Kameleoni

Kameleoni ("The Chameleons") were a Slovenian rock band formed in Koper in September 1965, one of the pioneers of the Yugoslav rock scene. They played beat and rhythm and blues, later psychedelic rock, and their close harmony singing made them a natural fit for songs by the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas.

The founders were four high school students, Danilo Kocjančič on rhythm guitar, Marjan Malikovič on lead guitar, Jadran Ogrin on bass and Tulio Furlanič on drums, with all of them sharing the vocals. They played their first concert at the youth club in Koper, and keyboard player Vanja Valič joined after a show in Piran. They gave around two hundred concerts in their first period and played Tivoli Hall in Ljubljana at the closing ceremony of the 1966 Ice Hockey World Championships.

Their national breakthrough came in 1966, when the unknown newcomers shared first place with the established Roboti at the festival of vocal-instrumental groups in Zagreb, helped by their song "Sjaj izgubljene ljubavi". Radio Koper recorded them, and they toured Yugoslavia and played in Austria and Italy, including the famous Piper club in Milan.

In 1967 they released their first EP on the Diskos label, with "Sjaj izgubljene ljubavi", "Looking for Me", "La Felicita" and a version of "See See Rider". It sold around 12,000 copies. A second EP followed on Jugoton, Dedicated to the One I Love, with their own songs "Gdje si, ljubavi" and "The Story of My Brown Friend". In 1968 the band split into two factions. One, with Ogrin, Valič, Furlanič and guitarist Goran Tavčar, recorded the music for Boštjan Hladnik's film Sončni krik on the EP Sunny Cry, and by the end of 1969 both groups had stopped.

The members went on to other bands: Malikovič and Furlanič both played with Faraoni, and Kocjančič with Prizma and Bazar. Kameleoni reunited in 1981 for a concert in Portorož, which led to a tour and the album Kameleoni in 1982, and again in the mid-1990s for the compilation Kameleoni 66-67 and the new album Za vse generacije. Danilo Kocjančič died on 3 February 2013. A 2018 documentary about the band was titled Kameleoni – Beatlesi nekdanje Jugoslavije (Kameleoni, the Beatles of former Yugoslavia).