By 
A Belgrade promoter’s fifty years in the music business – and what it teaches about doing PR without a budget, a database, or a functioning country.
The sofa had to go. So did the armchairs, the tables and the carpet.
Tina Turner was coming to Belgrade in the summer of 1990. The stadium had no dressing rooms – not bad ones, none – and every furniture rental company in the city wanted ninety per cent of the purchase price for a single day’s hire. Dropping the name Tina Turner moved nobody.
Srdjan Stojanovic mother was away on holiday. That helped.
He sent the crew into her apartment, stripped the front room, and rebuilt it backstage. When Turner arrived he handed her flowers and asked, with some anxiety, how she found it.
She said she felt at home.
“Of everything anyone has ever said to me in this business, that is the sentence I kept,” he says. His mother never found out. She died some years later. “I suppose I am telling her now.”
It was 19 August 1990, at Zemun stadium, on what was billed as her farewell tour – one of the last great Western stadium shows Yugoslavia would ever host. Within a year the country was at war.
For most people that would be the story of a lifetime. For Srdjan it is one scene among many: a table tennis championship won in Minnesota, an Eric Clapton review he was too frightened to sign, half an hour alone with Bob Dylan, two days stranded at an airport with Talking Heads, a decade in exile reporting his own country’s collapse for the BBC.
What connects them is a habit. Every time history shut the main entrance, he went looking for a side door.
The first one was opened by a rebellious seven-year-old.
The rebellion that decided everything
Srdjan was born in Belgrade in May 1960 and moved to Niš at two and a half, when his father took a chair in civil law at the new university. His mother taught French.
German was the obvious language for a professor’s son who had taken his doctorate in Germany. French was the obvious one for a French teacher’s son. Srdjan rejected both and, at seven, volunteered himself for private English lessons.
“That decision, made by a seven-year-old boy, decided my whole life.”
Everything downstream ran through it. The scholarship to America at seventeen. The journalism. The Englishman at a press conference in 1982 who was impressed by his English and hired him on the spot. Fifty-nine years of consequences from one act of childhood contrariness.
He landed in Minneapolis in 1977, the day after Elvis Presley died, and stood in the airport reading a headline that said THE KING IS DEAD. What king? This is a republic.
His second American lesson came in the car. He threw a gum wrapper out of the window and produced a silence he still remembers. Minnesota, he was told, does not do that. “I have not littered since, on two continents.”
The host house suited him exactly. His American father had a mathematics degree and worked for Westinghouse by day; at night he played in a country and western band, backing touring acts including Johnny Cash. There were guitars and an organ lying around. Music in that house wasn’t distant glamour – it was something people made after work.
The article he was afraid to sign
American high school let him choose his own subjects. He took world religions, studio recording, guitar, and – for his English requirement – journalism.
The marking system startled him most. Papers were graded under codes, names hidden until the marks were fixed. He argued constantly with his mathematics teacher and it never cost him a point. Back home, a teacher who disliked you could ruin years of your life.
His first published piece covered a charity run around Lake Minnetonka. His second was a review of an Eric Clapton concert, and it carried no byline at all.
His host parents had banned the venue after trouble at a Led Zeppelin show there. So he bought two tickets, told them he was on the evening shift at Burger King with his friend Mike, and went anyway – then stripped his name off the review in case the paper reached the kitchen table.
He was seventeen and he had his trade.
Back in Belgrade he took a law degree, which gave him a qualification. Journalism gave him a life.
The best restriction of his career
His editors would not let him near politics. He was allowed music.
“It turned out to be a magnificent restriction.”
He had arrived at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right country. Readers outside the region assume the Iron Curtain ran along Yugoslavia’s borders. It didn’t. Tito’s Yugoslavia was ringed by the Soviet bloc but was itself non-aligned and keen to look more liberal than its neighbours. Western bands toured Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana long before they could play anywhere else in Eastern Europe – and those three cities were the only stops for hundreds of miles in any direction.
A young man with fluent English and a press pass in Belgrade in 1982 was standing at a door that did not exist in Sofia or Bucharest.
By 1981 Srdjan was writing columns and reviews for Politika Ekspres. In 1982, at a press conference, he fell into conversation with the British promoter Norman Dugdale – a man who had started out in 1966 as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix, and gone on to manage Rod Stewart and run the finances for Dire Straits.
The conversation became a friendship. The friendship became a job. Srđan became his man in Belgrade, and in May 1982 promoted his first concert.
