1 February 2003
Let’s be clear: no one for a minute thought that T.A.T.u. and ‘All The Things She Said’ was any sort of considered, supportive depiction of real-world same-sex relationships. It was a Russian record producer called Ivan Shapovalov getting two young singers, aged 17 and 19 at the time, to cosplay as the cishet-male fantasy of sexualised schoolgirls, taking a punt that a kiss between the two in the video would spark all manner of easy teenage-lesbian controversy and prurience. Depressingly, that proved to be a lucrative odds-on banker.
The track itself, produced by ZTT’s king of OTT Trevor Horn, is essentially a dramatisation of the video, so it’s not really possible to consider it separately. The whole project was transparently crass, exploitative, dishonest and sleazy. Yet it was number one in Ireland for the entire calendar month of February 2003. The obliging mock-horror headlines and titillated lads-mag, zoo-radio banter only add to making this a particularly tasteless and unwelcome episode in ’00s pop music and pop culture.
