Background and career
Nikolai Ivanovich Noskov (Russian: Николай Иванович Носков; born 12 January 1956) is a Russian singer and former vocalist of the hard rock band Gorky Park (between 1987 and 1990). He is a five-time winner of the Golden Gramophone Award. He was also a member of the Москва (Moscow) ensemble in the early 1980s, the band Гран-при (Grand Prix) in 1988 just before joining Gorky Park, and much later the band Николай (Nikolai) in the 1990s. Starting 1998, Noskov had a solo career releasing six solo albums. In 2015, he served as a jury in second season of the reality TV series Glavnaya Stsena.
Born on January 12, 1956, in Gzhatsk (now renamed Gagarin), Nikolai Noskov comes from a working-class family. His father, Ivan, worked at a meat-processing factory, and his mother, Yekaterina, worked as a milkmaid and construction site worker. Noskov's boyhood gave him his first musical impressions, mainly from folk music played on traditional Russian instruments or sung by his mother. At the age of eight, Noskov and his family moved to a bigger city – Cherepovets, Vologda Oblast. There Nikolai finished school and afterwards served his term in the army.
Curious to explore, Kolya tried to play bayan, but as he was growing up, his attention shifted more and more firmly to singing – first in the school choir, then as a solo performer, winning one of his first awards at a local singing contest at the age of fourteen. As the lead singer of the school band, he performed the hits of Western rock bands like the Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival, bending to the wave of rock 'n' roll music, which was then surgent amid the Soviet youth. Posters depicting the members of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd came to relieve Shalyapin's portrait hung over Nikolai’s bed. His English was then undeveloped, and Nikolai simply transcribed what he heard on the original recording, transcribed it in Cyrillic letters. Later in his life, circumstances invited him to pay more attention to the language of rock 'n' roll.
A self-taught instrumentalist, Noskov plays the guitar, the piano, and the drums at a general versatility level. He even played the trumpet while in the army. Noskov never received an official vocal education, although he applied to the Gnesinykh state musical college. His knowledge of musical notation is also self-learned.
After being invited by an entrepreneur to an audition in Moscow, Noskov participated in several Moscow-based musical bands, then routinely dubbed "VIA" (Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble). However, none of these early engagements held him for long – Rovesniki (Peers) and Nadezhda (Hope) were soon left behind.
