The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Like most soul singers, Miss Platnum wants some sugar in her bowl. But here there are no metaphors, italics or quotes. She wants sugar in her bowl. Cream in her coffee. Cheese on her bread. She likes her potatoes deep-fried - and she eats them late at night. Ready to tip the scales in favour of real women, the latest R&B sensation has a full set of healthy curves and cravings. A creation of Romanian-born Ruth Maria Renner, Miss Platnum is injecting some much-needed fun, honesty and irony into a genre lousy with seemingly perfect little starlets.

“I don’t understand it,” she says, griping about common R&B themes from her Berlin home, “everyone sings about the same things - ‘I’ve been hurt by my man and now I want pay back,’ and blah blah blah. You’ve heard it a thousand times. And they all take it so seriously, I think. Everyone is beautiful and they have great videos, but where’s the person behind this perfect Beyoncé? You know what I mean? You hear them in interviews, they give all the right answers but you still don’t know why they’re doing it or what passion there is behind the image.”

So, on her album Chefa (Romanian for ‘female boss’), Ruth turns the typical R&B girl image inside out, singing about the joys of eating, being oneself, and mocking materialism - all over a riotous blend of slick, punchy club rhythms and ancient Balkan chords. The CD cover sees her in white fake fur and a diamante tiara, looking bored, slouching at a bar while a trilby-wearing Transylvanian honks a trumpet behind her. In the video for recent single ‘Give Me The Food’ she cavorts with a bevy of beaming, size-16 cuties. It is a funny, sassy performing character she has created (“an exaggeration, with a heavy accent that I don’t really have,” she admits), but one that contains a great deal of Ruth herself. She didn’t become Miss Platnum just for a laugh. It’s a larger-than-life persona she arrived at following an unusual life. You don’t just sashay out of 1980s Romania and head west with a bright idea. Her family actually had to escape.

Ruth was born in 1981 to meteorologist parents and raised in the mountains of Romania’s southwest. “I grew up in a weather station and had a very peaceful childhood,” she recalls. “I’d sing for my parents’ friends. We were not so affected by the Ceausescu regime. Until we lived in the city.”

Because there were no schools in the hills, the family moved to Timisoara, one of Romania’s largest cities. Though its most famous moment in history was some years off, Ruth was immediately aware of more than just trams and pretty fountains in their new surroundings. The first city in Europe to proudly display electric street lighting now suffered periodic blackouts, spies were everywhere and people vanished.

“Life was very different then,” she says, “we had to queue in the street for meat, for bread. My parents would tell my brother and I that we couldn’t say things outside that we were saying or hearing at home because it was very dangerous - and my parents weren’t talking so good about Ceausescu. This is the thing we had to get used to - we didn’t understand what it was all about. We didn’t have freedom anymore, of course, and I could see that my parents were planning to leave the country. And one day in April, 1989, they decided to do it. They just left.”

Leaving their two children with grandparents, the Renners took a train to the small village near the Hungarian border where Ruth’s father was born, stepped off, changed their clothes and disappeared.

“They escaped,” Ruth states plainly. “We didn’t know where they were, because we couldn’t talk about it - we didn’t know who was listening. Then one day my grandmother told us it was ‘all good’ and they’d made it, thank god. We took all of the stuff from our old flat and I realised then that they weren’t coming back, and we were going there. But we didn’t know where ‘there’ was. They’d had to stay for almost three months in Budapest to fix our papers and stuff. My father had a sister who already lived in Berlin, so then we went there. And we just knew that Germany had bananas and shoes, and stuff like that. And Nutella! It was kind of a paradise for us to go there.”

As the eight-year-old first filled her face with hamburgers and other delights, her former hometown witnessed the rally that spawned the infamous people’s revolt. Within days, Ceausescu and his wife had been machine-gunned to death. Ruth remembers it well: “My parents were really happy when they did that. It’s very brutal and cruel, but they hated him so much. A lot of people did.”

Ruth’s singing career began in 1999 when she met the respected Berlin-based American soul jazz vocalist Jocelyn B. Smith, who took the hard-working teenager under her wing. “She was an idol to me - a mentor,” Ruth fondly remembers. “She took me in, taught me better English, introduced me to people and got me my first job, telling me, ‘You can make it.’ She brought the talent out of me.”

After working as a backing singer, Ruth eventually headed a project called Platnum singing ‘organic’ US nu-soul styles. But their 2005 album brought little recognition.
“It’s sort of twee music,” she muses, “and you can be good at it, but people hear it and say, ‘You sound American, like Jill Scott, and I’d rather listen to Jill Scott than to you.’ This was a hard experience for me - I’d put all my love and energy into it but nothing really happened. So I thought, ‘OK, I need something different - something that defines me better… my whole personality and my roots.’ That’s how I came to invent Miss Platnum.”

But now, even this smart re-branding of herself seems to come with its own problems. She could have used her music to address Romania’s serious issues - former regimes, child trafficking and so on - but thankfully went for the funny. “I’m not Miss Borat,” she moans. “People are like that with something new and Borat was the first really successful Eastern European thing. Everyone thinks that’s why I wanted to do Miss Platnum. It’s not like that! But I’m patient and I know when people see me onstage or meet me then they’ll know that it’s something real within me.”

Also, while Lebanese pop disease Mika - a skinny male - patronises big girls in his recent hit, Ruth is unfairly expected to be a representative for the larger lady. “I never really wanted to become a spokeswoman, but it looks like I became one,” she laughs. “It’s weird - sometimes in interviews people are like, ‘Hey, you’re not fat!’ and I’m not. I’m not thin, but I’m not fat. I’m pretty normal. Yet they think I’ve got to be fat now because of ‘Give Me The Food’. That’s how media minds work. When I wrote it, I was thinking about experiences I had when I was 16 - when I didn’t like my body and wanted to lose weight to be like all the ‘pretty girls’. I decided to accept myself for what I am. It sounds easy, but it wasn’t and I really had problems. MTV and magazines show that you have to look a certain way, but then you have all these documentaries about girls that are bulimic and anorexic. Look at the girls in my video. They’re laughing, they can jump and dance - and when you don’t eat you don’t have that energy! Food is really a wonderful thing. Enjoy your food. Be yourself.”