On a hot summer night in 2012, by a lucky series of coincidences, I found myself chatting on Skype to Sven Martin, keyboard player with t.A.T.u. throughout their career, the man who produced the sound on many of their songs, music consultant, author of Running Blind, and a close friend of Lena Katina (with whom he still plays today) and Julia Volkova.
Talking to him about the ups and downs of their ten-year career and about how little of this is known to the majority of people, I suddenly found myself typing, 'I'll write a book about t.A.T.u. some time. People need to know.' And Sven replied from Los Angeles, 'Good idea!'
The fascinating history of this original and controversial group reads like a novel: what chance of success did they stand - a music project created almost by accident during Russia's post-economic crisis of 1999 by a software entrepreneur and a creative advertising psychologist with no previous contact with the world of showbusiness, in a country that had never launched a single pop star into the international arena, and funded with a handful of dollars, no proper record label behind them, and two teenage girls from a singing school? At the time, any layman would have said, 'none.' But a few years later those two young girls, by that time women, having sold millions of records around the globe and having played live in Europe, Asia and the Americas in front of hundreds of thousands of people from Wembley Arena in London to the Tokyo Dome, were established as 'legends' by the biggest television music station (MTV Legend Award).
The following pages tell how all this was made possible by the intuition, the unscrupulousness and the stubbornness of an extraordinary management, the originality of a few composers, the talents of a close-knit group of musicians, and above all the unexpected chemical reaction that took place when Lena Katina and Julia Volkova met: their ability to bewitch millions of teenagers with their voices and to scandalise a similar number of adults with their appearance, for the entire first decade of the new millennium.
For people who lost interest after their initial worldwide hits, All The Things She Said and Not Gonna Get Us, t.A.T.u. remain simply ‘that scandalous lesbian duo.’ But Julia and Lena demonstrated their ability over the years that followed to go far beyond the fictional and commercial image created by their first manager, and achieving quality objectives in every respect, as described succinctly by Roger Holland in his PopMatters column:
Emotion offered by Lena and Yulia’s quite distinct vocal ranges touches places most pop music couldn’t find with a map and GPS
This book is aimed at those who only remember them for their kissing on stage, to help them discover who t.A.T.u. really were, what was behind that provocative, disturbing and commercialised image, and perhaps play some of their CDs again and listen to them without prejudice.
cover art by Tiziana Spinosi
