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Uku!
Prologue.
It actually started out with him adding me on Facebook,
and I was thinking about doing this interview with him,
and I didn’t know this condition.
I don’t really know Uku, we had been in touch
when I was the program manager for the Genialists’ Club.
I discovered Uku Kuut and Marju Kuut, like, oh, he’s still in Estonia.
Maybe he wants to record a mix?
I'd think that would be cool, if someone asked me - and he did it.
And I discovered people were listening to it around the world.
And then I was like “hold on…”.
And then he started speaking Swedish with me.
And I was pretty like “Whoa”. And he was like “Yeah,
Vision of Estonia is recorded at a castle outside of Stockholm.”
And I was like “Whoa.”
Then I asked him, “Are you still doing shows?”
And he was like “No, I have ALS.”
You know, lot of people probably would say
that he’s put Estonia on the map for music fans,
who are into a certain sound.
A lot of their recordings are pretty lo-fi.
Actually it almost seems intentional in a way,
it’s like low budget,
but, artistically it’s really like high,
it’s like high concept or something.
Uku’s music has always been directed towards America,
but not a geographical America -
an idealized America.
There’s a 45 that I have as well,
but it was with his wife, if I’m not mistaken, right?
Um, that’s his mom.
Oh! There was... Okay!
There's just a rattle in the headphones, I don't know.
I don't... No!
One cool thing -
there’s this Georgian detective film from the seventies, black and white.
There’s a short piece of it online, where they walk into a bar…
The detective’s wearing a classy black suit and tie,
and Marju Kuut is performing there.
It’s sort of like, she had to be there.
She was the only one who could pull it off.
I was offered a position as the solo singer
for the band at Intourist Hotel’s restaurant “Tallinn”
and I was still underage,
but the band was mostly made up of young boys
and of course they all started hitting on me.
You know - there’s a young girl in the band,
they all tried and nothing came of it
and to get back at me, they started playing tangos for me.
And then one night I got so sick of it,
I decided that the first musician to come up to me
and invite me for a coffee -
I would marry him.
And a short while later, Ivar Krull walked up to me.
Luckily, I didn’t listen to my mother because then I got Uku.
I went to the hospital July 6th, 1966.
Around quarter after one at night on July 8th
this big ugly midwife,
smelling of cigarettes, I nearly choked,
jumped on my chest and stomach to squeeze the baby out,
it was awful and he came out and he didn’t even make a sound,
I thought that’s it, he’s not even alive
and only a little later he started making noise.
That’s the noise he made. It sounded just like “Uku”.
And it seems like he named himself.
So he stayed Uku. Tiny Uku. Uku-baby.
But Krull would come home for lunch to practice his trumpet
and whine to me about why I wanted to sing,
that I had a family and a baby now, I don’t need to sing.
I asked him why he wants to fiddle his trumpet all the time,
if that hasn’t worked out for him.
We met with Marju during music school.
Uku, I’ll be honest, he was still a child
when he knew that Marju, you need to go there
and do this and you know, it was so neat…
And he was like an iron nail, firm and serious,
he didn’t go “Mommy, you need to go”...
No, he was like:
“Marju, you need to go there and there.” And it was just so.
And Uku, of course, even though he may have liked other things,
he set his life according to Marju.
Suddenly, I was fired from everywhere.
Here and there and there and…
Then this old man came, a tiny mustache under his nose,
to recruit me into the KGB
and the same night I told my mother about it
and asked her for 50 rubles.
And we were in Sochi.
Sochi.
Uku was really glad to be somewhere else
and it was so warm and completely different there.
Since we got a nice place to stay there,
me and Uku had time to get to know each other.
Because we had never been alone,
just the two of us, without my mother, or aunt Minni interrupting:
“Oh what do you know about children go do your music.”
Imagine it - they were together from morning to night,
all the time, making music.
I think Marju found a close soul in Uku at that time.
Because before he was “a child, Uku”
and “a child is a child”, right.
And Marju came back from there very tired, but very optimistic.
And Uku grew up there, I noticed, into a young man.
I found my soul mate,
because you could talk to him like an old person
and he was so full of such wisdom that I was in awe.
And we both had this wish
to live in a country like this someday.
And it seemed to me that Uku got the music bug in Sochi.
