My summer of love and lust: I fell for a Ukrainian rocker

For one memorable season in the 90s, I travelled with a group called Colney Hatch. It gave me a fleeting but fascinating window into the treatment of women who are ‘with the band’

‘Everyone knows you would do absolutely anything for him. You can do this, surely?” In 1993, I was living in St Petersburg in the former Soviet Union for a year as part of my university course, studying Russian. I had fallen wildly in love (by which I mean in lust) with the lead guitarist of a Ukrainian punk rock band, Colney Hatch. And here was the band’s manager asking me to do just this one little thing: break the band in the west.

It was true that this was a Meat Loaf situation: I would do anything for love. Still, the only music industry names I had even heard of were Stock, Aitken and Waterman. When the band’s manager sensed reluctance – based on the fact that I was a clueless 21-year-old, had no contacts in the world of rock and had been to London only once, to go to John Lewis when I was eight – he said: “You want them to succeed, don’t you? Or are you just a groupie?”