There is an excellent documentary of Sasha to be found on the net. Also a recording has surfaced of his first ever concert. Both are compelling artefacts. The documentary is made by his long time friend and manager Art Troitsky. He journeys back to all of Sasha's old haunts and talks to old friends, lovers, accomplices and at one point we stand in the room where he spent his last moments and look down out of the window to the hard ground below. A bleak moment by any televisual standard.

More exhilirating is the recording of the first concert he performed in Moscow. In a fellow musicians apartment just off the Artbat, in a room that is holding maybe 20 or 30 people. You feel yourself to be very much there in the room with him. There is a range of Sasha related articles up on the web now. Most are essential reading. I can't help thinking that Bashlachev is to this century what Rimbaud was to the last

An epiphany

I was in Moscow with the Band of Holy Joy in the late eighties. We were approached by a local musician who wanted to jam with us. The people around us whispered reverently. Apparently we were in the presence of Russia's most extreme performer. The authorities were in the habit of beating the guy up before sending him to Siberia. He would return time and time again to give the most intense un-compromising performances. This was the true living suffering underground here in our presence. And he wanted to play with our band. We looked at each other; then took a good look at the guy. Grinning at us was a balding overweight long hair with no teeth. He did not look like much of a revolutionary artist. But then what did we know?   And as artists, surely, you pray for such inspiring moments to happen. A guitar was taken out of a case and handed to him. Anticipation was everything.   He joined us on the stage. The moment never got beyond a standard twelve bar shuffle. It was awful. Thank God for vodka and champagne on an empty stomach. We were having a good time and had just made another friend. Everyone here smiled a lot. And everybody had a poem or a song or a tale to push at us. The earnest character with the straggly bald hair and the bad denim thanked us for jamming with him. Then he staggered off, smiling and content, lost to the blur of the night. The tour carried on. Inspiration hit us at every turn there seemed to be magic around every corner. Russia was a blast.

He came to me years later. I was around a Russian friend's house. I happened to mention the Siberia prone performance artist. I gave a full description of the guy, but couldn't supply a name. My friend stared at me. Didn't I know who I had shared the stage with? No. Didn't I understand? I shrugged. Platon, my friend, passed an old dirt sticky cassette tape over the table. Alexander ‘Sasha' Baschlachov. He was a legend. I was very lucky to have performed with him. He had committed suicide not long after we had played in Russia. I felt foolish for denigrating the guy. But I still couldn't reconcile my image of the bumbling character we'd played with, and the underground legend Platon was now salivating over. I pocketed the tape with scepticism. I would play it later when I got home.

Later became days later. I had just started a programme on Resonance and hadn't gotten off to a very good start. I love singers and writers of song more than anything. But the earnest troubadours that I had been booking on the show thus far were mainly of the William Morris wallpaper variety. The sheer polish of their performances, the professionalism and the ready adherence to tried and tested formula was beginning to make me feel a bit giddy. Was this my future in broadcasting? It was beginning to depress the hell out of me. I was bored and hadn't even started. And that's no way to be. Maybe it was time to get that job in Sainsbury's stacking shelves after all.

One freezing winter night I finally got around to putting the dirt sticky tape into the machine. And the sound that came out blew me away. It was a raw performance, primitively played, just a man and his acoustic, but with a passion I hadn't heard in a long time. The voice had something of the Duende about it, there were Brechtian elements, and for certain you could hear the hinterland romanticism of Bargeld in his twisted vowels. It was a raw anger, but delivered with a Shamanistic intensity. There seemed to be a lot of care and integrity in the words, but also a snarling nihilism. It was neither rock nor folk but something besides and beyond. For the first time in an age a singer songwriter made me feel like petrol bombing the gleaming windows of mundane conformity. It was a good feeling.   There isn't much to his songs, just the essence; no frills. He spits out the words and he batters his guitar. He has this aggressive intimacy. It feels like you are in the room with him. It's a feeling both frightening and exhilarating. Like the best songs make you feel. ‘The Time of the Bells' is his anthem, a beautiful mix of pagan visionary and rock attitude. They are songs that inhabit an unruly Russian place of magic and of madness in the soul. He vividly conjures up the hunger and despair and the holy vision that makes up that country's folklore.

Sasha emerged at the time of ˜Stagnation', an era when the artists, visionaries, expressionists, and all their supporters had been driven underground by state persecution. Word spread fast; of this singer and his songs. His clandestine performances were recorded and passed around. Out on the streets things for the Rock fans got colder and darker and the times turned brutally against them. They were afraid of informants. Afraid of what would happen to them once they were dragged off. For many were carted away. And the few who returned to the rock scene were never the same. It seemed to the journalist Art Troitsky that Baschlachov was the only Russian artist out of thousands and thousands who had the courage to say a sincere word. Then Glasnost happened and Sasha seemed to get swept away in the wave of music that erupted over-ground. Baschlachov felt himself becoming more and more marginalized.   On the 17 th of February 1988 Baschlachov jumped out the window of his Leningrad apartment on Kuznetsov Prospekt in the middle of the day. Posthumously his work found immense recognition. All his recordings and a book of his poetry were published and in Russia the myth of Baschlachov began to flourish; his spirit, this energy. remains.

And this energy, this spirit, was the thing missing from the radio programme I was attempting to do. I played the songs over and over again and got inspired. The next few months worth of troubadours were cancelled from the diary, and the show started becoming more of a trip. An expedition into the unknown, rather than some dusty museum of the ever predictable! The actor Tam Dean Burn was already on board. We were joined by the violinist Chris Brierley and the engineer of dissidence, Ali Macgregor. All of a sudden we had a band. The shows became one hour journeys into the back of beyond every week, unpredictable, ramshackle, shite, visionary, excellent, over emotional, righteous, foolish, insane, beautiful random and obscure but most of all a joy to do. Sasha remains with us, an inspired ghost. We need our visionaries, our mad poets, our outsiders, our saints. Now more than ever in this ultra conformist age of office rock and celebrity drivel. Can we really fathom just where Blair's insidious regime is taking us? Or how climate change and the new dawn of nuclear power will affect us? Noise is still the main thing that keeps me going. I'm hoping for someone from this era to step forward. Gouge a barbaric name, a crass slogan, into that tasteful William Morris wallpaper.   Ah, after some initial research I soon established that the guy we had shared a stage with all those years back wasn't Sasha Baschlachov at all. The dates of our bands arrival and this great singer's death just did not correspond. A shame, but in a way I am glad; something precious remains intact. I got my epiphany moment anyway. And wherever the balding long haired jamming Siberian exiled chancer is right now, I just want to say, mate, thanks, I salute you.

This epiphany first appeared in Wire magazine