Well, she had this feeling
that she was being followed by these people, as we used to say,
and it bothered her.
To be honest, I doubt this,
because these people had much more important things to do
than deal with musicians and singers.
My father used to work
at the Culture Department of the Central Committee,
I know these things a bit. They didn’t deal with people like this.
Marju wasn’t a politician, she was purely a musician.
Look, Marju had this feeling
that she was frowned upon.
My father was the artistic director at the Philharmonic,
he was always thrilled about Marju as a musician,
but: “She was drunk again…”.
That was the issue, not the KGB.
I think the drinking put a sign on her.
And I was there when she met her Kent, by chance, but still.
And he was really in love, and talked Marju into it,
because Marju didn’t want to marry,
but he offered to take her away.
But when she left and her recordings were destroyed,
I honestly don’t believe it was the KGB,
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something personal.
An “accident”. Oh, you know, I didn’t mean to erase it.
When I was a child and we were at Saaremaa with my mother, Memme,
or even in Tallinn, I always thought that somewhere behind those houses,
there had to be something else.
And in Saaremaa we had a big field behind our house,
another farm’s field and then a forest
and I used to ask mother to go beyond the forest,
that there had to be something else.
Mother finally gave up: okay, let’s go.
There was nothing else, or nothing new, the same junk.
So I was always searching.
Sweden.
Uku was the one who told me: “Let’s go, let’s go,”
because I was about give up
when I found out my Swedish husband was a drug addict.
And I thought I wouldn’t go,
because with God I can live in the Soviet Union as well,
but Uku wanted to go, saying we could always return:
“Let’s go for my sake - I want to see the world.”
Uku adjusted very well in school and knew Swedish in three weeks.
We are. That was Uku’s teenage band.
“Funky”. Yeah.
It must have been around 19…
Probably was around 1983-84.
Hello? It’s Daniel.
I don’t know really how I came in contact with Uku,
but it was very much like Uku’s style.
But I don’t remember the actual first gig, where it was.
Bad sound, I think.
She was there, but I didn’t know who she was,
if she was famous or so.
She was just a mother.
She was very young compared to my parents.
She was a famous person in Estonia
and I think she and Uku had, at that time at least,
such a close relationship. They were like friends.
She used to come to the rehearsals and she used to sing.
I was almost always there in their rehearsals
and I took part
and I felt like a complete teenager.
And it must have annoyed Uku,
why I was there all the time, it was his band.
Music was primary for us, from morning till night.
Apparently his dream was, that we could be a good producer team,
in Sweden, or maybe even America, those were his dreams.
He had the abilities of a businessman,
he studied this,
but he wanted to tie business with music,
because music was what motivated him.
What motivated his soul.
I didn’t miss anything besides Memme,
but I knew Memme can follow us, one way or another.
And we filled out paperwork
and since I was working at a Christian radio station
with shows all around the world,
they must have been afraid that if they don’t let her leave,
I would start making noise.
They'd let her leave.
In Tallinn I had a big three-room condo, already paid for,
and Memm got used to living in this big place all by herself,
and when she joined us, she was so disappointed.
What hole-in-the-wall is she staying in now?
Memm was the one who wanted to take care of everyone
and she came there when she was already completely sick
and they did nothing to her in the hospital,
because they said there was already too much cancer to operate
and she just gave up.
She wasn’t able to fight any longer.
And so she left.
Grandma's interlude.
It had a terrible impact on Uku.
He wasn’t able to live at home
during the last months when I nursed Memme.
He lived in someone’s basement and helped build a studio there
to get his thoughts away.
Memm wasn’t just his grandmother, she was like a mother to him.
Hi, this is your little boy Uku!
Hi, this is your little boy Uku calling from Stockholm.
I wanted to tell you that be a dear and work hard and come home
and don’t call me again so soon, hold on with your bills.
Alright, dear. See you.
The last morning of Memme's life in the hospital, I could tell her,
that should it happen that she will leave us,
then she should know, that I will go to Los Angeles.
I'm saying this in advance, just to let you know.
I just could not stay any longer in this apartment
where I nursed my mother these last months.
Which was so terribly tragic.
I just couldn't do it anymore.
I had to get something else to survive at all.
So I flew away.
In the meantime, I had found a job with an Estonian woman,
who had once been a dancer.
And then she opened a little boutique.
