Do not believe Shura's tears

The British edition of The Calvert Journal called the Russian nineties and zero era of the camming art of the whole country, considering pop music as the most honest evidence. At that time, the “Hands Up!” Group She could take a clip about the relationship of the young man with the drag, the singer Oscar released the song “Mazh Vaselin”, and at sunset the Tattoos group built its stage image exclusively to explore the topics of teenage homosexuality.

At the end of the 2000s, most of the artists of this generation simply disappeared from the screens: Shamil Malkanduev, he is also a singer Oscar, said that his life “came Islam”, and the Tatu group, once supported the gay parade in Moscow, eventually broke up. In 2010, Boris Moiseev began to renounce his homosexuality.

One of the iconic figures of the departed era was Singer Shura. He performed in the Kremlin Palace in Kapron stockings and a T -shirt in a transparent grid, walked around Moscow in a make -up and fur coat on the floor, shot provocative clips and sang, whistling through two knocked out his teeth. At one time, the tabloids covered almost every step of his, but over time they forgot about the singer, and he himself, by personal recognition, today cannot recall several years from his life. The author of Samizdat Diana Sadreeva studied the biography of the main Quir-aquet of the post-Soviet stage and restored the chronicle of the memories that he forgot.

Year: 1997

What happens: from an apartment with a prostitute to a scene on Varvarka

In a three -room apartment on Leningradka, a neighbor wakes up closer to dinner, rustles in the bathroom and thunders in the kitchen: brushes his teeth, washing, then cooks breakfast and drinks strong tea. A dog is choking - a prostitute Tanya, who receives customers in his room, and a toothless guy from Novosibirsk, who plays a plate of a soup in the Manhattan Express club, walks with her. A few months ago, he lived and spent the night in the Botanical Garden. Now he has where to sleep, where to fold cosmetics, a couple of mesh T-shirts and pants-sovinny.

Every Saturday, he walks along the same route - from his apartment to Varvarka and vice versa. There, in the building of the Rossiya Hotel, there is a manhattan express known to the entire Moscow Bomond club. Shura enters the stage every Saturday, the presenter represents it as the son of emigrants from America, sings the same song and dissolves in the crowd. His tasks for the evening are to eat honestly worked out the first, second and, perhaps, even dessert, drink a few glasses of free vodka and infiltrate the fashionable party of this city.

In a drunken frenzy to the music, he makes an important acquaintance with designer Alisher. He dresses all the main stars of the Russian pop scene: the group "Brilliant", Masha Rasputin and Pugachev.

“Do not insert your teeth,” he says to Shura.

He nods, and the two of them relieve fricigation: they draw “black tears” to him, they throw a fur coat on his shoulders, a hat-earflap on his head and in this form is taken to a large stage.

Year: 1988–1997

What is happening: grandmother Vera, gypsy skirts and the main hits

Novosibirsk. In the gray-blue building, the employees of a small shopping center are sitting to the front door of which are driven by a bruised red staircase. Today they dwell pants, sell milk with bread and pour beer into containers. And in the 80s and 90s here, on the Street of the Teacher, was not upholstered by the cheap corrugated board of the shopping center, but the expensive restaurant "Rus", where Novosibirsk businessmen, bandits and winners of beauty contests gathered.

The restaurant was a thin thirteen -year -old schoolboy Sasha Medvedev. Its main repertoire was thieves' hits by order of visitors, and a stage costume - dresses on the floor and long skirts. Together with ulcerative mockery and cracks from the local elite, he received a salary and collected generous tips, some of which he gave his grandmother Vera Mikhailovna, and put off the rest for the future.

The story of the child’s childhood Sasha is well known and told in detail by the tabloids: he studied poorly at school, was an object of persecution and ridicule, scandalized with his father and fought with his younger brother, who once knocked out his front teeth. Many years later, it turned out that his brother was consolidated, and her father was not universal, which is why Sasha did not receive gifts for the New Year and did not feel his father's warmth throughout his life.

“I didn’t have that,” he says, “so that someone tells me: stand on a stool and tell us a poem.” I walked, dragging a chair, and asked: well, listen, listen to me.

An eight -year -old child he got into an orphanage: his mother preferred the calm of her personal life, and not the upbringing of a capricious schoolboy.

A few months later, a grandmother came after Sasha and took him to her. He watched with admiration how she sings gypsy romances and thunders stitched in the hem of a colorful skirt with bottles of bottles.

