…is interested in songs of Sting and Julio Iglesias…

Uznews.net – Tashkent-based FM Radio Maxima has denied reports that it has been banned from airing songs of Sting and Julio Iglesias, despite the former branding President Islam Karimov as “dictator” and the latter giving an interview to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Uzbek Service.

In an interview with the shov-shuv.uz show biz website Maxima’s Editor-in-Chief Alisher Kanayev said that these reports were nonsense.

“Reports published on the Internet are an empty talk,” he said. “Radio Maxima is interested in songs of Sting and Julio Iglesias who have given beautiful songs to the world. All radio listeners will confirm this. I do not understand where they have got [information about] this decree. It is pointless to even discuss this nonsense.”

Kanayev said that his colleagues on other radio stations had laughed when he had discussed this ban with them.

Kanayev was not available to comment for Uznews.net, but Maxima’s spokeswoman confirmed his position that there was no ban on airing Sting’s and Julio Iglesias’s songs.

Asked whether this meant that Maxima radio staff did not mix politics with the art and tolerated Sting’s statement that Karimov was a dictator, who “is hermetically sealed in his own medieval, tyrannical mindset”, the spokeswoman hanged up the phone. She did not pick up the phone, when Uznews.net repeatedly tried to telephone back.

Radio Liberty correspondent Hurmat Babajanov managed to speak to several radios in Tashkent about this ban.

Radio Maxima told him that he could listen to these two singers endlessly if he were to buy their discs, but it did not discuss whether he could listen to them on its waves.

Radio Grande said that these singers did not fit its music tastes, because it was more into Pink and Lady Ga-Ga, while Radio Oriat Dono said that it preferred Uzbek and other Asian songs.

Babajanov thinks that after the ban caused controversy, radio stations must have been ordered to air their songs and deny the ban in the media.