All kinds of interesting lingerie, and bric-a-brac a woman would need.
But one morning I was so sick, I felt so miserable.
I didn't know what to do, so I told Uku,
maybe you could go in my place today. Just say I couldn't come.
Uku agreed and went to work.
And he said he could stay working there.
Uku had also advertised us in Music Connections magazine
as an Energetic Producer team.
He put our phone in there. And then the calls began to come.
When I met them I started, I don't know, I mean...
Are they these writers, because they were,
you know, they're white
and I am thinking really? They do some pop music?
I got to tell you, they're the funkiest pop folks to this day.
We saw exactly what kind of music
producers and managers were interested in.
And that's how we found...
our own music producers, or not producers, we found managers.
They listened to all of our twelve songs.
All this fantastic energy and fantastic everything.
It would be great, but how, where can we...
Where can we place you as a mother and a son.
The fact that we're mother and son
has always been an obstacle when we were together.
At first, I tried to say in Sweden, that Uku is my brother.
Not to ruin everything right away, but it couldn't go on like this for long.
In the end it'll come out, you have to provide some data.
Mother and son, it won't work.
It's not attractive. We had love songs and everything.
And a song like Dream Lover.
We can't sing it to each other.
Of course, when we made these songs, we were thinking about our own things,
our own people, to whom we wrote those songs.
We had separate fantasies.
Question? - Yes, question comes now.
It's caused a lot of buzz that you're together all the time.
Uku is your son. How do you get along, you're friends?
It's a good question, it has arisen only for Estonians,
not for any foreigner.
Let's say, Uku was a girl, I guess many mothers
live with their daughters, and work in the same field.
They're not moving to different apartments,
there are not so many chances to do that in Estonia.
And why it's so strange that we live together, in one apartment?
We didn't live together in that sense, we shared an apartment.
We didn't have the money to live separately.
I don't know, abroad they don't look at things like this.
If you don't have money, then you'll live together.
Mother and son.
They have no other idiocy in mind to ask or even think.
But for Uku, it must have had a terrible effect.
It seemed to have stayed in his heart.
However, he always wanted to make
people like him.
And of course, if that's how people think,
then you have to change yourself.
We were still in our apartment, when Herbert Murd came to visit us.
He told that Estonia is now so great, and so beautiful.
And it was still the Soviet Union.
That they have ads now, and I wouldn't even recognize Estonia.
Then he said he had a Jazz festival there.
Wouldn't we like to perform there?
In fact, I didn't invite her to perform.
Life in Estonia began to become more free at that time.
And where I invited them or what we talked about,
was that they could come back here for real.
It is clear, that Marju was a superstar here.
But there she was...
Great L.A. and America, there you're just one among millions,
or even less.
The idea was, that they could come back to Estonia.
Promised to pay for everything,
also pay a good fee to us and arrange a place for us to live.
In fact, we finally agreed that they will come back to Estonia.
They would come through Norway and we had everything agreed.
But suddenly, at the last minute, I realized it came from Marju,
since we came with Uku from somewhere and Marju wanted to talk to him.
They talked in another room, and then said that everything's canceled.
So it's canceled. They know what they're doing.
I had nothing to say about it. I returned to Estonia.
And almost a year passed.
I organized the Fiesta Festival in Estonia at the time.
The phone rang in the office and Marju called.
She said she was now in Norway.
And waiting for me, that I should go there at once.
Of course, I had no time even to speak at that moment,
not to mention driving a car to Norway to bring them back.
I made it clear that I can't do anything right now.
Let's talk again next week.
By the next week she had found another way to get them out of Norway.
But since then I've heard how I have offended her.
And she talks about different versions
how I invited her to the festival, or to return to Estonia,
and that I promised to help them with everything, but in the end,
I didn't live up to my promises.
Little Saturday surprise here at Tallinn Passenger Port.
From the circle of fans I have brought Marju Kuut to the camera.
Golden sixties pop music friends will surely remember Marju,
her individual style and a pleasant timbre.
In two words, what happened in the meantime when you left Estonia?
In two words?
I've lived the lives of twenty or thirty people.
Yes, and where?
In quite many places. - Quite many places,
and today - how long will you stay in Estonia?
A person cannot live much by plan. Let's see, how it goes.
Anyway, you have the same warm weather as where I came from.
