Ha Chaverim Shel Natasha

A Haifa friendship and a photograph from Russia

Micha Shitrit was born in Nahariya to a Moroccan-Jewish family; Arkadi Duchin arrived from the Soviet Union and grew up in Kiryat Yam, outside Haifa. The two met as teenagers in Haifa and fell into a division of labour that never really changed: Shitrit wrote words and sang them, Duchin wrote the music. At 22 they moved to Tel Aviv, sharing cheap hotel accommodation while they tried to get the songs heard.

The band took shape in 1987, growing out of an earlier ensemble, with Miki Harari on guitar and Shlomo "Kozo" Almakayes on bass. The name came from a set of old Russian photographs of Duchin's parents that Shitrit saw; he suggested the phrase, and it stuck, a joke about a Natasha who never appears. A 1987 band competition did the rest: the judge Dani Basen passed them on to Yair Nitzani at the Hed Artzi label, and the group went into the studio with Nir Zidkyahu drumming on the debut.

Three records in five years

The self-titled first album came out on 1 March 1989. It sold around 40,000 copies, enough for platinum in the Israeli market of the time, and produced "Melancholia", still the song most often used as shorthand for the band. The sleeve carried a portrait of Yaakov Chaviv, the manager of the hotel where the pair had been living — a detail that says a good deal about how the group preferred to present itself.

Shinuyim Be'Hergelei HaTzricha (Changes in Consumption Habits), released in 1991, is the record that moved them from critical respect to genuine popularity. "Al HaMiftan" and "Shtei Sipurei Ahava Ktanim" came from it. Its producer, Yosef Alfant, died during the sessions; the twelfth track is dedicated to him.

Radio Bla Bla followed in 1994, a double concept album built around a radio broadcast, with Alon Oleartchik guesting and "Freddy BaBoker" among its best-known tracks. It became their biggest seller and the album most cited when Israeli critics rank the rock records of the 1990s. Then it stopped. The band played a final show in Kiryat Ata in 1996 and broke up, with a live recording released that year as the full stop. Internal friction, largely between the two founders over direction and the unequal split of the writing, did the damage. Both went solo, Duchin with a long and prolific run of his own records.

Seventeen years, one lawsuit, one comeback

The afterlife was legally messy. In 2001 Hed Artzi issued a compilation without the band's agreement, and in 2004 the members sued over unpaid royalties. The case took nine years; in April 2013 the Tel Aviv District Court awarded them 1.7 million shekels.

An attempt to reunite in 2008 collapsed almost immediately, again over what the new music should sound like. The one that held was announced by Duchin on 20 May 2013, with Golan Zuskovitch taking over on bass from Almakayes. What was planned as a short summer run kept extending through 2015 on the strength of ticket sales, and the band has not stopped since. The current line-up is Duchin on keyboards and vocals, Shitrit on guitar and vocals, Miki Harari on guitar, Zuskovitch on bass and Jean Paul Zimbris on drums.

Anniversaries as a working method

Since the reunion the band has structured its touring around its own back catalogue rather than new releases. A tour running from January to October 2017 marked 25 years of Changes in Consumption Habits. In 2019 four special concerts marked a quarter-century of Radio Bla Bla, with Amir Dadon and Ninet Tayeb singing alongside the band; a four-LP vinyl edition and an anniversary show followed in 2020.

On 20 August 2021 they played the outdoor plaza of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, as part of the Docu.text festival and immediately after a screening of Asher Tlalim's 1990 documentary Friends Without Friends, which had followed the band at the start. The Times of Israel described a sold-out, largely middle-aged audience singing every word through an hour of hits, and a band with mostly grey hair playing a tight, unfussy set.

The most considered of these projects was the 2025 show billed as The True Story, marking 35 years of the group and staged at Heichal Totzeret Ha'aretz on the Tel Aviv Expo grounds, with a performance listed for 15 February. Directed by Loui Lahav and produced by Almog Sharid, it walked through the three albums in sequence with autobiographical video between songs — "Od Negi'a", "Ne'emar Kvar HaKol", "Melancholia" and "Shir Acher" among them.

2026: the orchestra year

The band's standing was confirmed at the end of January 2026, when they appeared with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time at the Charles Bronfman Auditorium in Tel Aviv, in arrangements written and conducted by Ilan Mochiach. A review published on 29 January found the hall full and the audience ahead of the band on every lyric, and praised Mochiach for using the orchestra selectively rather than continuously — expanding the songs instead of taking them over, so the set moved between stripped rock passages and symphonic ones. The verdict was that the material survived the orchestration with its directness intact.

The pairing was repeated on 5 June 2026 at the same hall, in a Friday-afternoon slot at 14:00. Around it sat a conventional summer run: the Tel Aviv amphitheatre at Ganei Yehoshua on 18 April 2026, tickets at 209 shekels; the Sunset Festival at Ampi Max Live Park in Ramat Hasharon on 27 June; and a Ramat Hasharon club date on 3 September. As of early October 2026 the listings show a single date still on sale, on 10 October at the auditorium at Kibbutz HaZorea in the north.

Duchin remains the more publicly visible of the two. In an interview published on 14 August 2025 he put his own output at more than 900 songs across four decades, discussed writing "Sigalit" for the late wife of a friend, and set out his position on playing to a divided country: that he wants to perform for people on both sides of the argument over the war and would rather connect them than pick one.

On stage

The reunion-era show is built for people who already know the songs, and the promoters say so plainly: more than 50,000 people at their concerts across recent years, on a catalogue described as a generation's soundtrack. Both founders talk between numbers, explaining where songs came from — a device a 2021 review of their sold-out concert at the Skyline amphitheatre in Ariel Sharon Park, a 1,200-seat venue overlooking the Tel Aviv skyline and the approach to Ben Gurion airport, singled out as the thing that made the evening work. That show opened acoustic and built from there.

Venues vary more than the set does. The band plays seated halls, standing-room kibbutz venues in the north where the crowd treats it as a party, open-air amphitheatres in summer and, twice in 2026, a concert hall with a full orchestra behind them. The constant is three albums made between 1989 and 1994 and an audience that has aged alongside them.