The last tour

Group "Agatha Christie" says goodbye to the audience

Brothers in mind. This week, the Agatha Christie group will give two farewell concerts - in the Moscow Olympic and St. Petersburg Ice Palace. Despite the fact that the last tour will last until the future spring, the Samoilov brothers say: this is not a PR action, their decision is final and irrevocable, and after a series of performances of Agatha in its current form, it will cease to exist. The result of the 21-year life of the legend of Russian rock was summed up The New Times
In 1995, the famous rocker Sergei Galanin got a job as a TV presenter in a simple music telephone program. Its essence was simple: the audience called for the studio and ordered their favorite clips. Television was still relatively honest, so the earring really took on the air what the music lovers asked, and not what the producers paid for. And then they asked only "Agatha Christie." On the tenth air, Galanin is tired of it, and he announced: “Calls demanding to put the“ opium ”are no longer accepted. I myself will end every program with this clip. ” Three months earlier, Agatha Christie released the album of the same name, which, as they say, "blew up the country." Now many songs from that disk would probably be forbidden to put on air - "For the propaganda of violence and drugs." Then the clip with the refrain “Let's meet with you in the evening, we will smoke an opium” only in the “Time” program, and the Agatha itself became an absolute record holder for the number of tour, playing about a hundred concerts for the year, including three “salt marshes” in Luzhniki and two - in the green theater of the park to them. Gorky. The same people who, as they say, “the bear in the ear stepped” spoke about the Samoilovs about the same: “drug addicts and perverts”. In fairness, in some way they were right.

Group psychotherapy

Back in 1990, only two years after the formation of the group, Gleb Samoilov (the youngest of the brothers and the author of most songs “Agatha”) at home, on the most primitive synthesizer, recorded amazing in his musicality, but completely schizophrenic in texts, a solo plate called “Little Fritz” (“Published” it will be later, and even that limited circulation). In fact, this is a mini-opera (Samoilov is a passionate fan of music by Schnitsky and Wagner), in which the Great Patriotic War is shown by the eyes of simple, even touching German soldiers: one of them falls in love with a “cute russish witch Olesya”, but, having repulsed, with grief, he throws himself “parabellum in the mouth”, the other abides in shock from “unmocrated” The cruelty of the pilot Pokryshkin: “He is not a killer, not a villain or even a maniac / He does not love us for no reason - he doesn’t like it just like that!” Around the same time, Gleb writes another “solo” - “whistle” (unlike Fritz, he will remain on the shelf). There are even more curious things in it: for example, a song called "I was raped by ten people." Her lyrical hero (however, sings Gleb in the first person)-a nine-year-old child who has become a victim of sexual violence in a dark forest. To find a reassurance, he “recoups” on an even smaller girl, who lies in wait in the same place: “What is there,” I told her, “take off my underpants, bride!” / Say “thank you” that one, me - so ten at once / is better than anyone else, because I - good / offended me - I revenge, and this is justice. ” One very famous rocker (we will leave the last name with brackets) not so long ago quite accurately spoke about a colleague of Samoilov: “An absolutely ill, broken person, internally very lonely. Oddly enough, this is precisely the reason for the frantic popularity of Agatha Christie. After all, most of the inhabitants of our country are also “tightly” and lonely. And the concerts of Agatha are such a kind of group psychotherapy. It is easier to get rid of fears and complexes than one by one. ”

The new and at the same time the last composition of "Agatha Christie" (from left to right):

