Official Charts Flashback 2003: t.A.T.u. – All The Things She Said

officialcharts.com:

Perhaps the biggest pop phenomenon and marketing masterstroke since the Spice Girls' peak in the mid-nineties, t.A.T.u. had the press eating out of their hands when they launched their pop career in 2003 with the global smash All the Things She Said.

Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova were not your average popstars. The fact they were from Russia was unusual enough for an act getting to Number 1 in the UK; but they had plenty of other tricks up their sleeves to make sure you never forgot them.

For a start, they were pretty fond of dressing up in school uniforms, which perhaps would struggle to pass the ick factor in 2018 and their gimmick – which they said wasn't a gimmick – was that they were prone to snogging each other, usually only when a camera was pointed at them, of course.

Despite many popstars of the day, and indeed now, were gay or bisexual, very open expressions of same-sex love and rejections of heterosexual norms were quite rare, so the duo understandably attracted a lot of attention.