Whats in a Name - Ruby

Festival season is fast approaching and there are a few Indie names you will see crop up on lots of the bills. Scouting for Girls. The Hoosiers. And the Kaiser Chiefs. Though they were a huge band in the noughties, the troupe never had the same gifted revival as Kings of Leon recently did with My Favourite Toy, or the Arctic Monkeys do every time they drop a new album. Who knows, maybe their time is still to come? Ricky Wilson (not the b52s one) saw work dry up so much at one point that he became a judge on The Voice UK in 2013. Not only will you hear the classics - like I Predict a Riot - at several festivals this year, but you will hear Ruby in every pub garden on every Saturday pub night across the UK. Just not quite as much as Mr. Brightside. The lyrics are so simple that they have hit a real chord with people. It’s about a break-up, “Let it be said, that romance is dead”. Such a simplistic rhyme, and not an unusual one. Most songs are either about break-ups (the first eleven Taylor Swift albums) or how successful their love life is going (okay, only really the arrogant Life of a Showgirl one). We are so used to the lore of break-up songs nowadays. If Sabrina Carpenter, or Rhian Teesdale, or Lily Allen sing about a man, the internet sleuths are all over it, drawing lines or reading between them to figure out who he is. Back in the day, there was slightly more privacy around who everybody was dating at all times. Slightly. So, there was a bit of a mystery around who ‘Ruby’ was in the Kaiser Chiefs classic. Turns out, Martin revealed in a TikTok last year, that it’s all about a dog. The boys were strumming away, relatable break-up lyrics in mind, then a dog called Ruby walked in, and they started singing: Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby! 

It obviously struck a chord with people, marking Kaiser Chiefs’ first number one single. It was their only #1, back in the day when songs were only at the top for a week or two, before Olivia Dean and Sam Fender came along and made us forget there were other songs. Ruby is a black labrador, but can you get an indication of her tail and fur in the lyrics? Fortunately he never uses the word bitch. “And you don’t really see me” is more indicative of a man’s love for a cat. He feeds her and gives her a place to sleep, but she would rather gut seagulls and kip in a bus shelter. Other songs about dogs are much more transparent: Who Let The Dogs Out, for instance. Or Hound Dog by Elvis, although that’s probably a metaphor too. I doubt Who Let The Dogs Out is about sex and lust like most music. Ruby still gets millions and millions of streams every year, and it’s top of every forty-year-old man’s Spotify wrapped. It’s wracked up almost 348 million streams on Spotify alone, with ‘Riot’ and ‘Everyday I Love You Less and Less” also unlocking the middle-age nostalgia unsurprisingly often. It takes the football lads back to singing at karaoke and getting hammered at their grotty local club, the same reason Oasis sold out all those arenas and so many fell for the trips of dynamic pricing. It’s a whole other, incredibly rare language: something blokes can talk to each other. Britpop past its time. And it will always be timeless.