Leningrad Cowboys

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The band.

The Leningrad Cowboys is a Finnish rock and roll band famous for its humorous songs and concerts featuring the Soviet Red Army Choir.

The band were the invention of Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki, a fictional band in his 1989 film Leningrad Cowboys Go America. However, for the fictional band he used members of a real Finnish band, the Sleepy Sleepers plus a few others, and in the film they are joined by Nicky Tesco, former lead member of UK Punk rock band, The Members. However, following the film, the band then took on a life of its own, appearing in their own right in recordings, videos and concerts. The band appeared in two other Aki Kaurismäki films, the Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (1994) and the Total Balalaika Show) (1994), the film of a joint concert, held in Helsinki in June 1993, between the band and the full 160-member Red Army Choir. Kaurismäki also wrote and directed two videos featuring the band, their cover of the 60's folk standard Those Were The Days (1992) and Thru The Wire (also featuring Tesco) (1992).

In 1994 the band appeared, together with 70 members of the Red Army Choir, at the 11th annual MTV Music Awards, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, where they sang the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic Sweet Home Alabama. The show was seen by an estimated world-wide audience of 250 million people. That same year the band and ensemble made a joint concert, the "NOKIA Balalaika Show", in Berlin.

Currently, the band has eleven Cowboys and two Leningrad Ladies. The songs, all somewhat influenced by polka and progressive rock, and performed in English, have themes such as vodka, tractors, rockets, and Genghis Khan, as well as folkloric Russian songs, rock and roll ballads and covers from bands as diverse as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, all with lots of humour.