If you think Ukraine’s show business is underdeveloped, you should have seen it 10 years ago when it was barely starting. Many talented performers and bands came into the limelight in the ‘90s, then disappeared. Some of them returned later, having given their stage image a facelift, and tried to win the hearts of their audience once again.
Yulia Lord is one of those singers who took a lengthy break in her career, but then decided to give it another go. She and her producer Dmytro Prykordonniy eagerly talked about their new project in a Kyiv Post interview.
Prykordonniy started off as a guitar player in Yulia Lord’s band. In 1997, he became a producer of the famous festival and song contest Chervona Ruta, where Lord took part and won second place.
This jump-started her career.
She actually made her first breakthrough in 1996 with a hit called “Tanets Dush” (The Dance of Souls). With her gloomy rock image and an alternative style of music, she easily stood out among the crowd because most other girls on the Ukrainian music scene performed light and sappy romantic pop. Lord had a full-scale rock band going, playing shows, shooting videos and scooping awards.
Lord’s remake of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which she called “Dukh Molodi” (Youth Spirit) was another big hit, as was another single recorded in duet with Kuzma of the Skriabin band – “Brudna Yak Angel” (Dirty Like an Angel).
But after these hits, Lord suddenly disappeared in 2003, to return only five years later. “I felt all right without music, but now I want to return to the stage. You know, the creative process never stops, but sometimes its results are not presented to the public,” Lord said.
Now she is ready to present to the public her new music video, “Bonnie and Clyde,” that starts rotating on M1 music TV channel on Oct. 12. The single that Lord hopes to make her comeback with is a cover of another famous song written by Serge Gainsbourg and performed in duet with Brigitte Bardot, the French actress and sex symbol.
The song is about a couple of gangster-lovers, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, that drove around the United States in the years of the Great Depression. It became an anthem of rebellious youth around Europe.
Lord used Gainsbourg’s music and wrote her own lyrics. The video itself is based on an old Dutch tale about a wicked sorcerer, who played a magic flute to lure nonconformist youths to a secret place out of town to prevent them from becoming criminals.
“Bonnie and Clyde became criminals because they were never kidnapped to that place and they were in discord with society,” Prykordonniy joked, explaining why particular gangster images were picked for the video. He said there is no magic flute in their story. It’s replaced by a telephone booth with a sign on that says “Bonnie and Clyde Show.” People buy coins, get inside and disappear for good.
The idea behind the video is Prykordonniy’s. He produced and directed it together with well-known cameraman Vyacheslav Pilutskiy, whose trademark movie is Orange Love, depicting a romance during the Orange Revolution.
The creative duo of Lord and Prykordonniy is planning to release another video by the end of this year, as well as a new album. Lord says to expect more romance: “Everything in it will be about love. I’m a very romantic person.”
Lord says there is nothing but music in her life, so she spends a lot of time writing lyrics. She will start giving concerts after the new album comes out. She seems eager and ready to conquer the Ukrainian stage once again and then move on to a broader audience.
But she said she has no plans to keep to the beaten track and participate in the Eurovision song contest. “There are lots of ways to become popular in the world and Eurovision is not the best one,” Lord said, calling the contest a “freak show that has nothing to do with music.” Instead, she and her producer are now seeking contacts with recording companies abroad.
Despite much griping about the state of the music industry, Lord was upbeat about the numbers of talented musicians. Oe does not need to be a millionaire, she said, to start a musical career.
“Money is not the main problem for a beginning performer. All that is needed is good material and hard work. There are many ways to show yourself, including all those ‘Fabrikas’ (popular reality show ‘Star Factory’),” she said.She would consider going on one if the right opportunity came along.