You came from Helsinki. - I actually came from America, from L.A.
But you have something in mind?
I already heard people say that let Marju sing.
Let's wait for a the better plan and go with that then.
Thanks and I believe our viewers will soon hear from you.
How did you know I was coming?
They used to say that our news show
hears and sees all, but doesn't say much.
Okay, bye-bye!
Good luck! - Thank you. All the best!
Already in Sweden, when I dreamed
that I had accidentally ended up in Estonia,
I woke up with cold sweat.
Thank God I'm not back in Estonia.
I would never have gone back to Estonia in my life.
Again, it was Uku who wanted to see,
is it as scary as it seemed or as we speak here.
And so we arrived there.
Is music the only thing you see as an opportunity in your life?
Music - it seems that most of my acquaintances, especially Estonians,
would like me to turn into some kind of template they have.
Become a forward-thinking citizen.
Decent. - Yes, a decent citizen.
I'm a capitalist anyway, because I grew up there.
I would love to see music as a thing that goes through life.
I do all kinds of things, I'm also interested in music technique
and music economy around it.
Things are never one-sided.
Economics... - Economics, yes.
It's all connected, one day you do this and then something else.
All Estonians think that I'm that silly woman,
who draws Uku, this wise boy, off the right path.
That I want to make him a gypsy or something.
Grandma wanted you to become a bank clerk?
Yes, I was already heading there and tried, but...
But you could see it in his face, that he had no peace inside.
In Sweden, younger people talk a lot about careers,
I had short hair then, I looked like a decent social democrat.
We had to go to sauna with the older bosses,
they drank beer, I don't drink, and we talked about secrets.
Then I thought, do I want to be like that in my 40s or 50s.
Some were just 40 and already a heart attack and all.
It started to bother me and when my grandmother died,
then I decided, that no - better put everything in the game,
and use my business background in music instead.
We were left sort of hanging there.
We didn't have a place to stay there, in Estonia, in Tallinn.
What will we do now?
And the only solution was to go to Saaremaa,
to my grandfather's place.
So we went to Saaremaa to live with them.
Of course, the aunts were very happy.
A car took us there, a driver, who promised to come back in a week.
We'll see if we've come up with something in a week.
But suddenly we heard something on the radio.
Uku tried to listen to radio there to find out what was going on.
Suddenly, he heard something like tank and tanks.
In Latvia or somewhere, I don't know what language that was.
That tanks are coming.
He realized that something is about to happen.
Then we already heard about it in Estonian radio.
Things are going crazy.
It looks like they're going to close the borders.
I was wondering, did God really want us here right now?
So we'd be arrested here?
And when the day came,
when the driver came for us, we had decided,
that we'll go to Finland at once.
What will be, will be.
But the driver said,
that the tanks are already retreating and Estonia is free now.
Again, a new, how to say this, a new page in life.
Digital show with Marju Kuut
in real time via satellite at the RCE TV center.
We are talking to the legendary TV producer Leo Karpin...
We had already seen Estonian TV, the programs they had there.
Everyone was so important there.
And we thought we're doing a show that is completely senseless.
Eve Kivi was ready to come immediately.
What are we doing here now?
I don't know, I just walked in and I don't know why I came here.
But I don't know either.
I had... - You were here before...
Hey, but really, what are you doing here?
This is now straight from Siimann, this story,
that there was a Parliament session,
and the whole hall rushed to watch our show.
I don't really remember right now how it all was.
It took place at their home
and the result was unprecedented,
It seemed very Western to us at the time.
It certainly aroused a lot of interest.
Hey! You are watching a show called "Music Video".
And all we want to do is to show you good music videos.
I'm wondering what would you want to achieve as a singer?
In fact, I would like to make such music
which would reach elsewhere as well, because Estonia is so small.
To have opportunities and time to work hard and reach elsewhere.
Because it doesn't come easily, it takes a lot of effort.
That is a good answer.
Because usually people have great wishes
and the goals are big and high.
We think that someone is waiting for us out there, but it's not true.
If you don't put in the hard work, you can't get there.
I can't remember how, but somehow we got involved
with the festival Jazzkaar.
I don't know if we met someone in the radio or television,
and then...
There was a chance to help out a bit.
It had just turned out that their main performer
had canceled on them.
Then we thought, we know someone - Jeff Lorber.
