Ne ver', ne boysia: The Favorites Who Arrived Already Global

MAY 15 2003 · 12:15

t.A.T.u. · "Ne ver', ne boysia" · Russia · 2003 Placement: 3rd · Language: Russian · Composers: Sergio Galoyan, Valery Polienko, Elena Kiper · Venue: Skonto Hall · Host: Riga, Latvia · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: HD By the spring of 2003, t.A.T.u. were almost certainly the most internationally famous act ever sent to Eurovision up to that date. Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova had spent the preceding eighteen months at the center of one of the decade's most-discussed pop phenomena: 'All the Things She Said,' their Trevor Horn-produced English-language single, had hit number one in the UK and dozens of other markets, and their staged same-sex schoolgirl personas had generated simultaneous moral panic and commercial demand at a scale Russian pop had not previously exported. Russia's Channel One selected them internally for Eurovision 2003 with 'Ne ver', ne boysia' — 'Don't believe, don't fear' — a moody mid-tempo Russian-language ballad. Arriving in Riga, they entered the contest as heavy pre-contest favorites, with British bookmakers reportedly placing them at the top of the odds for weeks. The Eurovision live performance was tense in ways the duo's previous television work had not been: persistent pre-contest reports suggested they planned to stage same-sex imagery more explicit than Eurovision's delegation had approved. When the final came, Katina and Volkova performed in loose schoolgirl-adjacent outfits with restrained staging; the kiss widely rumored never materialized. They finished third behind Turkey's Sertab Erener and Belgium's Urban Trad. The Russian delegation publicly contested aspects of the voting. The duo left the Eurovision stage treating their third place almost as an affront, a rare case of an act for whom Eurovision was a downward step rather than a launch. Context Eurovision 2003 was held in Riga because Latvia had won in 2002 with Marie N's 'I Wanna.' t.A.T.u.'s Eurovision arc occurred during Russia's early-2000s cultural expansion into Western pop, a window that would narrow significantly over the following decade. Legacy The 2003 result is the rare Eurovision finish that is remembered primarily for the gap between expectation and outcome. The performance itself has been re-examined across the intervening decades as both a watershed moment for sapphic staging in mainstream televised pop and as an early example of Eurovision's relationship to transgressive imagery. Mythology Some acts use Eurovision to be discovered. A rare few arrive at Eurovision already famous enough to treat the result as an inconvenience. t.A.T.u. were the first of that category.