Today is Mary Boys Band’s 21st birthday and they will be celebrating with a concert at one of Sofia’s clubs. Twenty-one years ago today, the band played to an audience for the first time as a quintet.

But there are three core musicians - Maria Mutafchieva or Mary as they all call her, Miro, guitar (later to be her husband) and Ilian, keyboards. All three are from Bourgas and have graduated the school of mathematics in the city. In 1994 the trio started to play at different clubs in Sofia; later they were joined by a bass player and a drummer. It is the first time that Mary and the boys performed together as a quintet that they consider to be their birthday.

Here is what the musicians have got lined up for tonight. Maria Mutafchieva:

“Mary Boys Band invites friends to Sofia Live Club tonight to celebrate the band’s birthday. We start at 8. We decided the best way to celebrate was a concert, because the most important people in our lives, our partners throughout these 21 years have been our fans, the people who come to our concerts. We shall be playing some of our hits, as well as songs from the new album we shall be releasing soon. The first part of the set includes “Meeting your face again”, a song we haven’t even recorded yet. For the second part we have invited a special guest – tenor Mario Nikolov and we shall present a duet with him – “In my heart”. We got together twenty-one years ago – all of us people who wanted to perform our favourite music together. And this has not changed. Being in a band is a very special thing, only people who have experienced it on stage know what it means – to be always surrounded by friends. Family aside, they are the most important people in one’s life. Musicians are broad-minded, they love to have fun. Forgetting about the long rehearsals and the lugging of instruments from one place to another, we derive so much satisfaction from what we do, so much joy from the audience. While we were still at school we performed the songs of popular Bulgarian bands – Shturtsite, Signal, Tangra, Diana Express. We set up the band while we were at university in Sofia. We were really lucky – Vanya Kostova heard us play and liked what we were doing and she invited us to be her band. We were a brand new band, but we were playing on stage with a famous musician. Vanya is a true professional. Just like her, we always reach out to the audience.”

“There have been magical people in our lives, and they are the reason why we turned to music, and we have never regretted it,” says Maria and goes on to remember one summer in Bourgas a long time ago, when Miro, Ilian and herself became literally obsessed with the voice of Plamen Stavrev. “We would go and listen to him sing every night. His was a dynamite voice. He was from Bourgas but he was constantly working abroad and we only discovered him when we were at university. His name is not very familiar, but he was terrific as a performer. That is when we realized, all three of us, that we wanted to be like him, we wanted to touch the audience, to make a difference.”

Of course, they did so their own way, touching the hearts of thousands in Bulgaria and elsewhere. The band won several awards with their very first album “Unknown streets” (2001); the second is called “Just for You” (2004) and right after that, the band released a compilation of Mary Boys Band hits in English. Songs from this album have been aired by leading radio stations in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. The band has had concerts in this country and abroad with world famous bands like No Mercy, Boney M., Eruption, Gibson Brothers, Racey etc. Mary is the author of all of the band’s songs:

“Writing songs is very special. A song may live inside you for months, even years, waiting for its time to come. The song with Mario Nikolov we have lined up for tonight’s concert is a case in point – I made the first demo back in 2006. But there are some ideas that see the light of day right away. There have been times when the music and the lyrics have just flowed out of me in one go, and then I have recorded them in one breath. To my mind, lyrics are very important, they are the message we want to convey to the world. Of course, the melody is no less important. That is why a good song can be done with just voice and guitar.”

In the lyrics Mary writes we find streets and boulevards, roads and other such symbols, and that is by no means coincidental.

“It is imperative that we develop,” she says. “The road is something that helps us move forward, it is the symbol of dreams. I myself love discovering new places. We travel a lot with Miro, I am the perfect passenger who just sits there admiring the landscape, the birds. It is something that really charges my batteries.”

The audio file contains the following tracks:

- Boulevard of love;

- Come with me;

- The long road home;

- Rainy days.

English version: Milena Daynova