Video: Legends of the 1980s: the Mirage group, or the history of the scandalous musical swindle of the Perestroika era
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
First album group "Mirage" came out 30 years ago. But even today, not a single disco of the 1980s. can not do without their songs, which today, at the peak of interest in the music of those times, have found a second life. The hits "Music Tied Us", "This Night", "New Hero" and others were sung by the whole country, but no one knew what the vocalist actually looked like. All the secrets of the Mirage were revealed only after many years.
The history of the group began in 1985, when the composer and musician-keyboardist Andrei Lityagin, student of the conservatory Margarita Sukhankina and the band “Zone of Activity” recorded the song “Information from the Newspapers”. A year later, a group called "Mirage" prepared 12 compositions, some of which were recorded by Sukhankina. She refused further work in the group, as she dreamed of a career as an opera singer. Lityagin had to urgently look for a new vocalist with a similar timbre of voice. Natalya Gulkina approached this role, they recorded 5 more songs with her and in 1987 released the album "Stars are waiting for us" - the first in the history of the "Mirage" group.
In the first six months, the group, which has never appeared on television or sounded on the radio, gains incredible popularity. Their cassettes were sold in all the stalls. Then Lityagin decides to start touring. For this, another soloist, Svetlana Razin, was taken to the team. The touring schedule was very tight, the group played 80-90 concerts a month. At the peak of her popularity, Gulkina decided to leave Mirage and created her own project, Stars. In December 1988, Svetlana Razina married the producer of the group, Valery Sokolov, and soon also left the group, founding the Feya group with her husband in 1989. Of course, the popularity of new projects could not be compared with Mirage.
Mirage needed new soloists again. Although they could no longer be called "vocalists" - after all, they sang songs recorded by Sukhankina and Gulkina to the soundtrack. At concerts, people heard the same recognizable voice, and the faces of the performers were constantly changing. Irina Saltykova and Inna Smirnova performed with the group for a short time. Throughout the country, under the name "Mirage", hundreds of fake bands performed at the same time. During the year, Natalia Vetlitskaya worked in the group, she even starred in the first video clip of "Mirage", performing with her voice a medley of three songs - "I don't want", "This night" and "Music bound us."
Once the vocalist fell ill and did not come for a concert. Tickets were sold out long ago, and the producer was not going to cancel the performance. The band's costume designer, Tatyana Ovsienko, was released on the stage. She played the soloist of the Mirage to the soundtrack. Since then, she began performing with the group. In 1989, the group's second album was prepared - Margarita Sukhankina agreed to record all the songs again, but the album never came out. Her surname was not mentioned anywhere, at her own request, otherwise the career of an opera singer would have had to be given up. Everyone knew her voice, but no one saw her face. And on the posters, the fans of the group saw Tatyana Ovsienko, who has since become the leading soloist and the face of Mirage. In the same year, the song "Music Tied Us" reached the final of "Song of the Year".
1990-1999 by the decision of Andrey Lityagin, Tatyana Ovsienko was replaced by a new soloist - Ekaterina Boldysheva. Despite the fact that at the concerts of the group she performed live, the popularity of "Mirage" sharply declined. The success of the late 1980s. in the new decade, the group failed to repeat it.
In 1999, Lityagin made an attempt to revive interest in the project by forming a new composition of Mirage from young girls. But a complete renewal did not happen - the soloists sang again in the voice of Sukhankina. In 2005, there were several concerts dedicated to the 18th anniversary of the group, in which almost all the former soloists of Mirage took part. And Natalia Gulkina and Margarita Sukhankina even started performing together and released the album “Just a Mirage”.
Only in 2005 did the founders of the group reveal all the secrets of their grandiose scam in the 1980s. At the same time, Lityagin said that he regrets only one thing - that at one time he did not create 80 "Mirages" in each city. In 2009, Gulkina and Sukhankina released a new album "1000 stars", but it was not successful. In 2011, Gulkina's place in the group was again taken by Svetlana Razina, but a year later she left the group.
Simultaneously with "Mirage", another group emerged with an equally scandalous reputation. "Affectionate May": a musical phenomenon of boarding school boys.
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