Sergei Minaev - Margarita

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Sergei Yurevitsj Minaev (° Moscow, 1962) first attended the circus school, and then went to the Moscow theatre faculty GITIS. He started as a disc-jockey and then as a singer with a repertoire of translated Italian and American pop songs, often with a ring of irony.

His breakthrough came in 1986 with the song Margarita, especially written for him by the Russian composer of popular tunes Yuri Chernavsky. An old friend of Yuri Chernavsky, Vladimir Shirkin, had taken him to the disco club Novorossiysk in Moscow, to make him listen to the young singer Minaev. Tsjernavski decided to write a song for him for a big show that the record company SPM Records wanted to organise at the Luzhinsky Sports Palace in Moscow. It was the first disco show with more than 10,000 spectators in the former Soviet Union. It was at the beginning of the period of glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev. The text of the song was written by the poet Alexander Markevich and was inspired by Margarita's flight on the broom.

The recording was made in 1986 in the home studio of Yuri Chernavsky. For the background vocals, he had convinced a number of known singers to work with him. They were all prepared to help the then young and unknown artists.

The song was not yet taken on a record though. Which didn’t keep Minaev from becoming extremely popular in the Moscow clubs. This popularity was mainly due to the numerous magnitoalboms which circulated in Russia. A magnitoalbom - Магнитоальбом in Russian - was an illegal amateur recording on compact tape cartridges. In the 70s and 80s such tapes were distributed through the thousands of sales stalls which existed everywhere in the Soviet Union, often in the neighbourhood of subway stations or large markets. In Moscow and St. Petersburg such stalls are still teeming, but there are now selling - be it still mostly illegal - CD's and DVD's.

Because the original recordings were regarded as lost, it would take until 2002 before Margarita in the version of Minaev would appear on his compilation CD Назад в будущее (Nazad v budushchyeye) or Back to the Future. But meanwhile, another Russian singer, Valery Yakovlevich Leontev, had "hijacked" it...

Click here to read more about the version of Valery Leontev

Технические детали

Sergei Minaev - Margarita

Album
Nazad v budutchsheye

Artists
Sergei Minaev

Label
Misteria Zvuka



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