The Star From Vilnius Is Gone

Norway is saying goodbye to one of the biggest pop music stars in the country. Aleksandra Naumik, known in her homeland more as Alex or Alexandra Naumik Sandøy, passed away on 17^th of September in her house. Vilnius was present in her passport as a place of birth although in 1949, when she was born, it had already been a capital of Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. On the turn of the 1970s and 1980s Aleksandra was as popular in Norway as ABBA across the border(in Sweden), but her irreconcilable anticommunist attitude wasn’t helpful in making a career…

If anyone believes that the first star “from our grounds” appearing on the Norwegian musical firmament is Aleksander Rybak they’re wrong: forty years ago hearts of Norwegians were won by Aleksandra Naumik. She was born on 12^th of August 1949 in Vilnius in Artillery street in a family of a September Campaign veteran and Home Army officer Mikolaj Naumik and Halina from Kobylinski family. The Naumiks didn’t hurry to leave for Poland and the price they paid for that was high: the whole family, as well as thousands of Poles from the Vilnius region, were deported to Siberian Usol in Irkutsk Oblast; Aleksandra’s parents and grandparents were working forcibly in Taiturian wood plants…

No sooner than after Stalin’s death and six years of exile were the Naumiks able to return to Lithuania and when the second half of the 1950s saw another repatriation-expatriation wave, they had no more doubts – they left for Poland and came to live in Kluczbork.

Stunning with her unusual, 4.5-octave voice a young woman from Vilnius had already started her musical career in 1966 in the secondary school with the song “Crocodile in Masuria” by Adam Slawinski and Agnieszka Osiecka originating from the first Polish musical entitled “Singing Letters”. At the Opole Festival in 1967 she had already been competing in Debutants contest with another artist that had come to Poland at the same time and from the same area, Czeslaw Niemen (still only a few people know that he had been learning in the secondary school in Dziewieniszki for two years because he’d had some troubles on the side of Belarus!). She sang “Puff” with the accompaniment of Alibabki, but it was Niemen with “Strange is this world” that won.

In 1969 Naumik graduated from Teaching Training College in Lodz and started cooperating with a newly emerging band Quorum, but after one year (1970) she married a Norwegian director Haakona Sandøy and moved out to his motherland (after ten years their marriage fell to pieces). In Poland it went quiet of her but in Scandinavia she quickly became an icon of style and new trends. As the first in Norway she sang funk-rock and soon she was hailed the queen of this genre. Many times at a musical field she was prestigiously awarded. “For the Norwegian musical field pop music was like a breath of fresh air” – reminds her then producer during an interview with “Dagbladet” newscast.

In 1977 her debutant album “Alex” won the most significant Norwegian musical award called Spellemannprisen. Naumik became the star of the musical TV programmes, giving concerts all over the Scandinavia. As the first she put all her faith in modern marketing, binding with big sponsors. In Norway, the type of the haircut she was wearing is still being called “Alex’s haircut”.

She was also known for her undeniably anticommunist attitude and engagement in helping Polish opposition, what – believe experts of contemporary world of entertainment and politics – was a final obstacle to a greater, also international, career. Her political views were unpopular in leftist Norway, she was criticized for her anticommunism and marginalized by Norwegian media. Despite gold record and international recognition, in 1977, during a rock concert inauguration with a Swedish star Cornelis Vreeswijk she was booed off by the socialist youth. Indignant the crowd of her admirers, she was ignored in a public NRK television series dealing with the history of rock music in Norway…

At the day of an imposition of martial law in Poland, when people gathered in Oslo for a rally supporting the opposition, the artist gave there an unusual, spontaneous concert. In 1983 the single “I love Warsaw” became a hit. Two years later “Alex” started cooperating with “Sex Pistols” band and moved to the USA. For years Alex was working as a lyric author and a producer in the USA, travelling between the USA, Japan, and Norway.

Faith Leany (Leana Greene) album, composed and produced by Alex, was listed first on Billboard list in June 2005 and January 2007. It was only in 2008 that she started releasing medleys of her recordings because some of them hadn’t been made available by Scandinavian archives even after thirty years.

Lately Aleksandra Naumik, with an accompanying group of historians prepared a document on Siberians and leftist European dominance in the world of entertainment industry. She was in a long-term relationship with a musician and a composer Atle Bakken and left one daughter Naomi. Causes of her death weren’t made public.

Source: http://www.wilnoteka.lt/pl/artykul/odeszla-alex-gwiazda-rodem-z-wilna

Tłumaczenie by Roksana Kasperek w ramach praktyk w Europejskiej Fundacji Praw Człowieka, www.efhr.eu. Translated by Roksana Kasperek within the framework of a traineeship programme of the European Foundation of Human Rights, www.efhr.eu.