Attack on Moscow: what do we know about Picnic, the Russian rock band that was supposed to take the stage?

As well as sad memories of the Bataclan in Moscow. On Friday evening, at least 115 people were killed in an armed attack followed by a massive fire at a concert hall in the Moscow region, which the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) later claimed responsibility for.

A terrorist attack reminiscent of the terrorist attack against the Bataclan on November 13, 2015 in Paris, during which 90 people were killed and several hundred wounded during a concert by the rock band Eagles of Death Metal.

A little over eight years later, it was in the Crocus City Hall, located 16 km from the center of the Russian capital, that Islamist terrorists struck, while the rock group Picnic was supposed to perform a concert in this large hall.

Russian-speaking audience

Little known to the French public, Picnic is a Russian rock band born in 1978 in St. Petersburg, a city then called Leningrad. But the musicians believe that the group was officially founded only in 1981, when Edmund Shklyarsky became its leader. According to the latter, the group’s audience is almost exclusively Russian-speaking.

Formed by students from the Polytechnic School of Russia’s second largest city, the group released their first album, entitled “La Fumée” (“Smoke”), in 1982, and a year later achieved their first success, later becoming a Leningrad Rock laureate. Club festival. Since then, the group has released 26 albums and experienced numerous breakups in the 1980s and 1990s, but never went away.

Since 1981, the singer, guitarist and songwriter has been Edmund Shklyarsky, who has been accompanied by Leonid Kirnos on drums since 1983, Marat Korchemny on bass since 2003, and Stanislas Shklyarsky on piano since 2007. If their last album dates back to 2011, the band is still active, having just released a song called “Nothing, Don’t Be Afraid of Nothing.”

One of the group members is missing

Their style of music is a mixture of art rock, progressive rock and original Russian rock, with the musicians using electronic keyboards as well as folk and exotic instruments. With the exception of some early songs written in Polish, the group always sings in Russian.

In 2016, the group was banned from performing in Ukraine because they continued to perform in Crimea after its annexation by Russia.

At the moment, the fate of the musicians who were preparing to go on stage at the time of the attack is still unknown, but at least one of them has disappeared, reports the Russian press agency TASS. “There is no information yet about the member of the Picnic group who disappeared during the terrorist attack at Crocus,” said the group’s concert director Yuri Chernyshevsky. “We can’t contact one of them, we don’t know if he left Crocus,” he said, without specifying which of the four rockers it was.