Alsou info
        Articles/You (UK - 12 December 2004)

Ballad of a Russian doll

With millions of fans back home and a powerful family behind her, Alsou Safina has become her country’s great pop hope. But as Stuart Husband discovered, there is more to the Russian singing sensation then her Britski Spears label might suggest.

It was inevitable that Alsou Safina, a 21-year old singing sensation who is already a superstar in her native Russia, would be dubbed Britski Spears. 'Yes the papers have already called me that,' she says stoically, gulping down a coffee in the Rivoli, a beautiful 1950’s ballroom hidden away in a remote corner of Southeast London. 'And I like Britney. But you know what? I prefer Whitney.'

She means that in the multi-octave timeless-classic power-ballad sense rather then the impossible-princess sense. Alsou grew up on a diet of MTV divas such as Whitney, Mariah and Celine, and she can lay on the vocal pyrotechnics with the best of them, as her R&B-infected first UK single 'Always on my mind' makes clear. But she has all the credentials to play a hissy-diva card. Firstly, there’s her thoroughbred looks – a glowing. Latinate colouring courtesy of her roots in the Muslim republic of Tatarstan, sultry almond eyes, a perfect heart shaped face and a killer figure.

More importantly, however, Alsou – her name means 'rosewater' in Tatar – comes from elite Russian stock. Her father Ralif is one of the country’s new oligarch, a billionaire oil tycoon-turned politician who was at one point rumoured to be buying Manchester United. Indeed, the first anyone here knew of Alsou was when she turned up on various rich lists, where much where made of her private school in London (where her Moscow based parents sent her at the age 12) her bodyguards, and her chauffeur-driven Lexus. 'People think my father has bought everything for me,' she shrugs, in her characteristically low-key but unflinching way. 'And it’s true that he supported me in my career from the beginning; I probably wouldn’t have become a singer without him. But you don’t get to sell ten million albums in Russia without having some talent, I think.'

Alsou is decorous in many ways. Despite glossy shoots for Russian Vogue, Glamour and FHM, she insists that she'll never go topless,' no matter the money I'm offered or the publicity I might need', and when she appears in a particularly diaphanous dress for a photo-shoot, she employs a towel to cover her modesty. But she’s in no doubt of her own worth. 'A lot of people are jealous of me in Russia,' she asserts. ‘It’s hard for people to deal with someone who can sing, who has money, is pleasant to look at, and is a nice person too. But I can't let it get me down,' she says firmly. 'I just have to do my own thing.'

That confidence comes not just from being the only girl in a family of four (her brothers are 30, 27, and eight)- ‘Is it any wonder I can twist my father around my little finger?’ she asks archly – but also from her breezy cosmopolitan upbringing. The Safins moved to Siberia from Tatarstan when she was just a few days old, while her father set up his oil business; it was 40F in the summer and minus 40F in the winter, but Alsou remembers playing on an ice rink outside the house. It was a little town and everyone knew each other. It was very friendly.

She was always surrounded by music - 'my dad was a… What do you call it? Beatlemaniac,' she laughs – and she begged for a piano aged five. She was given one, on condition that she would attend music school to learn it. 'I walked everyday across the whole town by myself to go to my lesson, I was so determined.' She sang in a choir, but it wasn't until she was ten, and her family had relocated to Moscow, that she started talking her prowess seriously. 'I started hearing Whitney and Mariah and imitating them,' she says, 'and everyone was asking me to sing. They where already telling me I sounded like and adult. I thought, 'OK, I must be good.' My brothers would always tell me to shut up because I'd be singing away while doing the dishes or sitting around.'

Alsou sang in public for the first time at 13, belting out 'I Will Always Love You' during a 'talent night' at her Swiss summer school. By this time, the family was living in London, as her father had come over to further his oil business in Europe. Two years later, she sang the same song at her brother's wedding. 'I was a shy girl; you had to drag me on to the stage,' she stressed. 'I was not desperate to get up there in a precocious way, believe me. But I just loved to sing. This friend of my mother’s knew a music manager and he said, 'Right, you have to go and see him right away.'

