Part One This is the story of RUTH in two parts. This first part is our prehistory, compiled from a tape I made of us driving home from the studio one night in the midst of the Can't Stop Myself sessions. I have tried to do as little in the way of editing as possible, although there are just some things too dull and of too little interest to the casual reader to be worth putting in. Although I did leave some of them in. I also left out all the laughing, long pauses, sharp intakes of breath when nearly crashing and bits where everyone was shouting at once. But I'm sure you won't notice. This transcription also gives a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the not-very-famous-yet four. Stephen (belligerent) It's very late at night Matt Vincent-Brown (sad) I don't want to talk about it Matt Hales (at a loss) Where are we supposed to start from? S Are you recording now? Ben Yeah S (surprisingly incredulous) ARE YOU??? B What's your history, Steve, before er S (surprisingly angry) For God's sake DO I HAVE TO START??? B Yeah S (perplexed and upset) What kind of history do you want? Do you want musical history? B Just a very brief history of what you were doing and how come you ended up in RUTH S Right. OK. OK, (Deep breath) Started playing guitar when I was ten or eleven played in a band called Running Riot and The Neutrons until 1984 and then I did my own stuff on my four track- MH Was it called "Running Riot And The Neutrons"? S No we were called Running Riot and then we were called The Neutrons. Then I got a four-track and I did y own stuff by myself and I hated being in bands. Then in 1986 I formed a band called A Tribe of Toffs with my friends and we were famous for about four weeks in 1988 with er...a song. And then I used studios a lot and recorded things and got records released for a little while and one of the records I was going to release was a charity record and I heard a song that I'd like to put on the B-side and it happened to be by Mr. Matt Hales and I phoned him up and said "Can I use one of your songs called Rose in December on the B-side of my record?" And he said yes and so I did and then I met him and he played me some music that he'd done and I thought it was very good. Then he said "Oh all right then, how about joining my band" and I said "That would be a good idea" and so we did B That was very good S Thankyou pause S (suddenly and incredibly loud) I DO MY BEST, YOU KNOW? I TRY!!!!!! MH But your best somehow is never ever, ever good enough and never will be fighting B How about you, Mr. Vincent-Brown? MVB (sad) I don't want to say anything B (enraged) You always say this MVB I don't MH (high pitched) Well why not? MVB Why not? I don't want to S (incredibly loudly) ARE YOU TIRED OR SOMETHING? MVB (tired and irritable and not wanting to have any interviews) I'm tired and irritable and I don't want to have any interviews now long aching pause B Well how about you then, Matt MVB (suddenly, as if reason had unexpectedly prevailed) OK, right. All right S Here we go! WAHEY WAHEHEHOO!!!!! MVB Well I'll tell you. From the beginning I had piano lessons when I was about seven or eight and I was playing the piano for a period of time and then I didn't want to have lessons any more and I didn't want to play the piano any more and so I didn't. Although before I stopped doing that I was playing piano with Matt- S It's going well it's going very well B Shut up Steve S Sorry MVB Yeah. and um MH That's important, that bit. Did you get that bit? B What, me telling Steve to shut up? MH No S Playing the piano with Matt Hales MH That was it, he taught me how to play things when I was little S Did he? That's cool MH I'd already started playing the piano but he taught me all those crap things that every pianist has to know and we used to jam on his horrible orange piano S And now, ALAN, you've found out something at the same time as me, and I'm in the band for God's sake MH (ignoring this) And the funny thing was that at that point Matt was much better at playing the piano than I was, when he was six and I was five MVB Anyway, so I stopped playing the piano. but then I got interested in playing the drums when I was at school MH Don't forget though, that when we did "I Am A Whale", it can be no coincidence that when we did "I Am A Whale" [some song - Ed.] we both sang it and I played my organ and he played with a couple of sticks B It was one of those wire milk delivery things MH And a record case MVB I thought it was a bin as well MH And maybe a bin, and we did a recording and he played the percussion on it- S I used to play drums on a bongo and the drum off a banjo that I'd disassembled B Yeah, then what happened? MVB I was into drum machines at school. I never got a drum machine- S Look at those two girls walking fast RUTH Ha ha ha S Drum machines at school MVB Yeah...uh..... and I was at my cousin's house, and he's well into music, and he had a drum kit , a Premier ..erm.... Olympic and I had a go on it and I wasn't very good at it - I couldn't even put a bass drum and snare rhythm