And so we got Jeff to come to Estonia.
I was working for a human resources office,
and he called me and said he needed an assistant.
And I said yes.
He said it's urgent and do I think I can find someone.
I said, yeah, I have exactly the person you need.
I'll get back to you right away.
I think it was basically a matter of days.
I lived at my grandparents' cottage, and he just came there.
Cowboy & Capitalist.
We matched right away.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle or like Lego pieces fit together.
And it just went on from there.
What was going on beside there, that wasn't really...
That wasn't so important.
Of course, he represented
a different way of thinking, different understanding of things.
My first meeting with Katri...
Uku wasn't there yet and Katri was already there.
We said hello and then I said, Uku isn't here yet,
tell a little about yourself.
She was silent for a while. And then suddenly exploded, yelling.
Why should I tell you anything?
Who are you? Some Marju Kuut.
Who do you think you are? You're nobody!
I think he was operating on another level.
And yet there were some kind of...
How is this word in Estonian, some kind of distraction.
Or such interference, which came from some lower frequency.
Issues with money have always followed him.
They had some problems in L.A.
They had some trouble at the Jazzkaar.
And what happened to his company and our relationship -
again problems with money.
There was always something like growing...
Like some... as in the aquarium there are bottom feeders,
and this bottom feeder was lurking all the time.
His kind of energetic bottom feeder took a bite of some crap again.
We also had nice days with Katri.
They were still young with Uku
and both ambitious, especially the girl.
Like noveau riche, who want to get rich quickly.
Not step by step, but ten at a time,
and then you don't know where to fall.
Of course, they both started working hard,
whichever earns more.
And then it was nice once when Uku said
that Katri said she's pregnant.
That they'll have a baby.
That he will soon become a father.
Father.
It's probably called "breastfeeding father".
He was like so there all the time
and he took care of me when I was expecting the child.
When the baby was born, he was there all the time.
He bathed him, went for a walk with him,
he was different from some fathers.
But I was sleeping, when Marju came to see the baby.
Uku didn't wake me up and Marju was so frustrated.
This was Uku's version. Or the one I've put together later.
She was so angry,
how come I don't get up when she comes to visit.
Maybe the baby was also asleep, I don't remember.
And then we didn't speak for three years.
The 1990s were a very stormy time in Estonia.
When we think of it, in 1991 the petrol queues arose,
we received humanitarian aid from Finland and Sweden
and the Nordic countries.
Pasta, sneakers and colored pencils.
And suddenly in 2000 we have e-government.
It was such a drastic change, something happened every day.
And it was all a bit like the Wild West
in terms of all sorts of positive as well as negative aspects.
I think, formally the purpose of Love Radio
was to make some kind of American or foreign radio.
Adult contemporary radio for new business elite.
I remember that it must have been like this,
we were there one day, on the radio, making shows,
and then a message came that we have a new and young director.
Money.
As for the money, there were always problems.
One time they sold all the real estate belonging to that Estonian company
in order to make a salary payment.
And let's say that local managers
decided to raise their salaries equal to the Nordic level.
Probably this American owner was impressed
that there's an Estonian here, who is also from Los Angeles.
Probably for this American owner Uku's salary of 30,000 kroons,
if put in dollars, it was about $ 3,000 or a bit less.
From an American perspective, that salary was nothing.
If we put it in this context.
In Estonia, it was absolutely incredible.
Doesn't the director have a higher salary then?
He does have a higher salary.
Another reason why this radio did not work
was that image of Uku and Marju began to change in the late 1990s.
There was a bad shadow in the background.
When they returned in the early 1990s,
if I'm not mistaken, they received a lot of attention.
And then there was a kind of an incident.
With Jazzkaar festival.
It was not very clear what really happened there,
but it was clear that this incident changed something.
Then these stories began to spread,
that in fact Uku already had some problems with money.
I believe the problems with radio funding were related to this.
His ability to communicate,
to present any facts or evidence,
so to speak, sell, in the best sense,
it was an excellent skill for him.
At one point, he began to use it also for some negative activities.
It's also the moment when the big money came along.
If 20 and 30 kroons was once a large sum,
suddenly, it was 200-300,
then came thousands and zeros kept growing there.
Then something clicked, something like...
That there's some kind of interferer, which comes in.