Thus, from the age of 15, Alsou found herself shuttling back and forth between school in London and recording sessions in Russia, somehow managing to rack up A-levels.
'I’ve always been an A/B student,' she says, pulling a what-can-you-do? Kind of face – while becoming a Slavic teen sensation. It's hard to overstate the extent of Alsou's fame in her native land. She can't go anywhere without being mobbed by keening fans, her face is plastered over every bus shelter, and she celebrated her 17th birthday by performing in the town square of Bugulma, her birthplace, where 86,000 of the population of 120,000 turned out to see her presented with a pink car by the local mayor. She is seen as the face of Russian pop, having played a gig at the Kremlin with Enrique Iglesias in 2000, and represented Russia in 2000’s Eurovision Song Contest, coming second to 'two old guys from Denmark' but nonetheless being rewarded with Russia’s biggest-selling single of all time.

She might have been able to flee back to her relatively anonymous life in London, but didn't all the hysteria turn her head just a little? 'I was so young when it all began to happen, and other people where shielding me a bit,' she shrugs.
'Financially noting changed for me; my father was really strict about it and made sure I wasn't overworked and looked after the money and kept everything together for me. He still has the last say. I've never been a rebel. But I am a little more confidant and independent now,' she smiles.

Alsou's explanation for her status is disarmingly simple. 'The Russians where hungry for someone like me,' she says. 'The Russian music scene is terrible. Most of the artists are just embarrassing: Tatu are the only people who made it beyond Russia, and they had to pretend to be lesbians in order to do so. 'She’s critical of other aspects of modern Russian life. 'There’s an arrogance there among the rich,' she says. 'The women are head-to-toe in Cavalli and the men are in bright Versace shirts. They love the bling, but it’s a little shallow. I would never spend ?800 on a T-shirt just for the name. I'd rather buy ten for that price down at Topshop. I think it doesn't matter what you do in life; there is no reason to treat another human being like they’re lower then you. If someone was a cleaner or a billionaire, I'd talk to them in the same way. 'She takes another sip of coffee. 'A lot of people are amazed that I'm so down to earth.'

Despite her success, however, Alsou still feels that she have something to prove. She’s taken two years of to prepare her first international releases, and for the first time she's been involved in the writing and production herself. 'People have said I'm manufactured, that I can’t do it on my own, that it’s not even me singing,' she says. 'So yes, I want to show them that there's no one pulling my strings. But I also have things to prove to myself – that I can hold my own alongside the singers I idolised.'

She's certainly mustered some big guns for her campaign. Joseph Kahn, the man behind Britney's 'Toxic' video, has been drafted to craft a steamy-but-still-pre-watershed clip for 'Always on my mind', due to be released early next year.
- 'I thought my dad would kill me when he saw it,' she giggles, 'but he loved it' – and she duets with Nelly on 'I Wish I Didn’t Know', set to be the second single. 'He said it was… What did he say? Dope!' she cries, clearly thrilled. But while she might pay lip service to edgy-urban, her heart lies in the swelling, grandstanding ballads that exemplify what she calls her 'good clean vibe'. When pressed, the worst vice she can thing of is gluttony. 'I love junk food,' she says. 'But I'm always burning it off – I jog and ride my mountain bike. I'm never sitting still. So I eat what I like. My friends hate me.'

Alsou’s social scene is set around West London. Her parents are back in Moscow, but keep a weekend mansion here so that Ralif and mom Rosa can keep an d eye on Alsou, who lives a few doors away from her brother Marat, a sugar trader. She pops up occasionally in the likes of Chinawhite, sipping on a vodka and apple juice, but unaccountably – theres been no boyfriend for a year and half. 'I don’t really have time for that,' she says. 'I am just travelling all the time. And I kind of need it, because all the songs I write are about sad things, like break-ups. I can't write about happy stuff. So if a nice guy came along, sure. But I’m really picky.' She grins. 'We have our own little singletons' club, my friends and I.'

Of course, if Alsou's push for international stardom bears fruit, both in music and movies – she's just finished working on a teen-horror flick called Spirit Trap, alongside Billie Piper, and acting she says, ‘is definitely part of my agenda; my next film will hopefully be a Hollywood blockbuster' – then the delirium that attends her in Russia will pursue her around the world. Is she prepared for that? 'It's just something that goes with it, right? She says airily. 'I mean, if your still anonymous, then you didn't do a very good job. I love it when people come up to me and say my songs helped them through a bad time in there life or something. What I don’t like so much,’ she adds with a shudder,' are the gossip magazines. The Russian ones ask me the most provocative questions.'
Like what, I wonder?
'Oh.' She casts around for something suitably scandalous. 'Like how much does your father really earn?'
OK, how much does your father really earn?
'I don’t know!' she laughs. 'Really, that's the truth. I have no idea. But I told him, 'Don’t worry, Daddy. One day you'll be borrowing money from me.' '
Spoken like a true MTV diva.