“I am a singer. But if the Russians come I will take up arms, everyone will.”

All photos by Volodymyr Shuvayev

The weather was very strange in Kiev – clear and sunny, then a blast of wind and freak storms which came out of nowhere. I was in Cafe Arbequino, a laidback Mediterranean style cafe a block from the Maidan; the fulcrum of Kiev’s revolution where the people ousted President Yanukovych in February. These days the waitresses in the café wear military camouflage chic as a kind of solidarity. I had been discussing emotions with a Jungian psychologist I’d met at a Dakha Brakha gig - we spoke about how fear and excitement are almost the same emotion. Her name, she told me, could be translated as Viola or Violet. “So your name is either a flower or a musical instrument?” - gallantry I wouldn’t try in London seems to work here.

Rethink fear as excitement – that’s a liberating idea. This city has a sick sense of comic timing and, while we were talking, a huge gust of wind blew down the tree right in front of the café - it landed on a car, dented the roof and set the alarm off. The tree brought down the arrangement of light bulbs in front of the café - exposed wires crackled and sat, lethal, next to our table. It was scary, but exhilarating. We felt like the scriptwriters of our own lives; we could make things happen simply by talking about them, as if to illustrate a point.

In the news, Ukraine is a place constantly on the brink of political upheaval. After pro-democracy protesters prevented the corrupt election of Viktor Yanukovych during the Orange Revolution in 2004, Kiev has been a site of considerable civil unrest. In 2010, when the (this time elected) Yanukovych decided to publicly step away from a trade and cooperation agreement with the European Union and align Ukraine with Putin’s Russia in exchange for Russia’s cheap gas, the people of Kiev gathered in the streets surrounding Independence Square to defend their country. The rest you know: cold, bloody skirmishes that resulted in Yanukovych being ousted and a de facto civil war over the sovereignty of Crimea that is becoming increasingly violent.

Kiev remains a dangerous site of conflict. But young people here don’t separate politics from daily life. I was surprised by the number of world-class drinking holes and cafés in the city, like the Paravoz bar where one entire wall is a film projection, making you feel like you’re stepping on to a 1960s train. Kiev reminds me of Berlin after the Wall came down, I could easily see it at least becoming the new Berlin as a centre for the arts, strange electronica and edgy nightlife.

Just as in Berlin, there are questions around whose side the musicians, artists and bohemians are on. The issue of how involved musicians were in Ukraine’s uprising has become a vexed one. The decisions individual bands made have had consequences for them. Some artists saw their popularity increase by backing the revolution - like the rock star Slavik Vakarchuk, whose band Ocean Elzy were early supporters of the Euromaidan protests in 2013. Hip-hop group TNMK played a lot of shows in support of the protesters, while other musicians involved themselves more directly: Boombox’s frontman, Andriy Hlyvnyuk - with the best pop-soul voice East of Paris - acted as a medic and driver. “I didn’t feel like playing” says jazz pianist Ilya Yeresko, of the salsa band Los Dislocados (The Dislocated). He gave up his unlikely position as a Latin music innovator for the duration to help out because “I discovered for the first time there was something more important than music.”

Others, though, lost “street credibility” (perhaps a rare example of the moribund term actually meaning something) by not playing. Vopli Vidoplyasova leader Oleh Strpka told me he didn’t play at the Maidan because, “I could see there would be violence and didn’t want to encourage fans to come and be responsible for possible deaths.” His critics say that he either lacked the nerve or was hedging his bets on who would win.

Music, anyway, was a key element in rousing spirits and unifying the protesters. Most of the bands who played to the crowds during the Revolution knew how thin that line was between excitement and fear. The Dakh Daughters, who became heroines of the Revolution, set themselves up as the house band in Independence Square.

“We did play on the stages, but the most extraordinary times were just singing by the barricades.” says Tanya Hawrylyuk, the Dakh Daughters pianist and accordionist. “On some days it was dangerous and people died, including people I knew, somehow we weren’t afraid.” On their EuroMaidan YouTube video you can see them singing to massed ranks of military, police and a delirious crowd.

The band wear extraordinary coats worn by shepherds in the Carpathian mountains and often use white face paint. They fit into a burlesque tradition that, Oksana Forestina - the editor of a Ukrainian literary magazine - told me goes back centuries when Kiev was a bohemian centre with relative religious freedom. He’s got a theory that it was Ukrainians who brought cabaret to Paris.

Dakh Daughters play for gathering protestors

Dakh Daughters’ music is esoteric to say the least – flashes of English minimalist composer Michael Nyman collide with nods to the mid-century German composer Carl Orff, the instrumentation of passionate Ukrainian folk, and a touch of what they call “freak cabaret”, all delivered with punk energy. They also like the dystopian camp operatics of cult British musical trio the Tiger Lillies. As far as lyrics go, they have an inventive approach; usually stealing words from the most inspiring and relevant places they know. One of their “hits” (they have yet to release a record) is a version of a Shakespeare’s Sonnet 35, with the chorus sung in English and lines like “Such civil war is in my love and hate” reworked as “The Rose of Donbass” (where armed separatists barred people from voting in the recent elections).

