Branimir Stulic

Biography

Stulic grew up in Skopje where his father – an officer in the Yugoslav Peoples Army – was stationed at the time. At the age of 7, he moved with his family to the Cvetkovic village near Jastrebarsko where they spent a year and a half, before relocating to Jastrebarsko proper for the following five years. In January 1967, Stulic moved to Zagreb where he attended high school and later, for two years, studied phonetics and history at the University of Zagrebs Faculty of Philosophy before dropping out. Stulics youth and his musical beginnings are the subject of the documentary "Kad Miki kaze da se boji".

He began his musical career with a band named "Balkan Sevdah band", performing The Beatles covers and folk music. In 1977 he formed Azra which, during the 1980s, became one of the most prominent and influential musical acts in Yugoslavia. The Azra days brought Stulic widespread fame in Yugoslavia, as well as a rabid and devoted youth following – Stulic often used his music as commentary directed towards the social and political conditions in the then-Socialist Yugoslavia.

In 1984 Stulic moved to the Netherlands. His last live performance prior to the departure to the Netherlands was on August 15, 1990 in Hvar. In regards to the Yugoslav Civil war, Stulic frequently expressed his disapproval of separatism and was a fervent believer of Yugoslavism and Bratstvo I Jedinstvo. After the ex-Yugo wars stopped, Stulic recorded three solo albums, each published in Belgrade, Serbia. The records achieved lukewarm reception and limited commercial success. In 2005 he published an autobiography called "Smijurija u mjerama".

Hrvoje Horvat, a Croatian journalist, wrote an unauthorized biography of Johnny Stulic titled "Fantom slobode", ("The Phantom of Freedom"), published in 2006. Due to Stulics immense popularity in the former Yugoslavia, the book was an immediate commercial success. However, it was also heavily criticized by many literary critics, and even Stulic himself, for its poor writing quality and alleged misinterpretation of facts.

Today, Stulic who lives a modest and ascetic lifestyle, is often at odds with his past, fan base and critics. He typically does not give interviews and is very protective of his privacy. He states he has no interest in going back to his rock career, but in the past few years he has recorded and posted on YouTube