My summer of love and lust: I fell for a Ukrainian rocker - but was I just a groupie?

'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?"

It was the ultimate insult. Who wants to be just a groupie?

I had met the band in a nightclub where they had a monthly residency. The guitarist was sitting opposite me, using his cigarette packet to tap out the drum beat to Ace of Base's All That She Wants against the table. The terrible song was on repeat everywhere that year. As he looked up and our eyes met, I said out loud to the friend next to me: "I am sitting opposite a God." With long hair and high cheekbones, he was handsome in a kind of Whitesnake-on-MTV way that suggested an invisible wind machine followed him everywhere he went. I could not believe that he would talk to me, let alone let me be his girlfriend.

If that's what I actually was. I spent a lot of time fretting: "Are we actually having a relationship? Am I being taken seriously?" When you are a hanger-on, you know it. And it's kind of humiliating. But, at the time, it also felt empowering. The band was named after a Victorian asylum ("because we are crazy guys") and they described themselves as "Ukraine's answer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers". They were going places. I could be instrumental in them hitting the big time.

Most of their gigs took place in dive bars and dingy nightclubs in Moscow and St Petersburg. There was a scene that had flourished since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a mishmash of post-Soviet prog rock, folksy protest singers and bands with a lot of hair doing Pink Floyd covers. (The mangled lyric "smile from a whale" from Wish You Were Here is for ever lodged in my brain.) This was a chaotic era, so audience attendance was unpredictable. Sometimes, the gigs would be sweaty and packed, with dozens of kids in stone-washed bartered Levi's crowding to the front to scream Colney Hatch's most memorable refrain in their cod English: "I'm not drunk / It's only fucking funk." At other times, I would be virtually the only one in the club and certainly the only one on the dancefloor, swaying with imaginary sophistication, a bottle of Baltika beer in my hand, watching my shadow in the disco lights.

The band did need me badly for one thing: trying to make sense of their lyrics, which they had written with the help of an ancient dictionary. They didn't really speak English, but they wanted to sing in the language of the Red Hot Chili Peppers so that they could make it big in the west (unlike other bands at the time, who made a point of creating music in their own language, for domestic consumption). In the summer, we travelled south through Ukraine to a music festival in Odesa, arguing during the entire long bus journey over whether it is possible to say: "They suck their stinking crosiers." (Me: "No native English speaker will understand this.") I tried and failed to reform their on-the-road diet, which consisted of cheap bottles of "konyak" (fake cognac) and beer (which they claimed to be a soft drink). And I tried and failed to get the guitarist to drink less and love me more. More than 30 years on, I wish I had just concentrated on having fun and embraced the label "groupie".