Sasha experimented with appearance, and Vera Mikhailovna did not stop her grandson’s passion for changing clothes. She allowed him to open his closet, pull out dresses, skirts, cosmetics from him and walk around the house in shoes.

“You should become a star,” she repeated, and once brought him to a restaurant in which she herself worked as a chef.

He threw a school, began to speak to the visitors to the restaurant, and then met with musician Pavel Yesenin, who, while Shura shone with rhinestones in front of the Novosibirsk bandits, DJ in local discos.

“I took part in the music competition,” says Shura, “among the organizers, Pasha Yesenin was listed.” I did not pass the competition, but I was called a back-vocalist. I went to Pasha and said: And write me something too. He replied: “500 dollars” - and left for Berlin. I accumulated money, sent it to him-and after a few months I received music for three compositions, which then became the songs of the “rushki-palace”, “Cold Moon” and “Don-Don-Don”.

With a small suitcase and three songs, with the money proceeded for the sale of his mother’s fur coat, Shura moves to the Russian capital. From there, he regularly goes to the recording studio near Tver, where other novice artists who wanted to get into a large show business worked on his hits. Every now and then Shura asks for help. In the end, one of the artists organizes him a meeting with producer Igor Krutoy, through whom “a lot of musicians pass every day”, but Krutoy does not distinguish Medvedev from the voting mass.

And only when the “cold moon”, thanks to personal acquaintance, falls into the rotation of the Radio “Europe Plus” and quickly rises to the first lines of the hit parade, the steep invites him to his office.

At the same time, Yesenin returns from Berlin, and together with Shura they begin to work on the recording of the album. While Shura and Yesenin are shooting a clip to the main hit of the entire future solo career of the artist, the holder of the first Ferrari in Moscow, the editor-in-chief of OM magazine Igor Grigoryev carefully examines the Dazed & Confusion publication, and the first Moscow gay gay of the muscular gay of the muscular gay club opens in the recreation center “Sickle and the Hammer”. "Chance."

Year: 1997–2000

What is happening: Soviet pop camming out

- This was one of his first performances, ”recalls the art director of the“ Chance ”gay club Sergei Pchela. - He then had two or three songs. And one stage suit. I was then in the make -up artist with him, he behaved quite modestly. And then he stood on the heels and broke the hall.

The reference point, when Shura suddenly wants to, begins in 1997 after the clip releases for the song “Cold Moon”.

The clip is removed in one abandoned estate of the cultural capital - specially for him, Shura is engaged in two St. Petersburg transgender, which are happy to join mass dances.

The appearance on the screens of a young man in bright yellow leggings in the company of two tall dragons and an openly dancing crowd shocked the audience and instantly made the singer a symbol of updated Quire aesthetics:

“He quickly became one of the top artists,” the bee continues to say. - Before the collapse of the USSR, no one shocking, except Valery Leontyev, was. And here - freedom.

With the Cold Moon clip, Shura first gets into the TV, and then on the cover of OM magazine:

“I went out,” says Shura and laughs, “in a home robe for bread, and the people around are whispering: And this is you?” Is that you? The magazine only came out, just a few days have passed, and they began to recognize me. Then I felt famous!

Further - more. Shura receives a “golden gramophone” for the “cold moon”, writes down the next hit “Summer Rains has noise” and becomes the owner of the “Best Contractor” nomination of the main musical competition of that era - “Song of the Year”.

“During his cruise,” says Angelina Vovk, the host of the competition, “our ship met a lot of interesting things ....
“For the first time,” the co -host of Evgeny Menshov, dressed in a classic costume, continues to be embarrassed and lowering, “a very exotic and extravagant singer takes part in the“ Song of the Year ”... Meet!” Shura!

The singer with hair reminis with silver paint, in a white fur coat and short shorts, jumps energetically and under the plywood performs the main hit of 1999.

The Novosibirsk restaurant in a hundred seats receive concert halls for 6,000 people and stadiums for 10,000; Instead of quotations of famous hits, he performs his own repertoire; instead of costumes sewn at home on a sewing machine, wears designer clothes; After a rented room on Leningradka, he buys housing in the center of the capital.

“I felt like a nonsense,” says Shura. - I woke up, went on stage, returned home, went to bed, and the next day, the same thing: got up, sang, lay down, got up, sang, lay down.

In an hour of performances, he is paid $ 10,000, he gives two or three concerts a day, travels around Moscow in limousines, buying up diamond cufflinks and lives on Crak-Kokain.

“A drug for the lonely,” says Shura and looks thoughtfully under his feet.