Dmitry "Snake" Khakimov, Gleb Samoilov, Konstantin Bekrev, Vadim Samoilov

The beginning of the end

Gleb Samoilov, Gleb Samoilov, wrote his very first songs (including the murderous in his depressiveness of the “gray sky”). In none of his interviews it is impossible to find at least some happy memories of that time. However, like any other. Even when the group was called from Yekaterinburg to Moscow (this happened after the song “I am on you, like in the war” unexpectedly became the main radiochit of 1994), no particular joy in her camp was observed. On the contrary, Gleb talks about the first years of stay in the capital with some kind of childish resentment: “There was a feeling that we were forcibly removed from the maternal womb and transplanted into a completely alien Wednesday.” The "Wednesday" quickly threw Samoilov brothers, without which show business does not exist: drugs. The story is silent whether it was done with an angry intent (in general, such a practice that allows you to keep young stars on a short leash at that time existed) or, as it was called, "the fact remains: the Samoilovs sat on" synthetics ", and the producers for several years checked off on the" agate ". Despite the fact that the group was at the peak of popularity, its directorate, selling each concert for $ 10 thousand, voiced the amount of almost half as much as the brothers, and cut the whole difference in his pockets. There were several hundred such concerts, and “Navar” was crazy - even though the fact that since 1996 the public at the performances of Agatha became less and less since 1996. Only a very prepared and persistent psychological student could already listen to their new songs. “Winged Seraphim”, awarding “Ausweis to Heaven”, “Legionnaires of the Milky Way”, going to send “the last Fuhrer” from the space to the Earth, glitches of all the colors of the rainbow, which “float along the corridor and disappear in the bathroom,” the figurative series of the poet Gleb Samoilov clearly hinted at severe psychiatric and narcological diagnoses.

The irony of fate

By the beginning of the current century, Gleb Samoilov lived in a shabby removable “odnushka” in the area of ​​the Ilyich Square metro station, dinner in the kitchen, where only two could be dispersed, and slept in a room in which it was impossible to place anything but the most necessary: ​​a bed and musical instruments. “Behind the scenes” in conversations about him increasingly used the phrase “went crazy”. He could appear on the shoot for a glossy magazine with a fascist swastika on his chest. He could walk along the street with a friend - and suddenly stop as if dug and start to pray frantically to God. Could get out of the house in the middle of the night, go to the famous “Bulgakov” entrance and stand there near the door, muttering something under his breath. The lifestyle of his brother Vadim was not much different-except that he also abandoned the music at some point. The “Mine Kaif” record is one of the most hysterical in the work of Agatha Christie - Gleb came up with himself, and answered the question of the reasons for this: “Vadik completely flew away ...” At the same time, Gleb demonstrated a gesture depicting a injection in Vienna. The culmination of that nightmare was a concert in one of the now closed Moscow clubs: from an hour and a half program, not a single composition was sung by the Samoilov brothers, barely standing on their feet, until the end ... The final of the five-year stay in the rock and roll Ugarity turned out to be tragic, but the trouble was not at all from where the third participant died from atherosclerosis of the heart. Groups - keyboard player Alexander Kozlov. According to the evil irony of fate, he just led an absolutely sober lifestyle, but from childhood he suffered from a disease, as a result of it and destroyed it. “I will never forget one evening,” Vadim Samoilov later recalled. -We sat in some Moscow restaurant, I pecked my nose in a plate, Sasha looked at me for a long time, and then said: “You know, I will never accept you like that, but I will still be with you to the end.” At that time, he was not healthier than me, but he believed that his illness was human, natural, and mine - if we talk about alcohol and drugs, is brought, so it should be easier. He was ill for us with Gleb like no one else ... ”The death of a close friend shocked the Samoilov brothers so much that until 2004 they did not record anything new, and the album“ Thriller ”, who was born as a result, turned out to be frankly weak. True, during this time Gleb and Vadim managed to win (they say that not without the help of expensive doctors) the pernicious passion for drugs.

Farewell wine

The beginning of 2008 was marked by the fact that the Samoilov brothers took two new participants to the group, Konstantin Bekrev keyboy from the World of Fire and Dmitry Dmitry Khakimov from the Naiv group. With their help, almost all old songs were redirected and sat down for recording new ones. Last November, Agatha first showed the updated composition on the stage of the B1 Moscow club and again, as in the good old days, gathered a full house. The Samoilovs themselves unexpectedly appeared before the public in magnificent physical form, and all the "agata" never sounded so juicy and brightly, perhaps never. The news that the brothers are “tired” and in the spring of 2009 their group will go on a farewell tour called “Epilogue”, during which all major cities of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine will visit fans in complete bewilderment. But she did not look for a marketing course for long. It is enough to listen to the completely new creations of the Samoilovs, which are about to take shape in the last record.

The lines from the title song “Epilogue” could well become a dying note: “We drank farewell wine / and we are quite satisfied with everyone / gathered and burned the dreams of dreams / and we don’t feel sorry for them at all / other clouds, probably, we will call us / another very little will be a little to eat / and soon everything will pass from the universal longing and loneliness of“ Agatha ”.

Songs from the still not released album "Epilogue" "Agatha" has been playing at farewell concerts for six months. Most critics agree that the record will become the most mature work in the history of the group. And the most sad ...