One faTEFUL afternoon in the summer of 1995. Tim Kellett was buzzing boffinishly about his rural Derbyshire studio, a swish and swizzy state-of-the-art job financed by ten years of wages from Simply Red, for whom he had been loyally pounding keyboards and ignoring his own ambitions. He triggered a sample on his Starship Enterprise-like keyboard and there, filling the room, was a strange and lovely quivering, shivery vocal.
Her I must meet, decided Tim and hastened to the blower. Within hours he had tracked down Ruth Ann in Sunderland, thanks to a quick call to Vini Reilly (ex Durutti Column) who had used the little-known indie songbird in a couple of sessions.
Ruth Ann was from a classic North of England Irish Catholic family, one of a bountiful brood of nine. She was well-known for cutting a heels-aloft dash on the Irish dancing stages of her native Sunderland.
The two met up and went into the studio. Enter Robin Taylor-Forth, a club-smart bounder from Sheffield who had quietly been knocking out quality choonage for the influential Nightmares On Wax tribe. And so Olive was born, the toothsome threesome huddled happily together in the studio and, to go all Barry Manilow, they made some boooootiful music.
What s strange is that things have taken off quite so quickly for us, says Tim, two years later in Cork s Imperial Hotel as Olive gear up for an impressive showing at the Heineken Weekender.
Quickly indeed. Their second release on 45, the cheerily chirpy You re Not Alone , has topped the majority of Europe s hit parades and their debut album, the thoughtful and resolutely literate Extra Virgin, has been exiting record emporiums everywhere in the manner of warm cake. Success, however, shall not wither them.
Just because you get all successful all of a sudden doesn t change the music, says the charming Ruth Ann. But we re not at all bothered by being commercially successful, we re not snobbish about it. Pop music is pop music and we re a pop band.
It was an extremely odd feeling being number one though, butts in Tim. In all my time with Simply Red, we never actually had one, so it was like, Hah!
Olive s schedule is dizzyingly hectic at the moment as they fleet-footedly keep pace with the frantic run-around of the summer festival circuit. But they re having fun, nonetheless.
We just played this huge bash in Brighton and we were on pretty early so the field looked a bit empty but by the time we came to the end of the set and went into You re Not Alone , there were just arms in the air for as far as you could see. It was an amazing feeling, recalls an ever-so-slightly misty-eyed Ruth Ann, still coming to terms with the notion of being a chart-topping celebrity.
The live shows have been great, concurs Tim. What we do is genuinely live. A lot of it is guitar-based, there are real drums, a real horn section and not really that much in the way of sequencing. I think the audiences have been very pleasantly surprised.
On the tour bus, rolling merrily from mudbath to filthfest, Olive, like most of the rest of the planet, have been getting off on Radiohead.
I m a big, big Thom Yorke fan, admits Ruth Ann. It s just the type of thing I like, good singing and great songs with good old-fashioned choruses.
Who else tickles Olive s collective fancy?
Basically, good singers, says the titian-haired temptress. kd lang, Rickie Lee Jones, Nat King Cole even.
If these influences have a common thread, it s the way their classic cuts have been flavoured with a certain pop melancholia. Which might explain Olive s more downtempo, angsty efforts.
We certainly don t see ourselves as a dance act, says Tim, echoing one of those now-familiar refrains from contemporary popsters.
Definitely not, says Ruth Ann. I d really like to see people try and dance to some of the stuff on the album!
And so would I!
As Olive head off to the Opera House to soundcheck, Ruth Ann mysteriously reveals that this is not, in fact, her first time on the banks of the Lee.
Actually, I used to spend a lot of time in Cobh when I was a bit younger. I used to know all these people there from the Irish dancing thing! It was always brilliant, it s an absolutely mad place, very odd people.
Welcome home, Olive. n