UK-based Ukrainian singer Diana Vartanova has already generated success and controversy in her short career.
A video of the 20-year-old’s performance of the song “World Support Ukraine” has already racked up more than 260,000 views on video sharing site YouTube.
That’s the success; here comes the controversy and it involves Russian President Vladimir Putin and his two-year-old war against Ukraine.
Performing under the stage name Diana Mess, her song contains lines such as “Russians go home,” and “Putin get away and I won’t be sorry. Ukraine won’t be your territory.”
She entered the song in the UK’s national selection competition for the upcoming Eurovision 2016 song contest, held this May in Stockholm, Sweden.
“World Support Ukraine” didn’t make it to the UK Eurovision final, however, and Mess says that the reason for that might be the political context of the song.
Making her case to represent the UK at Eurovision, Mess even wrote to the UK’s head of state, Queen Elizabeth, explaining that her song was more anti-war than political.
No politics, please
Under the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest, no songs can contain overt political or commercial messages.
Georgia ran afoul of those rules in 2009 when it was asked to change the lyrics of an anti-Putin song. The country refused and withdrew its entry. In 2005 Ukraine was asked to change lyrics that competition officials deemed too political.
And this year’s entry from Ukraine, “1944” by Crimean Tatar Susana Jamaladinova, who performs under the stage name Jamala, could also run into trouble under competition rules as the song is about Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Russia has already complained about the song being “too political” in the wake of the Kremlin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Mess, a native of Zaporizhya, who moved to Britain in 2011 to study journalism and who expects to graduate from City University London later this year, doesn’t disguise her Ukrainian patriotism.
After the EuroMaidan Revolution erupted in Kyiv, she joined other Ukrainian activists in the UK to form the London EuroMaidan civil movement. She helped activists write explanatory articles about the political situation in the country.
Mess was born into a family whose members spoke Ukrainian – unusual for a city in southeastern Ukraine, where the Russian language usually dominates. She says that her parents always supported her passion for music and her first guitar was a gift from her father.
The singer says that she decided not to study at a music conservatory because musical education is too formalized.
Backing Jamala
The idea for the song “World Support Ukraine” came from Mess’s friend Andriy Loboda, a former member of the Zaporizhya band Horta. Loboda came to visit Mess in London in January 2014 and noticed activists with posters reading “London, support Ukraine” – a popular slogan among Ukrainian EuroMaidan supporters in the UK at that time.
Mess says Loboda wondered why only London was mentioned, so he came up with the chorus of “World Support Ukraine.”
Soon after his visit, Loboda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and later died. After his death, Mess sang Loboda’s song at the 2015 Busk street music festival in London. She performed the song in Leicester Square.
Mess says that even if she had been selected as the UK’s representative at the upcoming Eurovision song contest, she would still want Ukraine’s Jamala to win. A song about Russia’s war on Ukraine is important, but a song about the annexation of the Crimea is more significant, Mess says.
Mess is working on a new album, which she says mainly contains songs with personal rather than political themes.
Apart from journalism and singing, Mess is a photographer: pictures she took of Ukrainian veterans in a military hospital in Kyiv’s Pechersk district have been exhibited in London. Mess says she’s now in talks with galleries to bring the exhibition to other UK cities.
