Gorky Park, aka GP, is an Armenian, Soviet and American rock band, formed in 1987 by Armenian musician, composer and producer Stas Namin (Anastas Mikoyan) at his producing centre SNC.

It is the only Soviet band to have conquered the MTV and Billboard charts and become world famous. The main springboard in Gorky Park’s career was its participation in the famous Moscow Music Peace Festival organised by Stas Namin and Doc McGee at the Lenin stadium on August 12–13, 1989.

US Polygram Records released Gorky Park’s first and only studio album with the same name – Gorky Park, recorded entirely in English, which entered the American Billboard 200 and brought the band worldwide fame.

In 1990, the band broke up.

Revival of the Gorky park band was in 2022, when Soviet Union already didn’t exist and Armenia was a separate country.  The international line-up of the band now is based in Yerevan and performs all over the world as an Armenian band.

History

In September 1986, during the first USA tour with his band The Flowers, Stas Namin got an idea to found a band aimed at western audiences. Dennis Berardi, President of the “Kramer Guitars”, and manager of Gorky Park band: “Stas Namin came up with the name “Gorky Park” in 1986 while his band “Flowers” was on tour in the USA. He told me at that time that he wanted to put together a band for the American market, and he came up with the idea of a band name similar to the famous book and film “Gorky Park”, which was told to him by Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, whom he visited in September 1986 after a press conference at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York. Stas told me that the new band would be born on basis of the musicians working in the band Flowers. Thus, the Gorky Park band was born in the Stas Namin Centre (SNC)”

At the beginning of 1987 he starts to gather musicians for this new hard-n-heavy project. Four of the five musicians, apart from the lead singer Nikolay Noskov, were at the time working in The Flowers.

In the spring of 1987, a new group, Gorky Park (GP), started its work in Stas Namin’s studio — composing songs in English, rehearsing, making demo recordings.

In the 1988, Namin arranged a concert debut for Gorky Park as a supporting band for Scorpions during their tour in Leningrad.

The main springboard in Gorky Park’s career was its participation in the famous Moscow Music Peace Festival organised by Stas Namin and Doc McGee at the Lenin stadium on August 12–13, 1989. The band performed in front of one hundred and fifty thousand people, together with Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Cinderella, Skid Row, Scorpions. Through TV broadcast along with world superstars GP became known in the USA and 59 other countries around the world.

In August 1989, Gorky Park’s debut album of the same name was released by US Polygram Records. Its cover had the GP logo on it, created by designer Pavel Shegeryan in October 1986. It resembled the letters GP, stylized as sickle and hammer. The album reached 80^th position on Billboard 200, selling over 300 thousand copies in the three weeks since its release.

The single Bang made it to the top 15 on American MTV and stayed there for two months, reaching the third position. Try to Find me reached #81 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Gorky Park the first Soviet band to break into the US national chart.

In 1990, after the festival and album release, the Stas Namin Centre sent Gorky Park to the US tour, and it turned out to be the band’s first and last tour. It was on that tour that the misunderstandings occurred among the members of the band that led to break-up.

Revival of the group

In August 2022, Stas Namin announced the rebirth of the band. Their first performance took place at the festival “SNC. 35 Anniversary”.

The line-up of Gorky Park includes: Oleg Izotov – lead guitar and lead vocals, Sergey Arutyunyan – lead vocals and harmonica, Marco Mendoza – bass guitar and lead vocals, Timoty Grigorovich – lead guitar and vocals, Kenny Aronoff – drums, Stas Mikoyan – producer.