Everything is beautiful and nice.
It's like modern music or some arrangements,
everything's beautiful and then some quack comes in.
A trumpet suddenly...
You wonder what this was and everything is nice again.
Until you realize it's going to fall apart
and become a complete cacophony.
I remember when we broke up,
then for me it was one of those drops in the cup,
there were a lot of drops, which eventually overthrew it,
but I saw for months,
how the credit card limit was 80,000 kroons.
Which was huge at the time.
And he was able to spend it every month.
And the credit came on again, he paid off old debts,
that was not a problem, money came in all the time.
It was amazing, that he had money all the time,
money went out and came in, again and again.
Bragging.
Or maybe the word is boasting.
She's bragging.
Yeah.
And they started doing that a lot with Uku.
They began to brag about their wealth.
What's the use of a large three-storey house,
with plenty of space for two adults and one child,
if you don't want to go home.
It was a house where you could get lost.
Hide when you misbehaved.
Christopher!
I remember the children who lived on our street.
I think they just didn't like me
or they were jealous because I lived in a big house.
When one boy came to our house,
his first question was how many computers you have.
And it was the house, where my family broke up.
It was pretty big, over 200 square meters.
And through three floors, of course it was beautiful.
Katri said one thing very correctly and aptly.
The family was all together at some party in their house.
Christmas or someone's birthday, I don't remember.
Everyone was present except Uku, Uku was not there.
Someone dared to ask at the table, where is Uku?
And of course I said that Uku has a new secretary.
At the same time, Katri went to kitchen,
and said with laughter, it's just a long legged gold digger,
Uku will be home soon.
He knew all this time about my existence,
where I am and what I do.
We were both involved with someone else then.
It was obvious that we could not communicate more closely.
He noticed me and people around him noticed also.
He found out who I was and made a decision for himself.
And the next time we met, he came to me,
and he had made a decision, that he has plans with me.
He actually suggested that I come to work for him.
Love.
That day was very beautiful, just as I had chosen.
It had to be sunny and it was sunny, yet also very windy.
And since I wanted to get married on Tuesday at noon,
on Tuesday because it was June 15th, and it turned out to be Tuesday,
so it had to be on Tuesday at noon.
My position as a bystander is that Uku was Kertu's next victim.
Well, she really praised me,
loudly, in the presence of Uku.
Tried to draw Uku's attention to the fact that I was a worthy woman.
Oh, I don't know what changed.
The relationship between Marju and Uku is extremely complex.
Marju, as she herself has said, has been very dependent on Uku.
Both emotionally and financially.
I think, Uku felt a certain responsibility towards Marju.
And I'm absolutely not surprised,
when some other women suddenly appeared in Uku's life,
then of course you feel threatened,
for someone will take away your voice,
you don't know how much attention you get.
And pragmatically, you don't know
what will happen to your financial situation.
Think about it,
Uku starts rehearsing with his band-mates at the age of 16.
You're 16, you're starting to grow up,
this is your life and you are a young man.
And your mom hangs out with you and your friends in a band rehearsal.
I would be very angry. Like where is my life?
Luck runs out.
One day they came to me, both Uku and Kertu,
that now I should quickly sign something for them.
They have this great opportunity
to buy a house from our acquaintance.
Of course, it costs lot of money, but Uku could start developing it.
To fix the house and sell the apartments.
What problems has this new owner caused here?
The new owner shouldn't have touched us at all,
before we get apartments from the city.
House owner Uku Kuut is cunning like a fox when dealing with the media.
Attack the opponent with the same means.
Let's do it like this. Although we had no plans to attack.
Now there are two copies of our conversation
and if ours is lost, then we can borrow from Uku.
Residents complain. - Yes.
I am very sorry for them. I am very sorry for all the tenants.
That doesn't stop you from demolishing the roof,
breaking the chimney, turning off the gas,
I don't know, water or anything here.
What do you want me to say?
Apparently as a result of your actions, they are now in such a bad situation?
I don't think so, did you visit them?
I did, I visited the apartments and everywhere.
Liveable and decent?
Well, I wouldn't say that. - I think the same.
Do you think this house will stand for another year without repairs?
Without repairs it's clear it won't stand.
But what do the residents expect from you?
We lost everything in our life because of this project.
We lost our home.
Uku lost his health.
