UKRAINE: Oleg Skripka is Ukraine's answer to Bono. A wild and passionate rock singer with a shock of blonde hair, he spent much of last month's Orange Revolution whipping up the crowds of protesters in downtown Kiev.
If the pockmarked features of new president Viktor Yushchenko was the face of that revolution, Skripka was undoubtedly its voice.
Night after night as Ukrainians rallied to denounce their government, Skripka took to an improvised stage in Independence Square, belting out rock music to keep the crowds energised.
The performances by his band, VV, were ad-hoc, sometimes troubled by power failures, and always played with one eye on the lookout for riot police.
"Those concerts were very special," he remembers. "The atmosphere was different from anything I knew before. I felt like Che Guevara sometimes." Tomorrow Oleg (23) will take to that stage one last time, but this time in celebration to mark the inauguration of Yushchenko as president.
Rock is a blunt instrument to use in politics, better attuned for stirring consciences than pushing policies. And in an increasingly confused world, musicians in Ukraine, as elsewhere, had long since given up political rock.
That all changed on November 21st when the government announced that prime minister Viktor Yanukovich had won the presidential election.
When international monitors denounced the election as rigged, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in Kiev, and VV took to the stage.
"Up on that stage we had the feeling we were living in a very special moment," he says.
He was not alone: The cream of Ukraine's music industry went on stage with him, including pop singer Ruslana, winner of last year's Eurovision Song Contest.
Skripka believes rock and politics make uneasy bedfellows. "Music has no message, it is emotional. It was just a good coincidence that the emotion of our music chimed with the emotion of this revolution." His band joined the opposition last summer, providing entertainment for a 30-stop tour of the country by Yushchenko.
That tour proved to be the most fraught the band has ever experienced. They were pelted with bottles and stones in pro-government eastern Ukraine.
"We would go out and there were young guys in the front row throwing stuff at us," he remembers. "Luckily they were too drunk to throw straight." Finally, VV's music came to the rescue. "Those guys were bandits - but they like hard music. So we played a very strong concert and the problem was solved."
Skripka has been an icon to many Ukrainians since the 1990s, when his band became one of the first to sing in Ukrainian, rather than the more common Russian language, a hangover from its days as a Soviet Union province.
Skripka is shy and thoughtful, a contrast to his thundering stage persona. We meet as he is tucking into chocolate pancakes in a small Kiev restaurant, watched by adoring waitresses.
"This revolution was good for bringing people together," he says. "Before we felt we had been living our lives in a hostile aggressive environment. But then came the revolution and we found we all wanted the same thing." Assuming Ukraine is now on the democratic road, politics and music will now part company, he says.
"I hope after the victory of Yushchenko I will be again outside the politics - with big pleasure," he says.
But he gets misty-eyed at the memory of his protest days. "The revolution was spiritual, you can compare it to having divine feelings," he says. "It's not going to be like that ever again."