Leo Martin

Leo Martin is a Serbian pop and schlager singer, one of the most popular voices of Yugoslav popular music in the 1970s and 1980s. He was born Miloš Jović on 6 March 1942 in the village of Gornja Rašica near Blace, and when he was two his family moved to Belgrade, where he grew up near Slavija.

His family was poor and he worked from an early age. Loading coal at the Music Academy in Belgrade, he heard classical music being played, and it led him to music: he enrolled at a music school, studying piano and clarinet, alongside grammar school, and later at the Faculty of Law, which he did not finish. Before graduating from school he joined the Dixieland band Veseli bendžo, playing clarinet, then flute and saxophone, and had his first performance in 1959. He then formed Ekspres 8, in which he sang covers of Ray Charles and Glenn Miller.

In 1964 the band moved to West Germany, where it played in jazz clubs and for American soldiers. In 1967 in Munich, CBS Records offered him a contract to record an album of his own songs in English, and for it he took the name Leo Martin. The album Let Me Stay was a hit in Europe in early 1968, and he toured with Mireille Mathieu, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and Salvatore Adamo before returning to Yugoslavia in February 1969.

Back home he met the composer Vojkan Borisavljević, who wrote most of his songs. In 1973 he recorded his signature song "Odiseja" for PGP-RTB, and the single sold 100,000 copies in its first week. He was to sing it at the Yugoslav Eurovision selection in Opatija that year but could not perform because of illness. Hits such as "Ja te volim" (second audience prize at Beogradsko proleće 1973), "Plava obala" (first prize for interpretation at Vaš šlager sezone 1971), "Svet bez tebe", "Pesmo moja", "Ima vremena" and "Laku noć dragi, laku noć draga" (audience and lyrics awards in Opatija 1976) followed. He also sang "Sve naše mladosti" in the TV series Otpisani and took part in the Yugoslav Eurovision selection of 1972 with "Biću uvek sam".

At the Golden Orpheus festival in Bulgaria in 1976 he met his wife Vasja, and he won the festival's first prize for foreign performers of Bulgarian songs. He did not record or perform between 1990 and 1997; in 1997 PGP-RTS released the successful compilation Pesme mog života. He has since lived between Belgrade and Sofia, sang at Pjesma Mediterana in Budva in 2009 and received a lifetime achievement award at Beogradsko proleće in 2026.

The playlist here gathers Leo Martin's songs from the PGP RTS channel, from "Odiseja" and "Ja te volim" to "Laku noć dragi, laku noć draga".