together, but I was really really into it, and we were jamming away as you do when you're eleven or twelve. But he was getting rid of this kit, and so for a small fee I bought it MH Was that the brown one? MVB Yeah. So I got this brown drum kit and I played it as soon as I got home and annoyed the family straight away. And from then onwards. Basically my drumming got better as I listened to more music. I had one or two lessons but I gave those up, as I gave up every lesson. School lessons and everything. MH You kept getting together with me and we kept writing stuff, and we got into bouncing [a supremely lo-tech way of building up multi-track recordings using two tape recorders and a corkscrew - Ed] when we were about 14 S (facetiously) I'm into bouncing MVB So I was recording with Matt and I was getting more and more frustrated cos he had drum sounds and I thought "I'd really like to play drums with him". But I just didn't have that kind of drum sound. Mind you, I'm glad I haven't got a Casio drum sound. But the first time I ever got together in any band was actually with Matt and Ben, it must've been when I was about 15 and Ben was playing- he'd got a new black guitar MH His first electric guitar B It wasn't actually - my first electric guitar was bought for a pound MH Jon Cranley's B No, then I sold it to Jon Cranley for ten quid MVB Bought it for a quid? B But it was worth about 50p. MH So we had that get together, and I don't know how it happened but we decided we wanted to have a band, and Matt knew some S Chords MVB -friends from school. This was a couple of years on S How old were you at this point? MVB Sixteen when we actually had a band for the first time MH And we were called White Noise B Yeah MVB I didn't really know the other two and I didn't know if I'd like them B And in the end you never did MVB And it was all very very unpleasant, but I thought well I want to drum and I want to jam so it was all good fun. Then we became Mecano Pig and did a tape and that was all very interesting B Right, that's enough cos then that will all tie up together MVB Ask me another question S Do you like swimming? MVB Yes, next S No B Well we'll get on to our bit and then we can just talk about RUTH, which is the main bit really. So Matt then MH When I was a very small child, when I was about S Seventeen MH Two... well from before I can remember apparently I played the piano because there was a piano in the house and I used to go and hit it and seemed to quite enjoy hitting it and kept going back to do it, quite annoyingly but Mum and Dad just let me do it cos they thought it would be healthy and they were being progressive parents. I used to really enjoy playing and I used to have ideas and I'd try and make the noises coincide with my ideas and then Matt taught me a few things, so I played about with them and went on doing my own new things. When I was about eight I wrote a song about road safety B Which was "I'm a Little Teapot" MH But with a slightly different tune. And something me and Ben used to do, I don't know if he remembers this was to, when we were little, we used to quite often just both sit at the piano and sort of jam together in a kind of crap way B "Thunderstorm" it was usually called. MH I always used to really like that, and we did always have a connection via music even though we didn't make much of it for ages. Anyway I had piano lessons and went to school where I was hailed as a genius by my music teacher cos I was writing stuff by then, writing it down and stuff. So I was really good at music. I'd been writing songs for ages, first of all I did it on my own and then quite often Ben would help me write the words. Then when he got his guitar I'd get him to play guitar parts. At 15, we did White Noise and all that and write lots of songs about how people should just love one another and try to get along, and had a bit of a terrible moral streak. Did quite a lot with the band, and even though we weren't really ready to do anything great then we had good ideas and we tried out recording and we tried out making a tape and selling it we tried out doing big gigs and promoting ourselves. We tried out being famous in a very very very small way. So we were in a band and we played together, and though we did get better, we never had any good songs really.. By the time I finished my A Levels and went to University, me and Ben had just started writing songs which started to sound a bit special, the first of which was probably Sideways, stupidly enough cos we've just been recording that today, and we wrote it about four years ago. Yeah. That's it S Ben - tell us your story B I played "Thunderstorm" with Matt, and then I thought sod it, I don't like music cos that's what he does, so I'll be a writer instead. But then I was bullied and harassed into taking up an instrument, so I took up classical guitar, apart from my teachers kept disappearing. So then I took it into my head to learn myself and I wanted to be Rock Guitarist, much inspired by Paul Simon's amazing bass break in "You Can Call Me