Off With Those Gender Cliches!

Lesley Rankine contemplates the photo of her that’s part of the packaging of the debut album by her acclaimed new band Ruby.

“Grrrr,” she says in her rolling Scottish burr, mocking the scowling face in the photo, the severity of the image accented by hair pulled back tightly and the silver platform boots on her feet.

Sitting in a West Hollywood hotel room before Ruby’s recent Whisky concert, Rankine--despite her indigo blue hair and a ring in her right nostril--is a somewhat softer, less forbidding presence.

She’s not exactly embarrassed by the photo, but is clearly hoping to distance herself from an image that, as Ruby has begun to pick up commercial and critical steam, is a hard-to-shake first impression.

“In this kind of business, people get to know certain things about you and they take it a step further and think they really know you or something,” she says, leaning back in a desk chair. “And it’s all kind of crap.”

The image problem has been especially frustrating to her in Britain, where her previous tenure in the hard-edged industrial-rock band Silverfish gave her a strong pop identity.

The music on the Ruby album, titled “Salt Peter” and recorded in Seattle in collaboration with studio whiz Mark Walk, presents a much more well-rounded persona. Such songs as “Tiny Meat” and “Swallow Baby” are full of provocative pictures of sexual politics laced with a morning after’s self-recriminations. But it’s as often tender as it is harsh, and Rankine has spat out the gravel to showcase a versatile, rich and even sweet voice, complementing a variety of electronic-rock settings.

The changes caught some old fans off guard, which was exactly what she wanted. But reactions to some of her non-musical changes caught her off guard.

“The most things people remark about is the fact that I wear makeup and I’ve got a frock [dress] on, much more than the music, which is really insulting,” she says. “The first interview I did after making the album was a guy who just kept going, ‘You’re wearing a frock and makeup! What’s goin’ on?’ Well it was like, ‘[Expletive] hell, I’m a 30-year-old female, get a clue. This is what we do.’ ”

In America, Rankine has a fresher canvas to work with, having achieved only underground renown with Silverfish and with some studio work with the Chicago industrial combine Pigface, a variable outfit led by former Public Image drummer Martin Atkins.

“I’m figuring out how to play around with this image, the aesthetic of it,” she says. “One thread for me going through ‘Salt Peter’ is that the instrumentation and lyrics are like a balance of opposites.

“If you’ve got a beautiful melody, then stick some lyrics in it with some kind of nastiness to bring it back down. And the same with the music--if you’ve got some delicate piano melody over the top, you have to have something crunchy and nasty underneath it.”

Still, while reviews have generally been glowing both for the album and Ruby’s shows (with three hired musicians recreating the album’s sound), some writers have made comparisons or drawn conclusions that vex Rankine.

Where she understands such artists as Trent Reznor, PJ Harvey and a young Annie Lennox being used as reference points, she says that lately she’s heard more mention of Alanis Morissette.

“We have the same genitalia, basically,” she says, sneering at the comparison.

More troubling is that some writers have focused entirely on the frank sexual nature of some of the songs, one reviewer suggesting that her lyrics and manner bespeak a “sexually voracious creature.”

“That was obviously written by a guy,” she says. “There are some men who just do not understand the multidimensional aspects of women. They suffer really badly from the Madonna-whore thing, and you’re either one thing or the other. So if you talk about sex, you must be someone who [has sex with] everything in sight.

“What I’m saying is that there should be no gender boundaries, no expectations. . . . I’m just trying to stick my boot in the face of any sort of expectations with regards to gender.”

Fighting cliches is exactly what got Rankine into music in the first place.

“When I was a kid, I kind of sat on my own quietly somewhere and painted and wrote,” she says of her childhood near Edinburgh, Scotland, in what she describes as an artistically rich household. “My brother was the more outgoing, getting into a band and going out playing. I kind of thought, ‘This is such a typical male-female path to follow.’ So that’s why I started getting into bands.”

Her first experience was actually with her brother, Scott Firth (Rankine took her mother’s maiden name after her parents divorced when she was young).

“I was probably about 14 and we got this band going to try to make some money,” she says. “We rehearsed a bit and played around, just old disco stuff--really serious, like Sister Sledge and stuff.”

(Firth continued to work in music, currently playing guitar and bass in the blues-techno hybrid Little Axe.)

Rankine’s singing ambitions remained dormant until she moved to London to attend art school in the mid-’80s. A drummer friend dragged her to an audition for a punk band and they both got the job.

“The first gig we played was horrible,” she says. “It was like when [the drug] Ecstacy first started coming over to Britain and they’d have these all-nighters in squats [abandoned buildings]. We went on at about a quarter to six in the morning after being up all night and played to 20 wasted hippies lying on the floor and a dog. I just kept thinking, ‘I wanted to do this for so long, and this is crap. I’m never going to do this again.’ ”

But she stayed with that band for about a year, during which members of a new band, Silverfish, asked her to join. In 1988, at the first show they played, they got offered a deal with the small, independent label Wiija, and then in 1990 jumped to the rising indie Creation, which had a U.S. distribution deal with Columbia Records.

But after one album, 1992’s “Organ Fan,” and a U.S. tour opening for Pigface, Rankine felt artistically hemmed in and quit, staying in the U.S. to record with Pigface for the album “Fook.” It was during those sessions that she met Walk, an engineer on the project.

“We just recognized that we had certain kind of philosophies and integrity with music that was a bit thin in the ground in other areas,” she says. “We realized that we were the same kind of idiot.”

At the moment, Rankine sees a wealth of creative possibilities in the partnership, planning to return to the studio with Walk to start a second Ruby album in the fall.

But already she’s got an eye on new territory. Having not had a permanent home for nearly five years, she is planning to settle either in New Orleans or Seattle and renew an old interest in photography. She’s also hoping some day to move into film and video direction--but only if she can do it her own way.

“I think I’ll only ever now do anything under my own terms,” she says. “If I have to take orders to do something, then I’ll go and flip burgers for a living.”