The dark story of the only Russian song to chart in the UK
Go to any Pride party and you’ll likely hear it. For a generation of young girls grappling with their sexuality, it plays on repeat in their minds, just as that music video played on repeat on YouTube or MTV or wherever it was that an era of confused women first clocked eyes on tATu and suddenly had some clarity as ‘All The Things She Said’ played in the background.
The 2002 hit quickly became a queer anthem. With lyrics that seem to speak of forbidden love, as the two girls sang, “Want to fly to a place where it’s just you and me / Nobody else, so we can be free”, the track seemed to be directly about closeted love and the desire to love freely, especially as the music video was so obviously sapphic.
It was controversially sapphic, as the two band members, Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, are seen embracing and kissing in the rain in the music video. All that is happening while they’re dressed in school uniforms and stuck behind bars, seemingly making a clear protest point against anti-LGBT laws.
It levels up in controversy again due to the simple fact that tATu are a Russian band, and as we all know, the state of LGBTQ+ rights in the country is still majorly lacking. While homosexual relationships were decriminalised in 1993, still lagging behind the rest of the world, Russia is not really a safe place for queer couples.
Charities supporting LGBTQ+ people are banned and deemed “extremist”, where in 2013, a federal law adopted against the “propaganda of homosexuality”, leading to increased attacks against queer events and organisations, with repeated attempts to fully ban what they deem propaganda.
In 2003, a year after ‘All The Things She Said’ was released and soared to the top of the charts worldwide, it became the first ever UK number one from Russia. And that should have been a truly inspiring story of a queer Russian girl group fighting their country’s prejudices with the backing of the world, but that’s not what happened.
First, tATu aren’t a queer band. Even though the two girls were kissing in the video and routinely kissed on stage during performances while they were promoting the track, they eventually had to admit that they were never together and were straight.
Part of the fault in that doesn’t lie with the young, impressionable women who were just trying to make it big. Instead, it lies with the adult men who wrote the song, directed the video and told the girls to play up this image, knowing the sexualisation of a lesbian relationship would sell, or cause controversy and still sell either way.
There were issues there anyway, as the band’s producer and director, Ivan Shapovalov, was accused of being “awful” by their American producers, treating the young girls incredibly harshly while also being the driving force behind branding them as lesbians, adding gendered lyrics to the songs at the last minute and encouraging them to play into it.
It gets even darker, though, or at least more disappointing. Already a story of manipulation, both of the girls in the band and of the general public, ‘All The Things She Said’ became an even more hollow queer anthem when in 2014, Julia Volkova said on Russian TV that she would not “not support a gay son”, despite the ways the queer community has arguably powered her entire career.
