The Ukrainians

If you’ve heard of John Peel & The Wedding Present, then you’ll probably have heard of ‘The Ukrainians’. We’ve been performing our unique style of east west crossover music for over three decades now.

Our origin is in The Wedding Presents’ ‘Ukrainski Vistupi V Johna Peela’ album - a Ukrainian language record that reached no 22 in the UK National Album charts in 1989. ‘The Ukrainians’ developed from that project, and beginning in the 90’s, we performed over a thousand shows all over the world. We played WOMAD, Glastonbury (twice), Rudolstadt, and much further afield at Calgary Folk, the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle, and Kyiv as guests of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture.

The band prides itself on its live appeal. Using their British born Ukrainian roots, the band mix eastern and western culture – singing in Ukrainian, using eastern ethnic instruments, but backed up with a western rock rhythm. James Hall, writing in The Telegraph, named the '92 Glastonbury gig as no 4 in his all time festival performances - behind Radiohead and Bowie.

This summer, the book ‘From Kyiv to the Kosmos’ is being published by Spenwood Books. It tells the story of how we created our unique hybrid of traditional Ukrainian folk music and frantic Western post-punk. It tells the journey of our music (8 studio albums), beginning in Leeds , and via the UK, Europe and America, ending up on the International Space Station!

To promote the book, this autumn Len & Peter from the group are doing a book tour, performing tracks acoustically while telling key stories from their 35 year career. A companion CD of the most influential tracks discussed in the book is being released with the same title. We plan to follow this up with festival performances in the summer if 2025.