Irakli Charkviani · Mepe

The king of the Georgian alternative scene

1961–2006

Irakli Charkviani (1961-2006) took the name Mepe, Georgian for the king, and entered Georgian music under it. He grew up in a family where the country's history was a domestic matter: his father, Gela Charkviani, was a journalist and diplomat, Georgia's ambassador to Britain; his grandfather, Candide Charkviani, led the Georgian Communist Party from 1938 to 1952. Irakli himself graduated from Tbilisi University, in Western European and American literature.

He began playing in 1976 with the project Arishi, then came Taxi, Children's Medicine and Georgian Dance Empire. In the nineties he was the central figure of the Georgian alternative and electronic scene: rock, electronics and hip hop met in him as one manner of speech. The key albums are Svan Song of 1993, Ap'ren of 1997, Amo of 2001 and Savse of 2004.

He wrote verse and prose: Personal Letters, A Calm Swim, Mepe Irakli's Poetry, Old Toys. On the twenty-fourth of February 2006 he was found dead in his Tbilisi flat, his heart, at forty-four. The unreleased songs came out in 2007 as the album Down with the King. In 2013 he was given the Rustaveli Prize posthumously, and in 2016 a monument to him was unveiled in central Tbilisi.