And I didn't know if Uku was tired of those tensions,
or is there something wrong with his health, or just like...
In fact, we sold everything and paid off the debts
we owed to someone who bought an apartment there.
We repaid the debt to them.
Basically, we gave away everything we had.
We did not knowingly remain in debt to anyone.
And then I got my husband back,
who had worked on this project every day for years.
I got a squeezed lemon, who couldn't even get out of bed.
I can imagine what was going on inside him,
but I saw that he was physically tired.
In fact, he sensed his illness.
He played the drums in the studio
and said he could no longer beat the rhythm.
His leg no longer works like this.
Uku starts filming his drumming, to capture coordination failures.
He...
He couldn't squat or step up the stairs, because his body stiffened.
And we didn't know that this is the beginning of the disease.
I don't know if he had any suicidal thoughts, but...
Well, I...
Then Uku probably wanted to move to Saaremaa.
Uku told me some stories, how some things were in his childhood.
Some memories of the people and neighbors who lived there,
how they lived their daily lives.
He spent all summers of his childhood there.
It included chickens and sheep,
garden work and caring for animals with grand-aunt.
It was such a mystery to me and another example of who he really was.
Anyone else would have given up,
just meditated for as long you have left.
But he took the bull by the horn, and began to make music.
Musician.
People keep sending it to me and asking what I know about it
and if I know him.
Yeah, people send the track “Vision of Estonia” to me
every few months, asking if I know it.
I don't know exactly, how they got in touch with each other.
He had agreed what he could,
and started to release his records, his songs.
Then he said, you know Kertu,
apparently, this disease was given to me,
so I could do my music.
I basically found Uku not through his records,
but through his CD Santa Monica,
and there was something about this.
I was like, why is there a pair of loafers sitting on this park bench here?
So I figured this guy is got to be really cool.
We got in touch through his Myspace page.
There was one song on Santa Monica CD - Vision of Estonia,
which is a killer instrumental, it's just really laid back.
Why almost anything,
except for music, at the very end of his life,
was not successful for him.
In other words, there are periods in everyone's life,
when you experiment with things, you look for your DNA
and your calling, your education, your companions and...
what makes you happy.
This was like his safety zone,
where he was able to act on his own, without any influencers or limiters.
He put his heart and thoughts into music.
And used effectively the energy he had.
What was in the opposite direction first,
that he's sick and the end could be so and so.
I know it myself, why I came here, home to Sweden, in solitude?
I could finally work in peace, without distractions.
He had this excellent feature, he didn't let anything to disturb him.
And did his thing, as long as it was still possible.
Then, in fact, his music was released, and the attention began to emerge.
First of all, I think he knew he really was valuable as a musician.
And whether he was ahead of time, behind time, or outside of time,
this is the great mystery of his story.
When I first heard Uku’s music,
I just connected so much with it.
I was like, wow, this guy gets it.
You know, sort of when I heard Dam-Funk’s music.
I discovered Uku’s music through PPU of course.
Automatically, I took to a song called „Soft Fashion“.
The LA vibe was in it, you know what I’m saying
and I just really connected with the chords
and different things he was doing.
With Dâm-Funk you can hear it - similar musical sources,
specifically the softness of Uku’s sound.
A man is the architect of his life,
and then you build your kind of imaginary memory cathedral.
It was in many ways his life that he really lived,
and in many ways the life he had devised for himself.
It was the purpose for which to get out of bed in the morning.
That is what makes it very difficult for seriously ill people
to cope with their lives, they fall into depression.
And their illness is like one long period of depression.
But by that time, which is also a huge help to him,
he had a lot of life experience.
And all of this helped him peacefully focus on his mission.
And it really gave meaning to his life, his days.
We had a day plan, I knew why I had to do some things,
because I knew what Uku had to do during the day.
There was my role and his role. My role was to help him in his roles.
In my opinion, Uku achieved complete earthly asceticism.
You have nothing left.
You can't even drive a fly off your nose.
You have to accept everything in your life.
Total reconciliation.
I love you.
Dear Uku...
This is your mommy here.
I just want to say that I'm so proud of you.
I'm so-so proud of you.
And like you said to me...
Let's do it, my dear.
Goodbye!
I was so glad to hear your voice, darling.
Thank you.
A playful re-created documentary in three acts.