Trivia / t.A.T.u.

• Creator Backlash: Both Yulia and Lena hated the song "Poeziya" that they did with another music group Polyusha, but were forced to do it.
• Development Hell: Their solo careers. Started in 2009 as the pair were drifting apart, both started releasing singles shortly after the official breakup in 2011.... and then nothing for years.
  • Lena finally escaped in 2014 with the release of her album This is Who I Am, after ditching her label for constantly pushing her album back, and then she stopped promoting it to focus on motherhood for a while. In 2016 she came back with a Spanish version called Esta Soy Yo (ironically removing the title track in favor of a solo Spanish version of t.A.T.u.'s "Running Blind"), and stated that she was working on a Russian language version of the album.
  • Julia was apparently having even more vocal problems. She opened up in 2016 about having a thyroid tumor removed in 2012 that wrecked her voice and required 3 surgeries to finally fix. She got back to releasing singles around the same time, but it's still almost a decade into her solo career with no definitively announced album in the pipeline, and her last song in English was in 2012.
• Dye Hard: Yulia is a blonde but dyes it black. Interestingly, she is a blonde in their first music video "All The Things She Said/Ya Soshla S Uma" but the night filter makes it look black.
• One-Hit Wonder: If one considers the "only one US Top 40" criteria ("All the Things She Said", #20)... and even then, follow-up "Not Gonna Get Us" topped the Club charts (where "All the Things She Said" only reached #5) and "All About Us" also charted there.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Believe it or not, Yulia is openly bisexual. Which makes her homophobic comments all the more troubling.
  • As for Lena, she supports LGBT rights openly, has openly stated gender was never a boundary for her to seek atraction, and has never denied any claims about her being Bisexual.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Kind of the opposite, but Ivan was originally just going to release the original "Ya Soshla S Uma" to English markets, before he realised that the line "A oni govoryat - vinovata sama"^note "But they say it's all my fault" sounded like a very bad word which would have caused them some trouble with radio censors. The English version, "All the Things She Said" made them international megastars overnight, instead of probably being another One-Hit Wonder foreign pop group like O-Zone.
• What Could Have Been: An anime movie, t.A.T.u. Paragate, was in production, but was cancelled before its target release of Winter 2004 due to numerous circumstances, including a fallout between the singing duo and their manager Ivan Shapovalov.
  • They were in the middle of planning a full reunion in 2014 when they fell out again for good. The one song they actually managed to record was released after the fallout under the name "Yulia and Lena" to really drive the point home that they weren't a group anymore.
  • The duo could have been named differently, with variants being Virus, ORZ and ORVI (the latter two names are another word for flu in Russian). Then, Shapovalov heard that Maxim Fadeev, also a famous producer, was casting members for a band called Tatu, and decided to give his band that name (Fadeev ended up naming his band Total).
  • They were originally in talks to provide vocals on Rammstein's song "Moskau".

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