We talk about legacy in terms of fame. But real legacy is the imprint left on the people who loved you and the work you built with your hands.
Every era has its rock gods. Their faces are iconic, their lyrics quoted like scripture. I was raised on that music. But my titan never filled a stadium.
There’s a photograph. A single, grainy shot from 1987. A young man stands center-stage with a bass guitar. The band is СЕЙФ (safe). He’s looking past the crowd, into a distance only he can see. In his eyes is a future he doesn’t know yet — a different career, a wife, a daughter. He doesn’t know he’ll document our life on film, teaching me to frame the world through a lens. He doesn’t know that I, twenty years after he died, would look at this photo and see not just a footnote in Leningrad’s metal scene, but the origin story of my own life.
This man is my father. Mikhail Spiridonov. This article is my attempt to finish the solo he never got to record.
The official record: What the Encyclopedias say?
The entry is brief, like so many from that era. According to online sources and Andrey Burlaka's Rock Encyclopedia, СЕЙФ was an interesting but underrated band from Leningrad. It formed in 1986, founded by guitarists Alexander Frolov and Valery Petrov. They were joined by bassist Mikhail Spiridonov (my father) and drummer Alexey Osokin. The lineup shifted, with musicians coming and going from legendary acts like Нокаут. In July 1987, SEYF delivered a standout performance at the «Second Wave of the Rock Club» festival, earning applause from the crowd and nods from critics. Yet by May 1988, the band had dissolved. The entry concludes with the dry, definitive line: «No recordings of the group have survived».
That chronicle of shifting lineups misses the point entirely. It loses the people behind the instruments. To the world, my dad is a footnote—a member of an underrated band. To me, he’s the man who played me albums by Ария, KISS, AC/DC, who watched The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Shrek with me, who taught me to ride a bike, who cultivated love and gave it freely to our whole family. Today, armed with rare photographs and living memories, I as both a daughter and a journalist call that archival verdict into question. The recordings did survive. They survive in the memory of those who knew him, in the walls of the homes he built and in me. This article is the proof.
The first recordings: letters, not music.
Before СЕЙФ, there was the army. During his service in Afghanistan, he played in a military band and wrote letters home. In them, you see his whole character: an outer toughness wrapped around a core of quiet warmth. «I'm doing great, healthy as an ox, same to you», he'd write with forced cheer, then immediately admit: «As soon as I start writing, this homesickness just tears me apart...» His dream was simple and clear: «There's nothing better than home».
I believe it was this dream that led him, already discharged and matured, to the band SEYF in 1986. He didn't join as a romantic dreamer, but as a man who knew the value of discipline and was searching for his own kind of freedom in rock 'n' roll. His bass guitar was as reliable as his word. And after the last chord faded, he set out to build that «home» — literally, as a builder-architect, and figuratively, as a husband and father. He married my mother in 1995. I was born in 1997. And in my earliest memories, I can still hear the rhythm he hammered out in those letters: strong-strong and hard-hard. The rhythm of love.
Voices from the past: Family Memories.
Yet, the story of SEYF remained for me a collection of facts and dates. To turn them into a living history, I needed a voice from the 1980s. I went to the people who witnessed that chapter of my dad's life.
In the summer of 1986, relatives from Belarus arrived in Leningrad — their family fleeing the aftermath of Chernobyl. Among them was my uncle Vasya, my dad's cousin.
— He worked at a concrete plant, and in the evenings, after his shift, he'd meet up with the band. I once asked if I could tag along, and he say yes. At rehearsals, they played their own songs — ones I'd never heard anywhere else. And while playing, they'd discuss how to nail a certain part. They were always chasing a better sound.
In this childhood memory lies the essence of that time. Not romance, but work. The grind at the plant and the meticulous work on their sound.
Three words my cousin now uses to describe him serve as his motto: «Aim. Creation. Kindness». He also says of my father: «He wanted to be everywhere at once».
Another child of that time, my cousin Slava, who was very young then, also remembers the SEYF rehearsals:
— They even built their own big speakers, and Misha was the bass guitar. The spark. When he was young, he lived for it, you could say he was inseparable from his guitar.
«Was the bass guitar». Not played it, but was it. In that phrasing is everything. The instrument was an extension of his body, and music was his form of life. «The spark» — the one who sets the tone, the energy. The energy he now carried onto the stages of Leningrad. To where, soon enough, the «Second Wave» festival would thunder, forever etched into the reference books.
View from the Stage: voices of members.
