Yuri Shatunov: the difficult fate of the star of "Tender May"

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Yuri Shatunov celebrated his 45th birthday on September 6th. His childish voice and manner of performance made the artist a real star of the Soviet era. Despite the fact that then he was only 15. Now he is happily married, has two children, lives in Germany and is actively touring. And once he was forced to wander the streets and live without any love. About the difficult fate of "Tender Yuri" in our material.

Childhood

Yuri Shatunov was born on September 6, 1973 in the town of Kumertau, then still in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Although his family was complete, for some reason the father was extremely cool towards his own child. As a result, the boy was given his mother's maiden name and sent to the suburbs to be raised by her parents.

Three years later, Yura's parents divorced, his grandfather died, and his mother took him with her to a remote village, where she immediately jumped out to marry a local drunkard. Because of his stepfather's alcoholism and constant scandals, little Yura constantly ran away from home. When he was 11 years old, his mother assigned him to a boarding school, and two months later she died due to a long illness. Yura took underguardianship of an aunt, but it didn’t work out there either, and the boy began to wander. Yuri Shatunov prefers not to remember these facts from the life. He spent more than a year on the street until he was forcibly forced into an orphanage, the director of which insisted that he remain under her supervision. Then the woman was promoted and appointed head of a boarding school in Orenburg, where Yura followed her. It was there that Shatunov's fateful acquaintance with Boris Kuznetsov took place.

Tender May

In the autumn of 1986, Shatunov meets the head of the amateur art circle, Sergei Kuznetsov, who decides to make 13-year-old Yura a local star. For two years, the group "Tender May" has been actively performing in houses of culture and at various discos. It was then that Kuznetsov wrote the main hits of the group - "White Roses" and "Grey Night". In 1988, "Tender May" recorded the first album at an impromptu studio within the walls of the boarding school. Kuznetsov gives the cassette with tracks to the kiosk at the railway station, and the songs begin to go to the people.

In the same year, the then manager of the Mirage group, Andrei Razin, accidentally heard songs performed by 15-year-old Yura on the train and decided to find him at all costs. He gets off at the nearest station and goes to Orenburg. In September, the group "Tender May" begins its official existence under the wing of the SPM "Record".

The team suddenly becomes incredibly popular. True, a year later Kuznetsov left the project and Razin took his place, who sometimes scheduled up to eight concerts in oneday. Good phonogram. Such a hard rhythm forced Yuri Shatunov to leave the group in 1991. A few months after that, the Tender May group ceased to exist.

Solo career

Shatunov goes to Germany, where he decides to get an education. There he continues to work in the studio with producer Arkady Kudryashov, whom he knew long before that. He is recording a new album and in December 1992 he first appears on stage as a solo artist. At Alla Pugacheva's Christmas Meetings, Yuri Shatunov sings the song "Starry Night", which immediately breaks into all charts and all dance floors.

In the spring of 1994, one of the largest recording studios signed a contract with him. Songs and clips begin to actively rotate. In the same autumn, the album “Do You Remember” was released, almost all of the compositions of which were written by the same Sergey Kuznetsov.

Success accompanied the artist for a long time, but with age his popularity began to decline. The biography and work of Yuri Shatunov did their job anyway - a slight touch of tragedy and romanticism in each of his tracks allowed him to become one of the iconic figures of the national stage. In February, at the anniversary awards ceremony "Soundtrack" Shatunov received an award for his contribution to the development of Russian show business.

Private life

The personal life of Yuri Shatunov has been sealed with seven seals for a long time. There were rumors about the artist's unconventional sexual orientation and that he was seduced in childhoodthe same Kuznetsov.

The bullshit stopped in 2007 when Shatunov married a Russian immigrant. The couple has two children: 12-year-old Dennis and 5-year-old Estella. The family lives in Frankfurt, but both children of Yuri are fluent in two languages. Andrey Razin, by the way, is Dennis' godfather.