How to buy a world tour with money that can’t leave the country
In 1985 Dire Straits were about to launch the biggest tour of their lives behind Brothers in Arms. They chose to rehearse for it on the Dalmatian coast.
The mechanism was the clever part. Every dinar taken at the box office across Dubrovnik, Split, Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana was earmarked to be spent inside the country by the band’s own thirty-person party – hotels, crew, catering, everything. Yugoslavia could not have afforded to buy a Dire Straits concert. Instead it got five, and no hard currency left.
“I am still quietly proud of that piece of accounting.”
The archive makes the scale plain. The Brothers in Arms Tour opened in Split on 25 April 1985 and closed in Sydney a year later: 248 shows, 117 cities, 23 countries, over two and a half million tickets, with Live Aid in the middle. The album has sold more than thirty million copies.
The largest rock tour of the 1980s began in Yugoslavia – not as a gesture, but because someone worked out the financing.
There’s a detail Srdjan doesn’t claim for himself.
The album was released on 13 May 1985. Belgrade heard the entire show on the 10th and 11th. For a few days, the only people on earth who had heard those songs live were Yugoslavs.
H is for cold
At Pionir Hall, the Dire Straits tour manager arrived in distress: no hot water in the dressing room showers, all day.
Srdjan went to look. One tap was marked H. The other was marked T.
The man had been turning H for hot, in good faith, for hours. Hladno means cold. The warm tap was the one he had been carefully avoiding – T, for toplo.
“Don’t you ever tell this to anyone,” the tour manager said.
Forty years on, he tells it to everybody in the business.
Half an hour with the man who speaks to nobody
Bob Dylan played the same Belgrade stadium as Tina Turner in June 1991, days before the shooting started. Dylan is famous for speaking to no one – he relays instructions to his own band through an assistant.
Srdjan wore a Minnesota t-shirt and asked the assistant to tell “Mr Zimmerman” that another Minnesotan would like to say hello.
Dylan said yes.
They talked for half an hour, about Minnesota rather than music. Then Dylan asked about the opening act – Galija, a band from Srđan’s home town of Niš, whom he had booked. He liked them. Could he hear more? Within half an hour the cassette was in his hands. Who should he call if anything came of it?
“Call me,” Srđan said.
Nothing did. It hardly mattered: for Galija, being noticed by Bob Dylan went straight into the band’s biography and stayed there. Those two nights – Ljubljana, then Belgrade – were the only concerts Dylan ever played in Yugoslavia. Within a fortnight, Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence.
Fame runs the other way too. Srdjan promoted Bo Diddley in Belgrade, then spotted him a year later playing a small Minneapolis pub. He went early, introduced himself as the man’s promoter from Serbia.
Not a flicker of recognition.
“The bigger the star, the easiest person they are. The difficult ones are the men who had a great career and then dropped.”
At his first show in 1982, a guitarist from a famous English blues band refused to walk one flight of stairs from the car park. I am a star. I do not walk. Years later, Srđan heard, he was playing Serbian villages for two hundred euros a night.
PR before analytics
The craft, in those years, ran entirely on people.
He knew the journalist at that paper, the editor at that radio station, the producer at the television channel. Free tickets opened doors. But tickets only open a door – reliability keeps it open.
“Do one campaign properly and you never chase them again. They call you.”
Some of those relationships are now more than forty years old and have quietly turned into friendships. It is worth sitting with that for a moment, in an industry currently obsessed with reach figures: his entire distribution network was thirty people whose numbers he knew by heart, maintained for four decades, and it was enough to fill halls for Dire Straits and Tina Turner.
“This is not your war”
Then the concerts stopped.
As Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991, Dugdale offered him a house and an instruction: You are not a soldier. This is not your war.
He went to London and stayed ten years. The industry still knew his name, so tickets and backstage passes were waiting whenever he called. He spent a decade watching shows from the side of the stage in one city while reporting the destruction of another – as a BBC foreign correspondent, on air every two or three days, with everyone back home watching him do it.
A man who had spent the eighties explaining Yugoslavia to visiting musicians spent the nineties explaining its collapse to the world.
His English colleagues told him to go home when it settled and stand for office. He told them he’d be shot at the first rally where he started preaching democracy. They thought he was being dramatic.
With Serbian Rock Stars and Football Players in London in 1998
He enrolled at LSE in 1998. The following spring, NATO began bombing Belgrade.
