Day 37: "Ruby Blue" - Róisín Murphy (2005)

If you've been following along with this blog, I suspect you are starting to form a kind of picture of what my musical tastes are.  "So Rich," you are no doubt asking your screen right now, "what's it going to be today?  90's Gen X grunge, nu-metal, actual metal, or some R.E.M album?"

Firstly, that's very hurtful.  Secondly, talking to your monitor is strange, you know I can't hear you. Thirdly, let me introduce a personal favourite of mine, an album I listen to at least once every couple of months, and definitely my favourite mid 2000s weird electro jazz pop record of all time.

Listen to me here

In 1998 I was working at an Architects firm in Sheffield as a general admin dogsbody.  It wasn't interesting, or glamorous, but it did bring in some much needed money, and didn't require a lot of my attention, and taught me a strangely large amount about how subsidence in houses occurs.  The company didn't have any kind of internal IT establishment, and because I'd foolishly demonstrated an ability to install a printer driver early on in my tenure at this place, I found myself the defacto IT 'expert' for the office.  This mainly involved me doing things like installing drivers, sitting in our tiny server cupboard running weekly backups onto DAT tape drives, and unjamming printers.

Whenever there was anything serious that needed doing, the company had an outside consultant come in to take care of it;  because I was the on-site help, he'd often rope me in to assist, which didn't involve me working very much but did involve me keeping him company and talking about stuff while he messed around with network cables in the mostly-abandoned floor below the office.  That's how I met Jon.

Jon was in his early 30s, nearly a decade older than me at the time, and had made the switch to consulting early in his career.  Back in 1998, Network Engineers felt like sorcerers, with no-one understanding the Dark Arts of Novello Network Server, and so Jon commanded an exhorbitant hourly rate for his work.  We got on pretty well, and after we'd got to know each other a little, Jon would occasionally sub-let some minor jobs he'd taken on to me;  nothing complex or important, just basic stuff like "Format all these Hard Drives for me will you?" or "Can you install Windows NT on these machines?".  Jon paid me a fraction of what he in turn was paid, but it was still a very nice steady, and off the books in cash, source of extra scratch for me.

Jon's other revenue stream was as a landlord.  He owned a couple of places around Sheffield outright, and was doing the buy-to-let landlord thing before it was popular.  He was also a big music fan, and knew a lot of people in the Sheffield music scene at the time, mainly by dint of the fact that several of them were renting their houses from him.

Jon actually got me in to my first ever show at iconic Sheffield music venue "The Leadmill" because a band who lived in a house he owned were playing a gig there and had put his name down on the door, but he couldn't make it, so told me to go in his place.  A few weeks later, Jon sent me an email telling me he was having a party in Sheffield and I should come.  I was super-apprehensive about going to a party on my own, with a bunch of people I assumed to be far cooler and older than me, but I didn't feel like I could refuse, so one Saturday night, I took the train into Sheffield and a taxi to his place, and that's where I met Róisín Murphy.

One of the bands Jon was landlord for was Moloko, and the party was full of young Sheffield musicians.  Jon introduced me to a few people, including Róisín and her boyfriend Mark (then comprising the full lineup of Moloko) and Dean Horner (of more later in this blog) and everyone was very polite and I was very, very, very scared shitless.

Everything I expected out of this party was true.  Everyone there was cool, everyone there knew each other and were chatting and drinking and having a good time, and I was so far out of my depth I couldn't even see the surface of the water above me any more.  I found myself a drink and a quiet corner to hide in.  I don't know whether Jon assumed I'd just fit right in, or that I had the social savvy to handle myself, but really, my social skills are just a front, and in that situation I was as helpless as a new born infant.  I drank two beers, made my excuses, and left.

I only saw Jon a couple of times after that before I left that job to start working full time at Sheffield University, and never really thought much about that whole experience until years later.

I've mentioned before that 2005 was a pretty bad year for me.  On the weeks where I left my flat at all that year apart from to go to work, I spent a lot of my Saturday's wandering around the city center, and by force of habit, going into the then much-expanded HMV.  It was there, browsing the new releases, that I saw a single copy of this CD.  I remember that I instinctively felt I had to buy it.  I stood in the aisle of the HMV and counted out all the money in my wallet.  Then I walked outside to the cash machine to check my meager bank balance.  With something like 10 days left before the end of that month when I would be paid again, in a flat with electricity and gas on a meter you had to feed coins into, and without hearing any of the tracks on it, I spent the last £15 I had in the world on this album (and got the HMV Sampler June '05 for free) and walked home.

I think I must have listened to this album about 40 times over the course of those two weeks.  It was so far removed from my usual listening, but it was hypnotically strange and fascinating.  It's definitely not the worlds most accessible album on your first listen through, but the entire thing is sultry and alluring and discordant and utterly unlike anything I'd heard before that I just became lost in it.  I don't think it came out of my CD player for over a month.

I don't know whether that brief memory of meeting her and feeling out of my depth, someone allowed into the cool kids party through the back door where I very much didn't belong, sparked in me some need at that time when my self-confidence was at its lowest ebb to buy this album, but I'm glad I did, because I honestly think its one of the best albums I own.

You may not agree.  It's certainly an album I can see people finding impossible to love in the same way I do.  But there's a great deal to be said to listening to stuff outside of your comfort zone.  You might find there are treasures out there in the unknown.