Inna Volkova - singer, leader of the Hummingbird group, a bright and charismatic personality. The team is often called feminist, but the participants themselves assure that they simply chose their own style: a mixture of directions with a touch of light decadence.
Childhood and youth
Inna Volkova was born in 1964, in the distant Murmansk, her zodiac sign is Cancer. The family of the future singer was the most ordinary, the girl’s childhood was also no different from most peers. Its only feature was an early love for music.
Inna studied well, her parents planned that she would go to college and get a "serious profession." However, they had to come to terms with the choice of their daughter, who had already decided at school: she would become a singer, songwriter or, in extreme cases, an actress. After leaving school, the girl thought about moving: in her native Murmansk it was difficult to develop creatively. Inna came to St. Petersburg, where the fateful meeting with Natalya Pivovarova, Irina Sharovatova and other members of the Hummingbird group took place.
Professional career
The original female music band was created in 1988. At first, there were 7 participants in the project, later their number dropped to 5. The rate was not an unusual mix: a combination of a mixture of various musical genres with a predominance of folk rock and costume show. The songs were written by the participants themselves, Volkova also created several interesting compositions.
Concert performances "Hummingbird" began in 1991. The musicians of the Nautilus Pompilius, TV, and Aquarium bands took part in the recording of the first album. The fame was brought to the team by the composition "Autumn Yellow Leaf", made in the style of a parody.
A real breakthrough for the group was a performance at the Parisian festival "Russian Rock". Volkova as a vocalist was remembered by the public. There were several more performances in open areas and constant exits in clubs. The team was invited to domestic and foreign rock festivals, fame grew.
Hummingbird positioned itself as the first and only feminist music group in Russia. Her work was not close to everyone, but the number of fans grew every year. The girls turned each performance into a real costume show. Many songs were recorded clips, the creation of which involved leading studio masters and arrangers. The group had complete equality: five vocalists performed their hits in turn. The singers experimented with directions, including songs in various styles in concerts. Folk, rock, pop motifs, parodies in an interesting arrangement distinguished Hummingbirds from the mass of performers and provided them with loyal fans.
Along with the live performances, the collective recorded albums. The debut collection "Behavior" was released in 1991, it was soon published in vinyl and licensed in the United States. A year later, the team presented the second collection of "Little Tragedies." All the songs in it were written by the vocalists themselves, and the author performs the leading part in each composition.
The group is on a tight schedule, releasing an album almost every year. The most successful is "Find Ten Differences", released in 1995. A year earlier, Hummingbird went on the air, songs sounded on the radio. The group gained great fame, previously released albums were re-released on vinyl.
The team worked for a long time in an unchanged composition. Volkova repeatedly admitted in an interview: all these years rallied the group, turning it into a real family. Constant tours also contributed to such relations. Inna’s last performances as part of the Hummingbird took place in 2013, after which the team quietly left the stage. Farewell gift fan became an album of rare records "Apocrypha".
Volkova’s creative achievements are not just about vocals. She tried her hand as the author of the songs that she performed as part of the Hummingbird. Among Volkova’s hits “Not Near”, “Find 10 Differences”, “And Me?”. Inna starred in several episodes of the popular television series Streets of Broken Lights, participated in the film Hummingbirds in Paris and at home. The work in Volkov’s husband Alexander Bashirov’s Iron Heel of the Oligarchy film was also interesting. The whole collective Hummingbird was shot in the film, but the main role went to Inna. She also wrote the song for this picture and herself performed it. The composition "Not a Hero" was performed in a completely different manner from the Hummingbird and reveals new facets of Volkova's talent.
