Vatrogasci at Bistro Dijana in Trnovec on October 17 - the parody band that has spent 35 years mocking hits from Boney M to Baby Lasagna

Vatrogasci ("The Firefighters"), the Croatian parody rock band, play the Dijana bistro and night bar in Trnovec near Varaždin on October 17 at 21:00. The band was founded by Tihomir Borošak Tiho and Dean Parmak in 1991 in the Zagreb neighbourhood of Gajnice, which means this year marks 35 years of making fun of other people's hits.

Their formula is well known: take a song everyone sings and turn it into a joke. One of the first was "Joj što volim" from 1992, a turbo-folk version of Boney M's "Rivers of Babylon". Since then they have parodied Croatian and foreign stars alike, and they didn't stop in the YouTube era either: they covered Aleksandra Prijović's "Dam dam dam", and later Baby Lasagna's Eurovision entry "Rim Tim Tagi Dim", which in their hands became "Rim tu tiki tiki". They have 13 studio albums behind them.

Parody may be the most Balkan genre of all - a way of laughing at what you hear on the radio every day. Vatrogasci have been doing it for longer than many of the artists they parody have had careers.

Tickets cost 12 euros (about 740 denars) on entrio.hr, and tables can be reserved with a minimum of four tickets. Bistro Dijana is at Ludbreška ulica 2 in Trnovec.