Natasha Shneider

Natasha Shneider (Russian: Наташа Шнайдер; May 22, 1956 – July 2, 2008) was a Russian musician and actress. She was most notably the keyboardist and vocalist in the musical group Eleven, along with her partner, bandmate Alain Johannes. Shneider contributed to tracks for Queens of the Stone Age and together with Johannes toured with Queens in 2005 on their Lullabies to Paralyze tour. She died of cancer in 2008.

Life and career

Shneider was born in Riga, Latvia (then Soviet Union), to a Jewish family. She proved musically gifted from an early age and both of her parents were musicians.

In the early 1970s she was a member of 'Sovremennik', a state-run pop orchestra, that featured Natasha Shneider on vocals and piano, her first husband Serge Kapustin on guitar and percussion. Her brother Vladimir Shneider produced and played piano and keyboards for the 'Singing Hearts', which was one of Russia's hottest groups in the mid-'70s, whose output and sound was heavily controlled by the Soviet authorities. Vladimir Shneider recalled: We'd sing 37 songs about how good the Communist Party is, and at the end—if we were lucky — we were allowed to play a mellow song like Killing Me Softly or Ain't No Sunshine. But never rock.