His last lecture of the semester, on 28 March 1999, was given by Lord David Owen, a former Balkan peace negotiator. Srđan had a ticket home for the 29th and asked him directly whether he should go.
“Nobody can stop the Americans now,” he said.
The campaign had already been running for five days. He wasn’t deciding whether to be home if it started – he was deciding whether to fly into it. He went, stayed a week of what became seventy-eight days, sat in the shelters when the sirens sounded.
Then took a bus three hundred and sixty kilometres to Budapest to fly back and finish his degree.
He is careful not to inflate any of it. His neighbourhood was never hit. “I had no hardship. I want to be honest about that, because plenty of people did.”
Srdjan and Jeff Beck in 2007
Good people are good people
On what broke the country, he is unsparing – and unusual. Nationalism he calls a sickness, a virus he never caught. But he thinks nationalism and religion were mostly the curtain.
Behind it stood people making fortunes from a war. What has emerged since, he says, is that the crooked elites of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia were cooperating with one another throughout, while the front lines were held by other people’s sons.
Every friend he had in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia before the war, he still has.
“Good people are good people.”
Governments changed, borders hardened, flags were replaced. The friendships didn’t move.
India, and one restaurant
Ask him about India and he doesn’t reach for a cliché. He goes back to Tito and Indira Gandhi, and the era when the two countries were genuinely close.
He undersells the connection. The Non-Aligned Movement wasn’t something Yugoslavia joined — it was founded in Belgrade, at the first summit from 1 to 6 September 1961, with Tito in the chair and Nehru among the five founding leaders. Twenty-five countries attended. The groundwork was laid in July 1956, when Tito, Nehru and Nasser signed the Brioni Declaration on the Adriatic — a meeting since called the Third World’s Yalta.
Srđan was sixteen months old, living in Belgrade. The friendship that would link India and Yugoslavia for thirty years was assembled in his city while he was learning to walk in it.
The affection outlived the politics, he says. Then he offers a more practical measure.
“We love Indian food. There is only one Indian restaurant in Belgrade.”
A pause.
“Someone should be prosecuted.”
The T-shirt he bought in 1976
He retired in May last year. It lasted about four months.
In September a colleague in Hungary called about the Harlem Globetrotters. He said the political situation was too unstable to promise anything for November. She clarified: November 2026.
Then he remembered something. Fifty years earlier, on his first solo trip to London, he had bought a Harlem Globetrotters t-shirt for his girlfriend.
With the Harem Globetrotters
This November he is promoting the Globetrotters in Belgrade on their hundredth anniversary tour – at the Aleksandar Nikolić Hall, the building formerly known as Hala Pionir.
It is the hall where he played competitive table tennis as a teenager. Where he promoted his first concert in 1982. Where Dire Straits played the two nights of the tap marked H. It stands two hundred yards from his front door.
At sixteen he bought the shirt. At sixty-six he is bringing the team into the hall where several of his lives began.
“I make no claims about how life is organised. I only report what I observe.”
He still plays table tennis weekly, without keeping score. “The moment you play for points, you become tense.” The two hours are spent discussing everything except table tennis.
His daughter is sixteen and currently in America on a music scholarship – her first time abroad alone, with young people from seventeen countries. He had planned to collect her and take her to Minnesota, but the visa queue was four months. Instead he wrote a long letter to his American host mother, promising next year.
She is the only parent he has left. His Serbian parents are gone, and his American host father too. Nearly fifty years after one exchange year, that family is still family.
“It gives you a second set of everything, and then keeps the accounts open for the rest of your life.”
Asked what he would tell the seventeen-year-old, he says he sometimes thinks he should have stayed in America – that he kept coming home to share what he had learned with a country that didn’t particularly want it.
“That was the mistake.” Not said bitterly. Just reported, like everything else.
He is a book publisher himself, which raises the obvious question about his own memoir. He agrees it should exist. All that remains, he says, is to put a date on it.
The day he starts, and the day he finishes.
Karnvir Mundrey is the Editor, and the Founder of Atharva Marcom and TheFutureOfPR.com. Reach out at tfofpr@gmail.com or at +918296303806.
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Karnvir Mundrey is also the producer and host of 4 YouTube channels. Finest Fintalk brings you the latest in Finance, LitInMin for Books, The Health Tips Podcast for health and Atharva Marcom for leadership talks
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