Year: 2000-2003

What happens: big money, bottles of vodka and 18 courses of chemotherapy

The beginning of the zero in the life of secular Moscow is money, alcohol, drugs, rampant fun and money again. Future billionaires Mikhail Prokhorov and Oleg Deripaska are shooting tables opposite each other, around them-oldlets and secular lionesses, who had just returned from the opening of the first Chanel boutique in Moscow.

Shura flashes here and here. In each of the establishments, he seems to be his own - the Feers open the doors of Fabrique, “Diaghilev”, “Three Monkeys”. He has everything for this-popularity, shocking and a lot of money.

“I have never seen so much drugs as his house.” He just walked around the apartment and fucked up, ”recalls the concert director of Shura Pavel Depershmidt, who has been working with the singer for the past 15 years.

They met late at night at the Kursk station: in a long fur coat, surrounded by a motley retinue of imaginary friends and frankly, Schur took a squeamish, squeamishly stepping over the legs of the homeless people poisoned by the “pale”.

“Then I thought:“ Your mother is, ”says Depershmidt, looking at the artist. - Everyone told me that it is not worth working with him, that this upstart is nothing, except for the end of the mouth and pink leggings. He uses drugs, breaks out concerts, arranges brawls wherever it happens: in hotels, airports, police branches.
Well, well, tell me how dear he is. For four years we were at war with him

When someone says that Shura is not capable of aggression, Deperschmidt shakes his head and recalls the nineties:

-Well, well, tell me how dear he is. For four years, after meeting, we were at war. Although he, of course, is very vulnerable. There have always been a lot of people around him, he treated them, lowered all the money, and gave them in debt. And people became more and more, and he got used to everyone, was very gullible. And only then, when I recognized Shura closer, I realized how much bad relations with my mother influenced him. He had everything picked up, picked up, then here they would love a little, then there.

When Shura began problems, all “friends” disappeared somewhere. His whole life was built around cocaine and vodka. Shura began to tear up concerts, going on stage in alcohol or drug intoxication - one by one the organizers began to abandon his performances.

Shura finally disappeared from the field of view of producers, fans and hucksters at the beginning of the zero. Yesterday's colleagues and friends whispered among themselves about severe drug addiction - and really put the singer in a narcological clinic.

He took tests for HIV, underwent a complete medical examination; Doctors diagnosed him with fourth stage cancer, prescribed an egg removal surgery and a chemotherapy course - the first of the eighteen.

Shura began the tremor of the right hand, and then problems with his feet. Alexander Medvedev is in a wheelchair.

Year: 2006–2011

What is happening: Touring by nostalgic talk shows and return to the stage

It took four years to restore. In 2006, Shura entered the stage in the same image in which he collected stadiums a few years ago: in short metallic shorts, tall boots in tone and with a overlaid bundle of discolored hair. Only from under the tight-fitting transparent longshviva now, a full stomach was bulging, and instead of a toothless smile-ideal, snow-white, with all thirty-two teeth.

Shura with a new jaw did not immediately realize in which world he found himself: from the second half of the zero, Russian society was increasingly turning to conservative rhetoric, and the beginning of the tenths had already passed under the sign of the law on the prohibition of “propaganda of non -traditional sexual relations”.

Soloist of the group "Hands up!" Sergei Zhukov, publicly apologized for the video “And he kisses you,” the Tattoo group broke up, and Shura, trying to adapt to the changed conditions, eventually renounced from the past, saying “thank God, I am not gay”. Shura does not understand what to do: he lies under a surgical scalpel and for a while gets rid of excess weight.

His only chance to regain fame is the tour of the current show: Shura with the same enthusiasm participates in them all, talks about his difficult childhood on NTV, then on ORT, and then records in programs with cartoon Masyanyan.

In 2007, he entered the scene of the “You - Superstar” project, along with the same artists unknown to today's generation: Aziza, Glyzin, Apina. He lost weight, on him a shirt, stuck under a collar, black trousers and a large jacket, as if from someone else's shoulder. To find out in this man with a steady near a number of white teeth Frick from the 90s is difficult, although the voice, sharp waves of the hands and movements of the hips give out the same person in him that he came up with “summer rains”, “cold moon”, “do good”, “do not believe the tears”.

Returning to the stage is more difficult: Shura still remembers his dizzying success, but the audience already poorly remembers it. After several exits to the scene, Shura breaks again and begins to abuse alcohol. He runs around the aircraft, kisses the airbus, shouting the songs - it is removed from the flight and detained in the Moscow "Vnukovo" for hooliganism.