Al". When I first got my £1 guitar, I plugged it into the amplifier, Matt's little keyboard amp, thinking that it would sound like it had loads of effects on it, and thought "Right, I bet I know how to do it" S But you couldn't B But I couldn't and I didn't touch it again. Then I sold it to Jon Cranley. Got another one, learnt, got better. I'd been writing lyrics all this time. And then when we had too many guitarists for White Noise I said Oh, I'll play bass then cos I was classically trained and so I knew how to use my fingers. So I was bassist for a couple of years. But then I thought I'd try to usurp Justin [Mecano Pig guitarist - Ed.] because he had big hair MH He had a tendency to wear big basketball boots and big cream fluffy socks and tuck his tight jeans into the socks to try and fake rock'n'roll Spandex trousers B So he didn't deserve to be a guitarist. So became more of one, we got better, wrote better songs and better lyrics. We finally decided, and this is where the story really begins MVB As we near home B To actually start the band that would be The Big One, The One, and decided that we'd do it alone, just me and him, which was a damn good idea. We were called Gravel Monsters and we played together with a drum machine and it was an awesome sound. We'd always had this little deal on with Matt that should we ever need a drummer then it would be him. So me and Matt hired an eight track one summer and recorded the demos that Steve heard in the end, and we were quite pleased with that, and we were just about to sent it out to loads of record companies, when Matt got the fateful call from Steve S That's quite amazing, the timing of that, then, cos any earlier and you wouldn't've been ready, any later and you might've been on your own doing whatever B Yeah, but you didn't turn out to be the fat, forty year old with your own record company that we thought you were S See, Matt and Ben thought I was about forty and was a record producer, when in fact I was just 21 B And you were working washing up in a hotel S And it just so happened that I had connections with studios and things, so I wasn't really as amazing as I made out I was B I remember one day I was almost moved to tears by the news that we'd met Stephen Cousins and that he was going to make us big, and then the crushing disappointment when we found out S That I was a small boy B But then we decided that really you weren't going to get anywhere with a drum machine, so you needed a real drummer, and if you needed a real drummer, you needed another person to pay bass and guitar. And if you needed another person to pay bass and guitar, you might as well have the consolation prize of a man who knew about washing up MH And more importantly who could get us into a genuine recording studio for the first time in our lives B So we got together on the weekend of my 18th birthday at Upham Town Hall S This was our first band rehearsal in February of 1992 MVB I can remember at that rehearsal all I can remember about you, Steve was that I might have found out that you had been doing more professional stuff, and I was like beating the drums really quickly, and you were going "Hey, you're speeding up" S Was I? MVB And I was thinking Shit! This guy's really professional B I remember thinking he's a lucky bastard cos you know, we've got a PA and what's more I've got a Marshall. A tiny. tiny Marshall. But it was there MH And that was the rehearsal when we'd just written Fear of Flying, and it was the first time we'd ever played it. And it sounded then, like absolutely amazing, and we were absolutely thrilled. And we had that first ever RUTH feeling, or Gravel Monsters as it was then, and we went S+MH YES!! MH But it was the first time I'd ever been involved with playing with a group of people and it had sounded like The Real Thing B I wonder what it did sound like Discussion of first gig B In the end we thought the best strategy is : We go Newcastle and blow All our cash earned in Burger King S Cos I used to live in Sunderland and the studio I used to work at was in Newcastle, and we could get cheap rates B We thought we'd go there for cheap rates and record an album, which we thought we'd probably sell a couple of hundred thousand copies of MH We'd definitely be able to release it though B Well yeah, cos it's been recorded, for God's sake S In a real studio MH Well you definitely can't release something that hasn't been recorded S 24 whole tracks! MH Of brown-ness B So we went up there in July S 1992 B That was quite exciting, though, sleeping on the floor S Videoing the entire event B There is a video, actually, available for £2000 MH For £2000 you can see my bollocks twice B We came out of Impulse Studios in Newcastle with our first album ten tracks MH Ready to be pressed B Excellently mixed and MH Oh we're at home now S We'll continue as we walk into the house MH No we won't And they didn't. Don't miss Part Two next time when we find out how Gravel Monsters met up with shady Prince Brian, got on MTV and turned into RUTH (probably) Back to ALAN 3