Hello. I am Matt . I sing to you whilst playing the piano. Soon in our new video I will sing to you whilst riding around on a little scooter. Anyway. People have often said to us that we could be BIG in Japan, and we have often said 'what?'thinking "but Japan is such a long way away and seems so very different from here and how would anyone in Japan come to hear about us anyway?" And other bands we have met have asked us 'what about releasing records in Japan?' and we have pretended not to hear and changed the subject. But it turns out we might actually be BIG in Japan which is ridiculous, and we needn't have worried about how to make it happen because, like in all musician's fairytales, it happened on it's own, just like that! Well, just like this actually…….

Last October, we did a gig at the 100 Club in London which was cool (I played a real piano and hurt my fingers) and some Japanese fans came up to tell us we could be BIG in Japan and I remember thinking 'well if these people who are actually from Japan think so perhaps we could, but how, how, how, how…………..

Then we went home.

The next day, Ben rang me up to say he'd just checked his e-mail and there was some from Ichi Yamanaka an A&R man from Virgin Records in Japan. It went like this:

Hi, how are you? I'm Ichi Yamanaka,a product manager of Virgin Japan International A&R department.

I got interested in "Valentine's Day" on "Shine 6". So I got the other singles("I don't know" and "Fear of Flying" and I got to really like both of them.

Could you let me know when and From which label in Japan Ruth's products will be released.

Kind Regards and look forward to hearing from you

ICHI Yamanaka

Blimey, that's a coincidence. I thought.

So we faxed the message to Big Brian at ARC and he spoke to Ichi and said that we were indeed planning to release stuff in Japan and would Virgin like to do it? And he said 'Well I would, but I'd better just check with my boss' .Now that usually means it's all going to go wrong, but for once his boss actually said 'Yes' and suddenly RUTH had a deal in Japan! And since then it has gone very well indeed. We signed the deal, they began promoting 'Valentine's Day', Japanese radio started playing 'Valentine's Day' and, astonishingly people even began buying 'Valentine's Day' and it has gone from number 76 to 44 to 39 to 37 and that's kind of a hit!! In Japan!!! Christ!!!!!!

All we need now is for people to start coming up to us and saying 'you know, you could be BIG in Britain'.

That would be good.