[1] Apart from Bijelo dugme, Tifa sang in numerous bands with varying degrees of prominence (most notable being Teška Industrija, Vatreni Poljubac and Divlje Jagode).

After barely a month, he moved on to Kako kad and only started singing when the lead singer didn't show up for rehearsal one day.

Together, they also started working on tracks by mailing packages back and forth containing audio cassettes with Zlatan composing and Tifa writing the lyrics.

In the meantime, word spread around Sarajevo about Tifa's excellent vocal skills, so people started coming to him with offers of joining their groups.

Briefly, he was even a fringe member of the freshly re-activated Teška industrija that made use of his lyrics in 1984 to record a few tracks on their comeback album Ponovo s vama ("With you again").

In early 1984, Goran Bregović invited him to join Bijelo Dugme, the biggest band in SFR Yugoslavia at the time, as replacement to recently departed Željko Bebek.

During most of the recording sessions, Tifa was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but despite numerous personality issues, Bregović was very much satisfied with the quality of his young singer's voice.

The burden of replacing Željko Bebek as the lead vocal who spent previous 14 years with the band's various incarnations was just too heavy for Tifa to cope with.

To ease the pressure of playing in front of tens of thousands screaming fans every other night Tifa disappeared even further in his chemical addictions, making himself pretty much impossible to deal with.

The widely circulated unofficial story claims Tifa took a snitch deal from the police whereby providing the information they wanted about his suppliers in return for having the charges wiped off.

In 1989, he successfully released his first solo album No1 which he recorded with Tifa Band, a freshly assembled group consisting mostly of musicians from bands he previously played with: Aleksandar Šimpraga (ex Top), Vlado Podany (ex Divlje Jagode), Mustafa Čizmić (ex Bolero), and Veso Grumić (ex Top) with the help of Djordje Ilijin (ex Tako) who played keyboards during studio sessions.

After getting viciously beaten up by some local heavies, an incident which he vehemently refuses to disclose any details about to this day, Tifa left Sarajevo in 1995 for Germany.

Then, the day before the Belgrade concert (the final one in the series), irritated Tifa blasted Bregović and manager Raka Marić in Kurir daily tabloid: "I hear some are already talking about continuing on with the Dugme thing.