Slovenian avant-garde music group Laibach is performing in London tonight and like last time, I’ll be there sporting my North Korea t-shirt. The band’s rendition of the North Korean song We Will Go To Mount Paektu is a classic!
Gone are the days when Laibach was enemy No 1 for the Yugoslav authorities. At celebrations last year in Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, commemorating the formation of socialist Yugoslavia, Laibach was the surprise headliner, with the band’s spokesperson starting their performance by issuing a massive apology to Tito.
Here's what I wrote about it in November 2025...
Slovenian band Laibach apologises to Tito!
29 November was Republic Day, Yugoslavia’s national day, commemorating the second sitting of the Anti-Fascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) held in Jajce, Bosnia in 1943. It was here that the plans for post-war Yugoslavia were set. The hall where this meeting was held remains as a museum (and the people working there are lovely!).
Usually on 29 November there are festivities to honour the date, but this year saw the first ever AVNOJ Fest held in Jajce. Headliners for the week-long festival somewhat surprisingly was Slovenian punk metal/avant-garde group Laibach.
I say “surprising” given Laibach’s notoriety in Yugoslavia in the 1980s.
The punk scene has always been about being openly offensive and going for shock, and in socialist Yugoslavia, calling a band after the Slovenian capital’s German name – the one the Nazis applied when they occupied the city during WWII, plus wearing Nazi-like uniforms, certainly achieved that. Laibach were accused of promoting fascism, but anyone who truly followed their work would know they were all about countering authoritarianism.
Laibach were highly critical of the Yugoslav authorities in the 1980s to the point that its band members were deemed “enemies of the people”. At one infamous performance in Zagreb in 1983, Laibach even showed an image of Tito superimposed with that of male genitalia, with the Yugoslav police quickly intervening and forcing the band members off stage.
Unexpectedly, but not unjustifiably, Jani Novak – the leader of group known for its controversial use of totalitarian symbolism – opened Laibach’s concert at AVNOJ Fest with an apology to Marshal Tito and making reference to the Yugoslav WWII partisan motto “Smrt fašizmu sloboda narodu” – Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People:
“Comrade Tito, please forgive us for having destroyed your country.” “Now we know – Death to Fascism”
As what one commenter said about Laibach’s apology to Marshal Tito:
“It shows how much things have gone downhill since Yugoslavia fell apart that even former ‘enemies of the people’ are now praising Tito.”
But recently Laibach left the Yugosphere speechless when the group claimed that it’s always been a ‘pop act’. Though going by its latest release – Love Machine, with Senidah, the most prominent Slovenian pop star by far of the past decade in ex-Yugoslavia and known as the queen of Balkan Trap (this genre now bears very little relation to the original Trap), there’s a kernel of truth to that statement. Leave it to Laibach to cause a stir.
Photo credit: Gruppe LAIBACH, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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