(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The band Silverfish crashed onto the London punk-rock scene just as the movement seemed to be disarming, overwhelmed by the ranks of synth-pop and shoegazers. Their sound, wild and ferocious, straddling punk-rock and grunge, “roared” by the Scottish singer Lesley Rankine, is the underworld’s response to the pre-programmed fashions of the music industry.

Their dirty and repellent music harks directly back to the tradition of early punk rock and its anti-aesthetic ethos. Guitarist Andrew "Fuzz" Duprey is a force of nature, a Mark Smith of heavy metal, a Helios Creed of grunge. The "fuzztone" and "phasar" are two sound effects that in his hands become lethal weapons.

The band immediately pays its homage to music hall on the EP Silverfish (Wiiija, 1989) with the country-music satire Dolly Parton. The other tracks are built around the singer’s growl atop a rough instrumental bed, with guitars sketching clumsy riffs and a largely improvised flow. Weird Shit is tossed about in waves of distortion and tribalism. Don't Fuck is simply a dense layer of distortion over a barely regular drum beat. They are not songs, only the semblance of songs.

The EP Total Fucking Asshole (Wiiija, 1990) sharpens their aim. The title track condenses the best of their blind fury (seismic riffs, screams like a wicked witch). Then Driller organizes that chaos, concentrating its assault in a tank-like cadence and a drill-like distortion. Die opens a new front with George Thorogood-style blues-rock riffs and mechanical hip-hop cadences. A little more care in execution and production makes the work infinitely more accessible than its predecessor.

On a compilation appears the derailing square dance of One Silver Dollar, an even more musical track. The two EPs and this song were collected on Cockeye (Touch & Go, 1990).

The album Fat Axl (Touch & Go, 1991) marks a clear reformation of the barbarians. At the very least, the instruments now play together instead of against each other. The beggar-like sound of the early EPs often transforms into a solid, rocky, granite-hard hard rock. The harmonies, shaken by the same explosive emotion, seem to vibrate under the blows of the bass drum and jolt under the crackle of the guitar; yet all the previous savageries are now properly restrained and measured. Rankine’s singing has even gained a touch of melodic modulation, at times resembling the nasal register of country singers (Spoon).
The album opens with a series of tracks that rip apart harmonies with all the force a sound can muster, from the devastating rock and roll of Pink'N'Lovely to the bursts of syncopation and harsh words in Fat Painted Carcass. As abundantly demonstrated in Shit Out Of Luck, these are hurricanes of torrential rhythms, dizzying distortions, and breathless nursery rhymes. The experimental pinnacle of the album is the final track, Ich Bin Eine, where the vocals are carefully manipulated over an unstoppable instrumental “train.”
A separate chapter is formed by the “industrial” episodes, which incorporate Ministry-style sounds: White Lines achieves this while also creating a singular fusion of country and rap, and Two Marines does so by pairing the frenetic pace of American hardcore with Jourgensen’s seismic jolts.
Rankine earns the honorary title of “riot girl” for her sarcastically provocative lyrics and the disgusted way she “sings” them (with peaks of rage in Harry Butcher). Brutal and animalistic, Rankine buries under tons of insults the female singers who have plagued British pop music since Petula Clark (and who have successively reincarnated in all the vamps of the latest generation).
In that dark recess of rock music where the sinister rituals of Birthday Party and Big Black still echo, Silverfish have found their ecological niche.

Silverfish continued the process of normalization on Organ Fan (Creation, 1992 – Columbia, 1993). The beginning is even explicitly pop-oriented, with the catchy chorus of Crazy and a melodic guitar rumble. The rest, however, follows the template of the first album: the scorching guitar abrasions a` la Jourgensen dominate Mary Brown; the experiment of Ich Bin Eine is successfully revisited in Petal, a dense whirlpool of dark, viscous sounds; Elvis Leg is the crudest and most tribal episode. The harmonies, although better crafted, still rely on chaos and disorder. The songs undergo all sorts of torture, but often the effect is cathartic (as when they accelerate, distort, and detonate the blues of Scrub Me Mama).
Rankine, for her part, rages without restraint with her cocky “cowpunkette” attitude, backed by a guttural roar that would make more than one cowboy pale (Suckin` Gas), and never abandoning her post-feminist vocation (“Hips, tits, lips, power!”—her most famous slogan, from Big Bad Baby Pig Squea), which is perfected in the dramatic performance of Jenny.
Inferior to the first album and the early EPs, Organ Fan seems to reveal a certain difficulty in renewing itself.

After the single Damn Fine Woman (Creation), in 1993 Rankine leaves the group.

The ambush on rock song conventions mounted by Silverfish remains one of the most creative phenomena in British rock of that decade, even if it did not manage to produce the masterpiece that might have been within their reach. Their instrumental storms were worthy of the worst American saboteurs.

Rankine’s voice towers over their saga. Queen of England’s “riot grrrl” scene, Rankine is one of the few singers in the world capable of competing with Hope Nicholls.

Rankine moved to Seattle and formed Ruby together with multi-instrumentalist Mark Walk of Pigface and Skinny Puppy. Rankine steps into the role of intellectual and composer for Salt Peter (Creation, 1995). Rather than imitating the celebrated (and sometimes pedantic) Kate Bush and Bjork, Rankine foregrounds her own punk heritage. Compressed between electronic orchestrations and soft funky rhythms, the singer’s aggression and coarseness are channeled into a wild sensuality. The almost “industrial” excesses of Flippin' The Birds and Pine (with William Rieflin on drums) serve as a backdrop to the album’s main course: the trip-hop of Paraffin and Hoops. Continuing along that line, Rankine even flirts with cocktail-lounge dance music a` la Luscious Jackson in Swallow Baby and Tiny Meat.

Ruby's Short Staffed In The Gene Pool (Thirsty Ear, 2001) is a futuristic concept album that emphasizes the role of the groove in Ruby's music. Walk reins in Rankine's antiquated feminism and overtly erotic lyrics: instead of Rankine's feminism set to Walk's soundscapes, we have Walk's soundscapes using Rankine's voice. Those soundscapes are mainly variations on cliches. Everything sounds "post": the post-disco diva of Beefheart, the post-Depeche Mode synth-pop of Waterside, the post-Tricky drum'n'bass of Roses, the post-Daft Punk techno of Grace and Lilypad (perhaps the two catchiest songs). The combination works on eerie compositions like Queen Of Denial and lends itself to aim for the charts with atmospheric ballads like Lamplight. Altered And Proud (Thirsty Ear, 2001) is the album of remixes. After a long hiatus, Ruby returned with the EP Revert to Type (2013), the album Waiting for Light (2014), and the EP Type-Case (2016).