Focus on Mars, bars and stars
Natasha Hull tells Terry Grimley about her life of struggles as a rock photographer in Soviet Russia

Article from the Birmingham Post, 06/11/2003

Being in the right place at the right time has been the making of many photographers, and it certainly worked for Natasha Hull.

As a teenager in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) she started photographing the fledgling rock music scene from its beginnings in the 1970s, following it through to the collapse of the Soviet regime before moving to Britain, initially to work for a Russian magazine, nine years ago.

Her photographs will be published in book form next year, and meanwhile a selection of them is on display until Saturday at St Paul's Gallery in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.

'I started by taking pictures of people I liked,' she says. 'I didn't think of a professional career, but just having fun. These people were hippies, as much as hippies could exist in the Soviet Union.

'Originally they were just colour slides. We would gather in my kitchen and watch a slide show. Then gradually the people I made photographs of became better known. I picked the right people.'

Among the musicians she befriended at the beginning of their careers was Boris Grebenishikov, in later years a collaborator with Annie Lennox and Brian Eno, whose band Aquarium is the best known in Russian rock, and Viktor Tsoi, whose death in a car crash at the age of 28 was attributed by some - probably inaccurately - to the KGB.

It is difficult to imagine quite how insulated young people in the Soviet Union were from developments in Western popular culture. Natasha heard about Elvis Presley for the first time in the 1980s, and did not see him on television until she moved to Britain.

As for the Beatles, she first heard about them from a friend's merchant sailor brother when she was 14. The record he smuggled home in his kitbag, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, was hardly their most revolutionary, but it still had a dramatic impact.

'It was like somebody would bring you something from Mars,' Natasha remembers. 'There was nothing to compare it with.'

Beatles music seeped into the Soviet Union in some mysterious ways. For example, there was the innocuous LP compilation of popular music from Czechoslovakia, Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries which contained the Beatles track Girl, identified only as 'folk song'.

The underground rock scene, with its home-made instruments and improvised venues, did not start with any grandiose idea of overthrowing the state, but the state had no difficulty in identifying it as a threat.

'In a place where everybody had to be as equal as everyone else, some people suddenly got more equal than others,' Natasha observes.

'I knew all the musicians. They didn't say 'let's go and burn the Kremlin', but you didn't need to say things like that. The Soviet regime was based on lies. If I said 'I don't think we live in the best country in the world', it's already a political statement.'

Natasha had moved from taking slides to producing multiple prints. As there was nowhere for them to be published, she would sell them at gigs.

'Sometimes the police would come and take the photos and money,' she says. She points out an apparently innocuous photograph, dating from the perestroika era, of two musicians with a bottle of wine. This got her into trouble because it implied drunkenness -something unknown in Soviet society.

The photograph was confiscated. 'But later my friend saw this one being sold at an underground station by an old baboushka, so obviously the police sold them on!'

With the collapse of the Soviet regime, Natasha was offered a job in London working for Russia's first popular music and style magazine. 'It was the first-ever Russian magazine about modern culture -fashion, design. There were no facilities to publish it in Russia, so they printed it here and shipped it to St Petersburg.'

Unfortunately, the magazine proved impossible to sustain. At first there was plenty of advertising from businesses keen to break into the new Russian market, but soon came the realisation of how dominant the Mafia was in Russian business, and Westerners walked away.

The culmination of Natasha's career as a rock photographer came with her pictures of the Rolling Stones at Wembley in the mid 90s. In the exhibition there are also pictures of Blur and Robert Plant. The latter is out of focus because, Natasha reveals: 'My knees as well as my hands were shaking.'

Today she has given up photography for publishing. Her Seagull imprint will be a channel into English for Russian writers who are unknown here. She is sure that the work of writers like Vladimir Shinkarev, whose Maxim and Fyodor is her first book,deserve the attention of British and American readers. 'Some artists are very local and live in their own country, and some live on the globe,' she points out -which pre-empts my question of whether she still feels Russian after living here for nearly a decade.

'I've been living on the globe for some time now,' she says.

Per Aspera ad Astra (Through the Thorns to the Stars): Photographs by Natasha Hull, is at the St Paul's Gallery, 105 Northwood Street, Hockley, until Saturday (10am5.30pm; admission free).

Link to article on the London exhibition.

Link to article in Mojo