THE SAD STORY OF VALENTINE'S DAY Thankyou to everyone who bought Valentine's Day last September. You seemed to like it, if the reactions in Readers Wives are anything to go by. It was a sad thing for us, though, because most people didn't seem to get it. We got a perplexing review in Time Out which said that we had comprehensively ripped off "I am the Beat" by some band called The Look. Edgar says he has a copy of this and it sounds nothing like it - if you can shed any light on this mystery why not give us a shout? Some people did like it, though, such as Kevin Greening on Radio One (he had, by coincidence, first heard it on the 1994 7") and he invited us to compete with a band called Peach on a slot called "The Persuaders" in his show. This is the one where you get 30 seconds to sell your song in the manner of your choosing and the listeners vote on which one they are more tempted by. Needless to say, Peach won, although Kevin used us during the travel as a consolation prize. On Alternative Nation on MTV our fabulous video failed to get voted for in favour of something truly awful involving bicycles. This has instilled in us a great fear of phone-votes. If all this had given us reason to be nervous, it was borne out on Monday 2nd September when we rocketed into the charts at 107. By Wednesday we had slipped to 157 and by Sunday we had clawed our way back up to 121. I had good reason to rue those enthusiastic words in ALAN 6: "RUTH records shall practically leap into your hands if you so much as look at a record shop" - signing to our big new friend PolyGram hadn't appeared to make any difference. They made it up to us though, by putting Valentine's Day on their indie compilation SHINE 6 (disc 2, track 17! It sold 100,000 copies so perhaps you have one?) and we certainly can't complain about their enthusiasm for I don't know which, I hope I can truthfully say will be a lot more widely available than previous RUTH stuff. So we were sad that our lovely song wasn't a hit, but in the Crazy World of POP you always get a second chance - believe me, we haven't heard the last of the mighty Valentine's Day. It could be You. It was Us. RUTH Perform at the Royal Bloody Albert Hall Back to ALAN 7