I’ll Grin My Teeth To Make Him Stay

Ruby were one of those bands that had strange connections to my life in the mid 1990s, for no immediately apparent reason. Don’t get me wrong, I loved their scuzzier Garbage sound – It was the perfect marriage for my twin Britpop and Tricky obsessions at the time – and had a crush the size of a small mountain on lead singer Lesley Rankine, but still, it wasn’t as if I could hear myself in their lyrics or anything. But nonetheless…

I can’t remember why I bought “Paraffin,” their first single – At the time, I was buying a ridiculous amount of singles every Monday, because they were cheap(ish) and I was always on the look out for something interesting to listen to, so maybe it was that – but I remember being bewitched not only by the peculiar, sexually aggressive lyrics, but especially the Red Snapper remix on one of the CDs. I was given a pre-release copy of the album, and never actually got around to listening to it until one of those difficult nights with someone who I was very much in what I thought was love with, when she’d just told me she didn’t feel the same. Looking for something – anything – to distract us from talking about that, she found the CD and put it on, and it felt somewhere between how I felt and a good distraction from the same.

Cut to months later, and we’re all in Barcelona. It was one of the supposedly-educational trips we went on during my art school career (Besides Barcelona, there was also Amsterdam and New York; I was a well-travelled student, what can I say?), and we find out that Ruby are coincidentally playing there one night during our stay. Some international calls later, and we’re backstage after the gig, missing the band entirely and stealing a bottle of champagne before getting lost on the way back to our hotel. But as we wandered the streets, arguing about where to go and getting tired in the sleepy- and oh-God-we’ve-been-walking-for-hours- senses, it struck me that it was one of those must-have experiences in life, the kind of thing that you know even as it’s happening that you’ll fondly remember in years to come.

Ruby disappeared from view, not long after that. They did a second album that no-one heard (including me), and I’ve always felt as if that bottle of champagne that we stole was the last flush of fame for them and felt appropriately guilty.