Hari Mata Hari honestly about childhood, love for music, founding and disbanding of the group, war, private life, but also entertainment.
Hari Varešanovićbetter known as Mata Hari Day after the group of the same name, which was one of the most popular pop music groups during the old Yugoslavia, he rarely talks about his private life, but in an interview for Courier revealed everything about his childhood, his first encounter with music, his first big money earned, but also about the variety show where, as he says, he doesn’t have a single friend.
“I was born on January 16, 1961 as the second child of father Reufik, a mechanic, and mother Zlata, who worked as a cashier. The most interesting event in my childhood is related to my birth, because my dad stole me from the hospital. It was an extremely severe winter in Sarajevo that year. Newborn children began to die en masse, because there was no heating in the hospital. My father brought oranges to my mother, and he literally put me in a bag and carried me away in fear that I would die from the cold. I arrived in a warm home in an interesting way,” says Hari.
“I grew up in the suburb of Vratnik, which has always been the heart of Sarajevo. Goran Bregović, Emir Kusturica, Zdravko Čolić and Dino Merlin were also born there, and I remember childhood as the most beautiful period of life and essential happiness uncorrupted by materialism. By the way, my parents treated my eighteen months older sister, Sabina, and me as peers, so they raised us in the same spirit, and together we were always beaten. I was considered a more or less good child, although I was naughty and regularly fought with my sister. My parents raised me to be independent, free and humble. Sometimes these traits annoy me, because I lack some extremes in my character, but on the other hand, I’m also proud of them,” says the popular singer, who also told what his first contact with music was like.
“The first thing I remember was the sound of a violin, a Sevdalin costume and a house full of people. My grandfather Mehmed Aga Varešanović was a famous Sevdalinka singer, I grew up with his violin and I believe that he passed on my sincere love for music. Whenever the whole family gathered, they would put me on the clay stove to listen and watch child prodigy, because I sang sevdalinka and regularly made a show program. There used to be an atmosphere in our house like in the movie ‘Ivkova slava’.” While he was masterful in music, he was not overly interested in school.
“I didn’t make a name for myself at school, because I was a weak student, but that’s why I was already a famous child in the first grade of elementary school who sings and plays for Republic Day, Youth Day and May Day, it was understood that the show could not go on without Harry. As soon as I accumulated enough units and unexcused absences, it would be my turn to have my days off, that is, the big holidays, so there was an automatic deal with the class council. When calling them names, I always used the excuse: ‘I can’t do music and school at the same time, you have to help me a little!‘.”
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FATHER STOLE HIM FROM THE HOSPITAL, HE WAS A MIRACLE OF A CHILD: The Life Story of Hari Mata Hari – I don’t have ANY friends on stage
“The band Hari Mata Hari was created in September 1985, at the suggestion of the director Pjero Žalica, while the name of the band was given by the graphic designer Davor Papić. In the same year, the group released their debut album ‘U tuvoj kosa’, followed by ‘Ne bi te obradnila ni whole Yugoslavia’, which became the best album of the year. However, the first serious popularity found us in 1988 when we arrived at the record label ‘Jugoton’ with the album ‘I love you more than anything in the world’, which included the songs ‘Kad doje oktobar’, ‘Javi se’ and a duet with young by the singer Tajča “Seventeen is my age”, which sold 400,000 copies. This was followed by a tour from Vardar to Triglav, during which we went to every village and small place that was not even on the topographical military map. After those 300 concerts, I brought home a hundred marks, we earned absolutely nothing, but we toured the whole of Yugoslavia and showed people that we are not a virtual television phenomenon. We did the best job by winning the audience. In the manhood and ego-feeding years, like all men, I was silly and hungry for things I hadn’t gone through, so I swam in hedonism. We chased girls, proved ourselves. Those were years of madness wrapped in success. Life was like that beautiful and unencumberedand every year we spent two or three months at the ‘Park’ hotel in Novi Sad, while in Belgrade at the beginning of our career we had an apartment in Molerova Street,” said Hari Mata Hari. And then the war happened…
“When the riots started in Sarajevo, I was in Sweden on tour, I called Aida and told her to go to Slovenia with her child to stay with her family. I disbanded the band, because then I didn’t want to sing in either Belgrade or Zagreb. We stayed in Kranjska Gora for several years, where our son Damir was born in 1994. I was engaged in production, I made good contracts in Sweden and Finland, so I filled that chaotic time with studio work. Everything that happened at that time I gathered slowly, since I was thrown out of my rut. The group Hari Mata Hari returned to the scene only in 1998, with the album ‘I have no strength to love you’“. Today, he thinks that everything is one big act about pop music, and he has no friends from pop music.
“I don’t have any friends on the show. It’s a kind of acting – public stuff. It is a show for the people where you sing and act. It’s art. I see it as my job, I enjoy it. As for colleagues, colleagues live in all corners of the world and we usually meet at airports, have a coffee before the flight and that’s it,” said Harry honestly.
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