Yuri Shatunov


Yuriy "Yura" Vasilevich Shatunov, commonly anglicized as Yuri, Russian:Юрий "Юра" Васильевич Шатунов, is a Russian singer, best known as being the former frontman of the Russian 1980s band Laskoviy Mai. He was born on 6 September 1973 in the city of Kumertau, Bashkir ASSR, in the former Soviet Union.

Name

Commonly spelled "Yuri Shatunov" in English, his official website, Shatunov.com, lists his name as "Yuriy", "Yury," and "Yuri." The English pronunciation of all three is identical. Yuri took his mother's, Vera Shatunova, surname at a young age due to the lack of a relationship with his father, Vasiliy Klimenko.

Personal life

Shatunov was born on 6 September 1973 in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the former, in the autonomous Republic of Bashkortostan. At the age of three he was abandoned by his father and was raised by his mother. When he was eleven his mother died of heart disease, and he lived with his aunt and maternal grandparents, who soon found themselves unable to cope with his behavior.
Shatunov was sent to Orenburg Children's Home Number 2 in Orenburg, where he had a reputation for poor behavior, such as running away from the orphanage, playing guitar and singing on the streets to get money and cigarettes, getting into fights, and avoiding work.
Regardless of his troubled childhood, Shatunov sang very well. He met with Sergei Kuznetsov, a music teacher in the orphanage, and they created a band, "Laskoviy Mai". In this group they frequently sang about unfortunate love, which was not typical at that time, and was especially unusual for the young band members in their early teens in 1986. This group, in which Shatunov was the frontman, existed from 1986 to 1992, and was very popular in Russia. In 1996, Shatunov moved to Germany, where he went to complete his education, which was unfinished due to his turbulent youth and early career in music, and to learn how to become a music producer.
Shatunov has a wife named Svetlana and two children, a son named Dennis and a daughter named Estella. Shatunov and Svetlana got married in 2007 in Germany after seven years of dating.
Shatunov is currently busy working on his solo career, and performs frequently in Russia, Germany and in Eastern European countries, as well as some of the former Soviet block countries in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Discography