To complete the puzzle, to understand what that energy felt like from the inside, I needed the memories of those who played alongside him. I needed the stories of people who had shared the same stage.
I managed to speak with Valery Petrov.
— It wasn’t quite how they write it in the encyclopedias. Alexey Osokin played with us in Скорая Помощь, but after a new guitarist joined, he left the band. I didn’t like that, so I decided to move to Alexey’s new group. By that time, he was already playing in СЕЙФ, and I just completed their lineup. For a while, I even sang with a low voice at rehearsals. I remember the guys in the band were very kind and friendly.
Soon after his departure, the paths of Скорая Помощь and СЕЙФ converged again — this time on a big stage. «Valera Andreev was singing for them back then,» Petrov recalls. «It sounded really solid».
Alexey Osokin — drummer of SEYF and my father’s friend — also agreed to an interview.
Let’s start at the very beginning. How was the group SEYF formed? Tell us the story.
— The story’s roots go back to our youth. Misha and I were about 14 when everything to do with music became the trend. Every school had its bands, and we wanted our own thing too. Misha’s parents bought him a guitar, huge speakers, a good sound system. We started jamming with him and Vadik, an older kid who lived in our building. We wanted to create something of our own, started learning to play, practicing our instruments, traveling to different specialty stores, and they even assembled a drum kit for me. We rehearsed at home. We played with different guys, had apartment concerts on holidays. Then Vadik left the group, which was sad. We had a killer lineup. We sang in a choir at a local cultural center just so they’d give us a room with proper equipment for rehearsals. Back then, we played a ton of concerts, and also performed at various holidays, corporate events, and weddings as a cover band. Then, we all started going into the army. I kept playing during my service, and I know Misha was also part of an orchestra where he served. After the army, I decided to enroll in the People’s University of Musical Art. Misha enrolled with me. There we met a lot of different musicians, got back into rehearsals and gigs. We joined the rock club, went to meetings regularly, where we crossed paths with groups like Алиса and Кино, whom hardly anyone knew about at the time. Our performance at the festival in the Palace of Youth was very significant for us. We played a huge number of concerts with the band in the city center. When the band started to fall apart, I tried to get the guys to join other projects, but they didn’t want to for various reasons.
How did the band get its name?
— Misha, Sasha Frolov and I chose it together. We wanted something connected to heavy metal. Someone came up with the word СЕЙФ [safe] because it’s metal and heavy. The joint decision was to take that name.
Did the band only play covers? Did you have your own material?
— At first, we only played covers. We liked The Beatles, Машина Времени, Deep Purple and others. But we also had our own repertoire — a whole album’s worth.
What were your songs about? Can you recall a single theme, an image, a line? Was it about freedom, the city, the times?
— I’m not sure of the exact wording, but there was something like this in one of the songs:
What is joy? I've never known.
Yet in its light I've often shone.
To recall its fleeting trace
Is to be exiled from that place.
What three words would you use to describe my dad?
— Friend. Tiger. Lion. And if I’m not being brief, then Mishka helped everyone, always, with everything. I respected and loved him very much, he was my friend from childhood itself.
Here it is, that very «solid rhythm section» from the encyclopedia lines, shown from the human side. Not just a reliable bassist, but a friend, a tiger and a lion, with whom he traveled the path from kid rehearsals at home to the stage of the «Second Wave» festival.
So where do we look for greatness?
In reference books stamped with the verdict «no recordings survive»? Or in the place where a living portrait of a man is pieced together from the fragments of memory — from letters, old photographs, and the stories of family?
History put a period after СЕЙФ in 1988. But my father’s solo did not end. It transferred into the rustle of architectural blueprints, into the click of a camera shutter. It dissolved into bedtime stories and into the hard-won words of a soldier’s letter: «strong-strong and hard-hard». This solo was not played for a crowd. It was intended for a close people: for friends, for family. For me.
This article became, for me, a deep spiritual and journalistic investigation. A journey into the past where every unearthed detail — a line from a letter, someone’s recollection — was like a beam of light, leading me down the trail.
I must also note that I was inspired by those who speak this language of celebrating memory: RAIGN, who said in our interview that her best song is a conversation with the father she lost at seven, and the piercing ballad «По Камушку» by the band Settlers, built from the same kind of personal remembrance. They showed how creativity can become a bridge to our most guarded feelings. Now, I have walked my own path — stone by stone, word by word, fragment of film by fragment — and I have assembled my song. Not in musical notes, but in letters.
