Mumiy Troll

As home port of the Russian Pacific Fleet, Vladivostok's returning sailors provided the locals with tantalising glimpses of a world beyond the then Soviet Union.

Mumiy Troll founder and frontman Ilya Lagutenko remembers, "They came from Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong and would bring home Western albums. They didnt really follow the charts, they brought the ones with nice artwork. Thats why my first encounters with Western music were bands like Genesis, Motorhead and Duran Duran."

With his imagination fired by whatever illicit sounds he could get his hands on, a teenage Ilya formed Mumiy Troll in 1983. At the time, however, there was no sense that the band could ever amount to more than a kid's game.

Consequently, Mumiy Troll existed throughout the '80s as a semi-clandestine hobby. Two self-recorded albums were distributed among friends and like-minded people, and gigs performed to the same, necessarily limited, audience.

But as the '90s dawned, the Soviet Union had indeed begun to change. With restrictions on work and travel lifted, Ilya was able to realise his long-standing dream to "dissolve myself in a different environment".

Being fluent in both Mandarin and English, Ilya lived for a year in China as part of his degree course, and then, in 1994, in London, where he recorded Mumiy Troll's first official album amid the heady atmosphere of the nascent Britpop scene.

Armed with a headful of ideas and the album which would make him a superstar at home, Ilya returned to a Russia newly liberated by perestroika. Not only did making a living from the band now seem like a realistic option, the internet was beginning to offer alternatives to the traditional industry model.

Mumiy Troll weren't just one of the first bands anywhere to launch a website, they became, in 2000, the first with a sizeable fan-base to give away an album as a free download; seven years before Radiohead's supposedly pioneering move with In Rainbows.

"We realised that our biggest revenue was touring and that really depends on music distribution", says Ilya, many years before the idea had taken root in Western thinking.

In grasping this new reality so quickly, Mumiy Troll found themselves at the forefront of the digital revolution which would transform the music industry in the decade to come.

Starting with the release of their first official album in 1997, Mumiy Troll rapidly became one of Russia's most popular and influential bands, and have clocked up more than 100 million downloads to date. They were the first to appear on Russian MTV, represented Russia at Eurovision, and have won every native award going including Best Russian Band of the Millennium.

Their success continues unabated to this day, with tours selling out as a matter of course and their most recent album, SOS Matrosu, topping the iTunes charts.

As befits a true pop cultural icon, Ilya's interests and influence extend beyond music. He recently starred in a feature-length movie, which he also co-wrote, co-directed, and co-produced, and is the Russian representative of the Global Tiger Initiative, which campaigns to save wild tigers from extinction.

Having conquered modern, oligarch-era Russia, you might think Mumiy Troll would be content with a comfortable routine of domestic touring, casino residencies, and private shows.

But to do so would be to ignore "the mentality of the Vladivostok sailor", which Ilya insists has always been his driving force.

Embracing this literally as well as metaphorically, Ilya took the band around the world by ship to record their 14th official album, SOS Matrosu, stopping off in places as diverse as the USA, Japan, China, Singapore, South Africa, Germany and France in his unending quest for musical inspiration.

This spirit of adventure, the old Vladivostok sailor thing, has led to Mumiy Troll becoming a truly international band, with collaborators coming from all over the world.

Ilya's love of oriental food was responsible for at least two. He met new keyboard player Sasha Ho (aka DZA) in a Hong Kong noodle joint, while Keefus Ciancia (T-Bone Burnett's pianist) was persuaded to get involved over a bowl of Tom Yum soup in LA, the city where Ilya is now partially based.

Asked to describe SOS Matrosu in a single sentence, Ilya calls it, "My vision of the modern pop world from urban Asia to rural Africa modern rock music from outside traditional rock territories".

Clearly, Russia was only the beginning for Ilya Lagutenko. This Vladivostok sailor now has his sights set on the whole world.