Marinko Pavićević

Marinko Pavićević is a Montenegrin singer, songwriter, guitarist and poet from Nikšić, born there on 25 February 1957. His music mixes chanson and pop rock with touches of psychedelia and recital, and for decades he also worked as an editor at Montenegrin radio and television, where he was one of the most influential music producers in the country.

He went to school in Nikšić and studied painting at the Pedagogical Academy. He took up the guitar as a boy, played his first gig at seventeen and wrote his first poems at about the same time. In the 1980s he moved to Podgorica, where he hosted the night show of Radio Montenegro before becoming an editor at Montenegrin Radio Television.

After seven years as a solo artist he became the singer of Ponoćni ekspres, a Nikšić band formed in 1981 that lasted two years. Back on his own in the mid-1980s, he had some of the most played songs on Montenegrin radio, among them "Suza pjesnika", "Čarobnica", "Ivana" and "Jesen u ogledalu", and began playing in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Trebinje and other cities of Yugoslavia. His greatest success of that era was his appearance at the Opatija festival in 1986, and in 1988 he represented Montenegro at the Yugoslav selection for Eurovision in Ljubljana, which made him known across the country.

The 1990s brought "Svatovi bez pjesme", "Rekvijem za Vita Nikolića", "Žuto kuče" and "Da li si ikog voljela". In 1992 he played the Podgorica guitar festival before 5,000 people at the Morača Sports Centre and represented Montenegro at the MESAM festival in Belgrade, and he sang at Pjesma Mediterana in Budva in 1994 and 1996. At the start of the new century he wrote his greatest hit, "Crnoj Gori", a patriotic song that made him popular in Montenegro and among Montenegrins abroad. After 2010 he played again across the region, in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Zagreb and Sarajevo.

In October 2014 he marked forty years in music and poetry with the concert "40 godina sa gitarom i pjesmom" at the Scena 213 hall in Nikšić. The jubilee compilation Ognjište, released by RTCG, gathers twenty of his songs, all written by him, from "Crnoj Gori" to "Suza pjesnika".

He has also published five books of poetry: Nebesko dno (1989), Monahov talisman (1995), Svetac bez oreola (2005), Pečat pravednika (2009) and Kruna od kamena (2014).