Igor Gavrilov about the work of Alla Pugacheva

On the day of Alla Pugacheva’s 75th birthday, the names of Vladimir Shainsky, Alexander Zatsepin, Raymond Pauls, Yuri Chernavsky and other songwriters will be in the holiday playlists. But most often the singer Alla Pugacheva worked with the poet and composer Alla Pugacheva. He talks about how their alliance developed Igor Gavrilov.

Alla Pugacheva made her debut as an author in 1967 – she immediately wrote poetry and a melody. It was the song “The Only Waltz”. There is no official studio recording of it, as well as television footage; Pugacheva performed it only on tour. And it’s unlikely that anyone would have thought of filming a young, unknown singer. Then she traveled around the Arctic as part of the propaganda team of the Yunost radio station. There is a lot in the song “The Only Waltz” that was probably “on the brink” at that time. And not very accepted then, as they would say now, the spoken word, and the word “Lord”, and “the smell of the smoke of your cigarettes” in the heroine’s memories. What did the 18-year-old singer know about the smell of “his” cigarettes, where did these images come from? In the recordings of this song, which can be found on the Internet, you can hear that Pugacheva, along with the waltz, was quite interested in the blues, and black jazz singers were no less interested in them than Klavdia Shulzhenko.

The list of the best songs by Alla Pugacheva does not coincide with her conventional collection “the best of”. But these songs are milestones in her development as a musician. It can be seen how, having mastered a new style, she immediately tried her own strengths in it.

In 1968, Pugacheva turned to original song for the first time. Then the first version of the composition “I Kissed You” appeared, based on the verses of Alexander Nikolaev, which became popular in the 1988 version. Pugacheva’s bard form appeared in all its glory when she recorded Mikael Tariverdiev’s songs for Ryazanov’s “The Irony of Fate.”

While working on the music for the film The Woman Who Sings, she not only showed herself as a writer of epic ballads, but also created instrumental pieces and also paid tribute to the blues. “Come” is a clear homage to Janis Joplin. She hid her writing experiences from her regular author Alexander Zatsepin, and a certain “Boris Gorbonos” appeared in the credits as the second songwriter. Ultimately, the songs of “Gorbonos” were no less popular with the audience than Zatsepin’s songs.

For the film “Foam” Alla Pugacheva wrote perhaps the first Soviet disco hit in the Italian spirit – “Rise Above the Vanity.” For “Starry Summer” – the song “Dad Bought a Car”, in which it is easy to hear the intonations of “When I’m 64” by The Beatles. Country and folk fascinated Pugacheva so much that in 1979, for the album “Rise Above the Vanity,” she recorded a song based on Woody Guthrie’s poem “What an Atom Cannot Do.” This whole album sounded too “Western,” but Pugacheva was allowed a lot, if not everything, at that time.

In the 1970s, her compositions based on poems by Osip Mandelstam became a sensation. Pugacheva chose not to leave the composition of music for the texts of the repressed poet into the wrong hands. Mandelstam’s first collection of poems after rehabilitation was published in 1973, and after that for several years he still remained a poet “for the initiated.” Until Pugacheva’s songs were released, written on the poems “Musician”, “I’m Not Jealous Anymore” and “Petrograd” (in Pugacheva’s version – “Leningrad”).

The pinnacle of Alla Pugacheva’s talent as an author was the album “How Troubling is This Path” (1982), in which she wrote 12 of the 16 songs (the rest were composed by Raymond Pauls and Vladimir Vysotsky). The album had everything from prog rock to funk, reggae to folk. And there was nothing from the “stagnant” Soviet song.

In the 1980s, Pugacheva left her musical experiments to her most progressive partners – electronic engineer Yuri Chernavsky and rocker Vladimir Kuzmin. Over the years, the composer focused on epic confessional material, for which reliable lyricists, led by Ilya Reznik, were involved. For Pugacheva, as a songwriter, it was now more important not to explore new territories, but to highlight in bold the chapters of her unwritten memoirs. “Three Happy Days”, “Autumn Kiss”, “Oh, How I Live Today”… In the 1990s, she suddenly became interested in chanson, for which no term had been invented then. She wrote “The Real Colonel” and “Don’t Hurt Me, Gentlemen,” as if giving the genre the green light. And in 1997, poems and music were born for “Primadonna,” with which Pugacheva went to Eurovision in Ireland. Two years later, she wrote “Candle” based on the poems of Boris Pasternak, as if returning to “high culture.” Since then she has not created anything more significant, although she continued to compose.

In recent months, after a long pause, Alla Pugacheva has released an album and three new songs, but most of this material belongs to the archives. Perhaps there are songs in the archives of the singer’s most trusted comrade-in-arms, waiting in the wings. It is time.