In the view of Sergej Lavrov, the failing of the concert-tour of the group through Russia is the result of Leonid Shlyakhover's excessive greediness.
The last few years the group Tatu gave concerts primarily abroad. Just the present autumn the tatugirls decided to come by with the tour through Russia. But the long awaited Russian tour immediately ended up in a disgusting scandal, before it even had begun. First the group has cancelled a few concerts in the far east. Then they even declared breaking the contract with the organizer of the tour, the company Kreml-concert.
"Our company signed a contract with the director of Tatu, Leonid Shlykhover, for the realization of 22 concerts" told the manager of the concerts department, Sergej Lavrov. The first was scheduled for Aug. 24 in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, but this day the president declared a day of mourning in connection with the disaster of the airplane of 'Pulkovskij Airline'. All concerts have been cancelled. Other artists reacted with understanding for this. Borya Moiseev, who was about to work in Irkutsk the same day, gave back the money to me without questions. Maksim Galkin did the same way. Only the group Tatu demanded to be paid their full royalty of 20.000 euro for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. "It's your problem, that there is no concert!" told Shlykhover. "We are ready to perform. Move it to any other date!" But the organizer from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Nikolaj Zhadanov, refused to postpone the concert. There were too few tickets sold anyway in his opinion. In case of a postponement there would inevitably begin repayment of tickets. It would have brought nothing than additional losses to him. "In that case cancel all the other concerts!" told Shlykhover."Unless there is no fee for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk we won't go anywhere!" The situation with the ticket-sells wasn't better in the other cities. In Khabarovsk there were 500 tickets sold altogether for the stadium, in Vladivostok 400 tickets for the Circus. Nevertheless the local organizers were ready to carry out the concerts, but Shlyakhover insisted stubbornly on that. As a result the concerts in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok also "dropped". Generally there was nothing more than costs on the scheduled route. In Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar there were alltogether about 100 tickets sold.
Veneer is better
"According to the conditions of our contract, in case of the cancellation of at least one concert we would either all of us have to pay equally for it, or cancel the whole tour." added Lavrov sadly. But in show-business sometimes happen such things, which you don't provide for any contract. I don't cooperate with the group Tatu for the first time. We went with them throughout the country even at the time when they costed $ 4.000. Everywhere were "sold out" notices and I never expected that nowadays people wouldn't go to them. The prices of 200-300 rubles couldn't have scared off the audience. Maybe the reason for bad numbers was the unsuccessful attempt to make a high-quality musical product out of Tatu. The girls now sing live, but it turned out that they are thoroughly bad in that. The musicians begin to play, but they are not in time to join in, they can't get into the notes. Lenka so-la-la, and Yulka in general can't sing. As a result they direct the microphones to the audience and so during half of the concert they force the audienceto shout instead of them. In the past everybody went for the scandal, went to watch live those shocking girls, there was such a noise around them. Nobody was disturbed, that they performed with playback. People were beside themselves and everything was fine. But now there was no scandal and the group couldn't offer anything else as substitute.
Old lover
"Most annoying, it's not the girls fault." says Sergej Lavrov. "I'm friends with them for many years now. I affirm to you, they remained as they were before - simple, open, without any star disease.
In the hotels they content themselves with one double room like in the past. The air-conditioner in the car broke - no problem. They have to go from the hotel to the area walking - no problem. Yulka, she doesn't have complexes. For example, this summer in Sochi I went with her to the beach, and she, to common surprise, decided to bath topless. At the moment, when I helped her out of the bath, just then the famous photographs were made. Yes-yes, I was the very young guy with the orange swimming trunks, who was announced the new lover of Yulya. On that topic, I'm more the old lover... Me and the girls, we always are in the lime-light this way, when we turn up somewhere. I don't have pretensions to them. I think the problem is with their new producer. he doesn't have tactics nor a strategy for development of the group. He simply has no experience for that. This Shlyakhover lived a long time in Germany. He began as barman. Later he worked as administrator for Misha Friedman, who drives our stars on their tour in Germany. Obviously suspecting the upcoming crash of the group Shlyakhover wants to grab the last sum for himself.
Now Shlyakhover tries to organize the tour through Russia himself to save the situation. He already managed the concerts in Samara and Kaliningrad. On the official Tatu-site tatu.ru they announced they passed by with great success.
In the case of the stadium in Samara, accommodating 38.000 people, he managed to gather 2.000 spectators, including those who were invited for free. This with the fact, that the last three days the tickets were sold at the half prize. In Kaliningrad they performed in front of a half empty stadium, too. We will continue to follow the course of this tour and present the true information about him on the website artkreml.ru. But that's not all. Shlyakhover asserts, that they had not got a kopeck from us from the cancelled concerts in the Far East. That's a lie. I have autographed receipts. In accordance with the conditions of the contract we paid additionally to the fee of 20.000 euro, which they should get for each concert, a 'fire-proof' sum of 50.000 euro before the beginning of the tour. This money was gathered by us proportionally with the local organizers as a prepayment and should be included into the bill of fees for the last concerts. In detail, Nikolaj Zhadanov contributed for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk the "chicken-feed" of 12.500 euro. And since the concert has been cancelled without his fault, and in connection with force-majeur circumstances, he now files a law-suit against Tatu with the demand to give back that sum. To be exactly, formally he files Kreml-concert But we file immediately the group Tatu.
Mikhail Filimonov
Ekspress Gazeta
Translated by Argos
29.09.2006 |
