a music producer, curator and broadcaster. He came across the subject of the X-Ray recordings in 2013 when travelling to Russia to perform.

He has written two books on the subject: ‘ X-Ray Audio’ and ‘Bone Music’. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, he is particularly interested in the interaction between counterculture and culture. He is also the organiser of the arts festival, the London Month of the Dead.