The No Smoking band (Zabranjeno Pusenje in their original Serbo-Croatian language) was born in Sarajevo in 1980 and soon became the most significant musical expression of "New Primitivism", a cultural resistance movement created in the transition years of post-Tito Yugoslavia.
After two years of live performances in small Sarajevo concert halls, in 1984 the No Smoking (which musical critics have defined as a Gypsy techno-rock band) recorded their first album, "Das ist Walter". One of the songs in the album, "Zenica blues", was soon to hit the top charts in Yugoslavia with more than 100,000 copies sold. In the same period, the band appeared on a TV serial, "Surrealist Top List", a fake newscast that was actually a savage satire of Yugoslav politics. The trouble for the band started when its leader, Dr Nele Karajilic, made ironic remarks on Marshal Tito's death at a lively performance before a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters.
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