Translated material
Yuri Shatunov died
"Medusa" recalls a musician who never dreamed of becoming a star-but will remain a symbol of the early 1990s
The singer Yuri Shatunov died at the age of 48, an extensive heart attack was the cause of death. From 1986 to 1991, he was a soloist of the "affectionate May" - the most popular group in the USSR at that time. In the "affectionate May", which was led by producer Andrei Razin, there were several soloists (who pretended themselves to Shatunov), and the group gave dozens of concerts a month, sometimes speaking simultaneously in several cities. After the "affectionate May", Shatunov began his solo career, but neither he nor the group already returned to the previous level of popularity. Medusa briefly talks about what a man was the soloist of the main Soviet Boyz-Bend.
Three days before the death of Yuri Shatunov, the news was released on NTV - it turned out that the former soloist of the Affectionate May group only now, after long trials, received the rights to perform the song “White Roses” and other hits.
Shatunov sued them with Andrei Razin, a former collective administrator, producer and at the same time performer of songs of the "Tender May". From Razin in the early 1990s, in fact, the real success of the group began. Hearing on the cassettes the voice of a teenager from an orphanage in the Orenburg region, he (then-the administrator of the Mirage group) decided to engage in a new project and led the self-taught musicians to the status of the most popular group of the country-and a symbol of his time.
“The group fell very much precisely at the late piercing time, it coincided well with the feeling of a certain mass orphanage of the post -Soviet, when the country has lost its sense of value, the meaning of existence. And at the same time there was a feeling of some general poverty, ” says Musical critic Alexander Gorbachev in a commentary on the BBC . And he adds that “affectionate May” is “specially“ poor ”music” and “for timbres and instruments”.
The bet on "poverty" and "lininess" worked. At the junction of the 1980-1990s, the group collected stadiums-not a single video about the group is complete without large plans of the crying fans of Shatunov, who know all the songs by heart.
The minor soloist also looked brightly - he wore a disheveled, almost Pankovskaya hairstyle, manewent on camera and went on stage in a T -shirt with the playboy emblem, exposing his shoulders and chest . The Soviet Union has not yet seen such an execution of adolescents - it is not surprising that Shatunov became a megazvezt and a favorite of the female part of the audience (the standard element of the “affectionate May” mythology - children born throughout the country from the soloist of the ensemble).
Where was the "affectionate May" born
At one of his recent concerts in 2022, Shatunov called on the stage of Sergei Kuznetsov - the author of the White Roses, the Pink Evening, the Gray Night and the other main songs of the group. To the applause of the audience to the microphone, a middle -aged man slowly came out . “Everyone knows very well where the“ gentle May ”was born and who created it,” said Shatunov, the audience shouted approvingly.
The Tender May was born in Orenburg in 1986-at the boarding school No. 2. Kuznetsov in it led a musical circle. Shatunov at that time was 13 years old. His parents divorced when he was three. His mother died when the boy was 11. Shatunov did not communicate with his father, and Yura took the aunt to educate - but the teenager ran away from home all the time, and later vagramal in Bashkiria and the Orenburg region.
In 1985, Valentin Tazekenova, director of the orphanage of Akbulak, who became the “main adult” and “second mother” for him, drew attention to Shatunova (her other famous pupil of a decade was Tiktokier and singer Danya Milokhin). In 1986, Tazekenova became the director of the Orenburg boarding school No. 2, Yura left for her-and already in a new place he met Kuznetsov.
The name of the boyish group was also invented by Kuznetsov-on the line from the song “Summer” composed by him: “It seems to us a long winter-winter, but the affectionate May will enter into rights.” Nobody liked the name, but a few minutes before the next performance-the "affectionate May" began with school discos and concerts at small venues-it was decided to call it right behind the scene, Kuznetsov said .
In a few years, this phrase will become almost a household name-“how affectionate May” will mean something uncomplicated and naive, but superpolar. What adolescents sob at concerts from.
Many people know the legend by which all -Union popularity came to the group in roundabout ways: supposedly the first notes of the “affectionate May” producers suggested putting the cassettes on the trains - and so the whole country learned about it. In fact, Kuznetsov simply agreed to sell cassettes in the Orenburg kiosk at the railway station-and in this way the first records came to Razin, which in those years was just starting to engage in show business.
In the very beginning of the 1990s, Kuznetsov left the group, he ceased to arrange how Razin conducts things. Shatunov remained. After 30 years in the show Andrei Malakhov "Hello Andrey!" He explained this like this: “He left, but I could not, because he was a“ state -owned child ”. And he did not have a passport in his hands. I was forced to stay with him [Razin]. "
According to Shatunov, over the past two years in the "affectionate May", he and the group earned five million rubles ("Volga" then cost 1200), but the performers themselves did not see this money. To the question of one of the guests of the show, actor Stanislav Sadalsky: "Will you ever go to Razin for the funeral?" Shatunov harshly replied: "Only in order to make sure [that he died]."
In 1991, Shatunov himself left the group. Since then, the debate for “white roses” and other hits continued. “For 30 years, the administrator Razin, after he lost Sergei Kuznetsov, comes up with all kinds of fraud in order to keep me with him. He deprives Kuznetsov’s authorship and begins to blackmail me with these songs, ”he said in Malakhov in 2021.
One of the examples of such blackmail, claimed Shatunov, is associated with his own son, born in 2006. According to him, Razin set the condition: "If I do not be a godfather [your son], you can’t see these songs." Razin has become for them - and now calls himself in an interview with Kum Shatunov.
After leaving the "affectionate May", Shatunov went to Germany, learned there at the sound engineer. In the 2000s, Shatunov continued his solo career-and again hit the hit parades (you can recall at least the song “Childhood” about Natasha, which you want to pull by the braid). By the end of the 2010s, Shatunov forever entered the circle of Russian pop artists, who are waiting for the audience of concerts “Disco of the 1990s”.
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There are a lot of myths and strange stories around the “affectionate May”, to understand the history of their origin today it seems already impossible: from the legend invented by Razin that Shatunov is the illegitimate son of Elvis Presley (and Razin himself is the nephew of Mikhail Gorbachev), to endless reincarnations and duplicating compositions of the group, which was deserted and revived throughout three dozen years.
What do we know about Shatunov for sure is that he did not dream of a musical career - his “idea” was hockey , in the boarding school he was engaged in a lot of him, was the left extreme attacker. “But it happened as it turned out,” he said.
Shatunov was fond of fishing, went to the river with his son and daughter-he said that his record catch was a 13-kilogram fish. Before going on the stage, I always smoked a cigarette. He played harmonies , planned concerts for June 2022 and was glad that his children were not interested in music: “There are professions more interesting and stable.”
Colleagues called Shatunov a closed person. He himself said that “it is enough to listen to his songs” and everything will become clear. In January 2022, Shatunov released a clip to the new song “Do not argue with me”, in which he looks at the northern lights and walks along the luminous path somewhere in space: “Do not argue with me, but better a kiss. Let them fly past us. ”
"Jellyfish"