Dakh Daughters also sing women’s folk songs from Ukraine - “Songs of the eternal feminine – songs of nature, of death and rebirth. The strong, beautiful women are the greatest treasure of this country.” Other songs steal/sample lyrics from everyone; from beat poet Charles Bukowski to notable Ukrainian writers like Taras Shevchenko. They are "art directed" by Vlad Troitsky a cultural dynamo, who runs the alternative Gogol Festival, set up an experimental theatre, and also “art directs” the other most interesting band in Kiev: Dakha Brakha. Dakh Daughters have, slightly absurdly, been called “a revolutionary Spice Girls”, but as Vlad Troitsky, their “art director” says, they are “more Pussy Riot – with good music. The Pussy Riot story is almost finished because their music is not interesting”.

The euphoria of deposing the hated and corrupt President Yanukovych in February was marred by snipers killing a hundred or so protesters. Then, just after a bitterly cold winter when people hoped to get back to normal life has come the loss of the Crimea, insurgency and chaos in the East. There’s an art exhibit in Kiev of the mainly kitsch art and religious icons from the Presidential Palace, which had vast grounds including a private golf course, zoo, helicopter pad and other necessities.

Putin has been sounding more conciliatory in the last few weeks but tensions are still running very high. Troitsky likes to quote Chekhov - “If a gun is seen on the wall in the first act, it will be used by the third”, in other words, with 40,000 Russian troops parked near the border, there remains a real possibility of invasion, whether masked as “peace-keeping” or not, which will provoke a wider war. And clashes between separatists in the East, boosted by Russian “volunteers” and new Government are ongoing.

“We are at war already” says Oleh Skrypka who also directs the Kiev folk festival Kraina Mrij (Land of Dreams) and has a band called Vopli Vidoplyasova (they started as an edgy ska-punk outfit and got more into psychedelia and Ukrainian folk). He says one reason the Russians will have to be fought if they invade is that they won’t stop in the East and will come to Kiev. “My role is as a singer, but if the Russians come I will take up arms, everyone will”, he tells me. He talked of the deep Ukrainian and traditional Cossack love of freedom. Skrypka was born in Tajikistan but he, like several others I met, says he “made an existential decision to become Ukrainian.”

Dakha Brakha: "Kiev can be the centre of a new civilisation."

The next day I go to Independence Square (also known as Maidan), with Dakha Brakha, who are starring at the WOMAD Festival this July. Some of the barricades - that the Dakh Daughters enjoyed performing against - are still there, made of sandbags, street signs, piles of tyres, shoes and other assorted detritus. Quite a few homeless types still live in tents in the square. Photographs of the “Heaven’s Hundred” - who died from sniper fire - litter the walls and as a matter of respect the band don’t wear their jaunty stovepipe hats which have become their trademark.

Among the chaos and danger, there’s a surprising sense of idealism among many of the people I spoke to. And it wasn’t as it has been expressed over here, as half the country being pro-European and half pro-Russian. Plenty of people think they can do better than both, like Vlad Troitsky, who has the genial, visionary subversiveness of a young Malcolm Mclaren. I met him some years ago, and he has strong willpower – until a recent serious illness, he would swim every morning in the Dnieper River, which flows through Kiev, even if he had to cut a hole in the ice.

Troitsky admits cheerfully that “we may face economic collapse, and we have 40,000 Russian troops on our border, there’s unrest in the East”. He also really believes that “Kiev can be the centre of a new feeling, a new civilisation.” For Troitsky, Europe is “tired, old culture” and Russia “has the Putin story – freedom and real energy is being taken away.” He thinks it is possible, indeed it’s imperative, to create a more transparent, more democratic and free society balanced between, and better than, East and West. It’s an inspiring vision shared by many of the musicians and artists I met in Kiev, even as many wonder whether the lights will still be on in the next winter.

Was it dangerous? My friends asked. Being in an illegal garage club listening to Ukrainian techno spun by the likes of EVA-05 was a bit scary as it smelt of petrol and everyone was smoking and there was only one exit. I had a flash of paranoia as the car I got into with a bunch of strangers sped off at maximum speed into the night eastwards for 45 minutes before reaching a flat party right on the edge of the city in one of those impressively brutalist Soviet blocks.

Kiev is changing. There is a sexy, liberating sense of possibilities in the air. And with a music soundtrack that is emerging as a central element to mirror that inspiring potential. But always with the sickening sense it could go horribly, horribly wrong.

I was in Aleppo in Syria a few years back, one of the most beautiful old cities in the world, now almost razed to the ground. As Wordsworth said, after the French Revolution “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven” and the intangible post-Revolutionary buzz in Kiev today has genuinely world-changing potential.

Follow Peter on Twitter: @PeterCulshaw

Peter Culshaw’s book Clandestino-In Search of Manu Chao is published by Serpent’s Tail

Dakha Brakha appear at the WOMAD Festival July 24-27 July

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