The organizers of the concerts refuse to work with the artist again. 50–70 people gather in rare concerts in the hall, he does not come out of new songs, and only in 2011, after a seven -year break, he shoots a clip and presents the album “New Day”, the release of which is noted by the leading Tuttha Larsen and writer Yulia Shilova.

Year: 2011–2019

What is happening: Pugacheva, Shura and kings of Macho-rock in one episode

- There was a time of freaks, and it ended, ”Shura says calmly.

The party members replaced Diaghilev to GIPSY and a taxi with a bicycle, and Shura changed his heels to comfortable shoes, T-shirts to sweatshirts of free cut, short shorts for galve pants. From a twenty -year -old thin guy, he turned into a major forty -year -old man. He still loves rhinestones and sparkles, large make -ups and a bright concert makeup.

He gives concerts in Russian cities, but, of course, in smaller volumes and without hope to redo a wave of glory again. From the last trips-Kaluga, Rostov-on-Don, Bryansk, Krasnoyarsk. He sings at concerts of the Format “Faces of the 90s”, performs on corporate parties and television, sits visiting bloggers, tells the press now not about his mother, but about troubles with living space and plans for the future. He releases clips for new compositions that remain unnoticed: even devoted fans of creativity come to his concerts behind old songs.

The twenty -six -year -old Muscovite Ilya is actively commenting on posts in the official group of the singer: “I love you! I'll come to your concert! "

In addition to Shura's work, he listens to the Anal Grind group, which is described in this way:

- Mochilovo, dancing and wild porn in one bottle! Porn-maniacs invite to the gig and are waiting for you at the scene!

In his playlist of the songs of the Punk-Metal group “Pissed mutant”, the kings of the Blood Pollut Macho Rock, the Moscow gang of lawless people and amorals St. Vagina dentata.

As Shura turned out to be among them, Ilya does not explain, but he says that since childhood he was his fan and loved him for courage and “good energy”:

“In his songs,” he says emotionally, “as if there is a particle of me, he sings about my life!” His songs make me be sad, and at the same time rejoice! From Shura comes some bright, kind, pure energy! And despite all the troubles that he had, he was able to remain the same bright, kind and joyful person! В какой-то степени я хотел бы быть, как он... И завидую ему... В общем, люблю его за эту детскую радость, которую он несёт в мир, за которой скрывается много трагедий и переживаний! За это всё люблю его.

Шура действительно производит такое впечатление: слегка манерный, но доброжелательный, переживший нелюбовь матери, наркозависимость и рак, умеющий плакать в телевизионных студиях и при закрытых дверях. В нём не видно ни жестокости, ни нарочитого пафоса или снобизма: движения полного тела плавные и мягкие.

В официальной группе Шуры больше четырёх с половиной тысяч подписчиков — вместе с ними сегодня он изучает старые материалы о себе и «собирает по крупицам своё прошлое». Концертный директор Депершмидт объясняет провалы в его памяти тем, что Шура — творческий человек и «может себе позволить путать некоторую информацию».

Иногда он путается в датах и некоторых деталях биографии: то ли от того, что не видит в этом смысла, то ли от того, что девяностые и нулевые провёл в наркотическом и алкогольном беспамятстве.

Он признаётся, что в первом интервью на несколько разворотов, которое он дал журналу «Ом», нет ничего, хоть отдалённо похожего на правду.

— Однажды, — говорит он, — когда я только-только начинал, но меня уже заметили, я разговаривал с Аллой Борисовной (Пугачёвой. — Прим. авт.), и она дала мне несколько советов. Первый звучал так: «Ври столько, сколько будет нужно». А второй — «вставь зубы!»

Шура по-прежнему выступает на телепередачах и рассказывает у Малахова о том, как лишился жилплощади, которую купил ещё в 90-е. Однако артист до сих пор принимает гостей и подарки, стоя в блестящем кимоно в той самой квартире, из которой, по его словам, его уже давно выселили. Сотни видеозаписей в плохом качестве, обрывки статей из журналов COOL и разноцветных страниц СПИД-Инфо — сегодня отсканированы и выложены в его группу.

— Ну и что, что у меня всего пять песен! — громко смеётся Шура. — Буду их петь столько, сколько получится! Вообще мне сейчас живётся лучше, чем тогда. Тогда я ходил и говорил: это вы все хотите быть счастливыми, а я не хочу. Я был уверен в том, что счастье — это вообще не про меня.