In Demand
from The Scotsman by Ann Scanlon

From belting out Ave Maria on the kitchen table to being best mates with Madonna, where did it all go right for Sharleen Spiteri, asks Ann Scanlon

Sharleen Spiteri is all sorts of things to all sorts of people. To most of us, she’s the face of Texas, the singer with the dark good looks and the big soulful voice. To some men, she’s a girl they’d love to go down the pub with. To some women, she’s a lesbian icon. To Miuccia Prada, she’s the model she’d most like to see strutting down her catwalk. To Internet freaks, she’s a dead-ringer for Webbie Tookay, the beautiful cyberbabe. To Stella McCartney and Ewan McGregor, she’s just a mate.

But right now, Sharleen is sitting behind her keyboard onstage at Wembley Arena, getting intimate with her audience. "What is it you want?" she asks a persistent heckler. "Do you want to come up here and sit on my lap?"

Before the offender can reply, Sharleen has turned her attention to her female fans. "Don’t you hate it," she says, "when men shout, ‘Get your tits out!’ and all that sh**e when they’re about 40,000 feet away, and yet when they meet you face to face they’re like [adopts dumb voice], ‘Hello!’ [then couples it with an even dumber expression], ‘Hiya!’"

The girls cheer and Sharleen launches into the Al Green classic Tired Of Being Alone. But she hasn’t finished yet. As soon as the song is over, she asks a lighting technician to shine a spotlight into the front rows. There, another unreconstructed heckler is screaming up at her. "Okay, you, up here, right now!" she barks, as though she is inviting him outside for a fight.

Minutes later, the guy is walking onstage in front of 10,000 people, cavalierly handing his jacket to a security guard as he makes his entrance. Seemingly unfazed, he produces a camera from his pocket and starts taking photographs. With devilish humour, Sharleen asks him his name and then offers to take a picture of him with her two backing singers. That done, she commands him to dance with her, and the two of them slink across the stage to the strains of Grace Jones’s classic hit Pull Up To The Bumper.

"The whole thing started off as a joke," Sharleen explains later. "My two backing singers, Nicole and Charlotte, were being very cocky during one of the shows. They were running up to the band and dancing and doing all their sexy stuff, so I said, ‘One of these nights I’m going to get someone up onstage and teach you two a lesson.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, right.’

"You should have seen their faces when I did - not to mention the expression on the guy’s face. I just think, ‘If you’re brave enough to stand down there and shout things at me, don’t think I’m not going to take the absolute p**s out of you. The good thing about it is that when they’re standing up there, they suddenly go, ‘Oh yeah, okay, I am a plonker.’ It’s just a laugh and it’s turned out to be a real ice-breaker."

Texas are currently on the road to promote their Greatest Hits album, a celebration of the past 12 years. The most striking thing about seeing the band on this tour, which reaches the end of its first leg in Glasgow this weekend, is realising just how many hit singles they have had. From their first release, I Don’t Want A Lover, to the recent Inner Smile, there doesn’t seem to be a note in the set that the average music fan wouldn’t be familiar with.

"A lot of people seem to be walking away from the shows going, ‘Bloody hell, this is the Greatest Hits tour," she says, "and that feels pretty good."

Born in Glasgow in November 1967, Sharleen Spiteri was destined to be a performer. Even when she dreamed of becoming a ballerina, she was happy to be lifted onto a table at family get-togethers to sing Ave Maria. From her mother, Vilma, she inherited a love of soul and R&B, but it wasn’t until she saw Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River in the movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s that she knew she couldn’t be anything but a singer.

Some time later her father, Eddie, who was a fan of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds and Bob Dylan, taught her how to play guitar. She bought a black-and-white Telecaster after seeing Joe Strummer of The Clash cut his hand and bleed all over a similar guitar on TV, and she subsequently turned his band’s 1982 single, Rock The Casbah, into her own personal anthem by re-adjusting the lyrics to "Sharleen don’t like it".

Her musical career began properly when she was invited to an audition by Johnny McElhone, a bass player and songwriter who had previously played in Altered Images and Hipsway. She sang an unaccompanied version of Culture Club’s "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" and McElhone was blown away.

Naming themselves after the Wim Wenders movie Paris, Texas (whose Ry Cooder soundtrack reflected the style of the band’s guitarist, Ally McErlaine), the band quickly secured a record deal with Mercury. Johnny and Sharleen established a strong songwriting partnership, which was given a big boost when the first song they wrote, I Don’t Want A Lover, became a Top Ten hit in 1989.

Dressed in 501s and black leather jackets, Texas were very much a band, with Sharleen refusing to be singled out for special attention. "When we signed to Mercury, I remember people at the record company saying, ‘Let’s sex her up and get some wee short skirts and tops on her,’ and I was just like, ‘F*** off!’ And from that day on I was labelled as having this scary, bad attitude!" she says, laughing. "It was something that was very easy to live with."

The first Texas album, Southside, was a commercial success, selling over one and a half million copies in its first year. Their 1991 follow-up, Mother’s Heaven, however, made relatively little impact at home. The band began to spend more time in America, where they found kindred spirits in bands like The Black Crowes and The Jayhawks. The Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, who is enjoying something of a renaissance himself at the moment (he recently married Kate Hudson, the star of Almost Famous, and Oasis are currently supporting his band in the US) was a big fan of Sharleen, describing her in newspaper interviews at the time as "a modern-day soul singer".

"Chris was a mate, which is probably why he said that," she says. "We met The Black Crowes in Atlanta and we had a bit of a riot. They were just really nice people and we became good friends. What we were trying to do and what they were trying to do was the same thing, even though it was very different. It was all about songs and being able to make records that really touched people."

Texas’s third album, 1993’s Rick’s Road, failed to make the kind of impact they might have hoped for. The following year, 1994, when Britpop took off, could have been a particularly bad time for Sharleen, but it was lightened by what can only be described as a personal epiphany. She went to bed one night and woke up feeling like she had quite literally been transformed into a different person.

"I just stopped caring about the little picture and realised there is a far bigger one," she says. "I basically thought, ‘Okay, step forward, Johnny and I are going to do it our way.’ I was aware that this was our last chance and if we didn’t get it together we’d be finished."

The immediate result was that Spiteri moved to Paris, the home of her paternal grandmother. "I’d been talking about moving for quite some time," she says. "I’d just come to a rut in my life, of acting like a pop star, because of the success of Southside, but not really being a pop star any more. I knew that I needed to live life in order to write songs." She settled into a top-floor room off the Rue St-Honoré and found that she could easily continue her writing partnership with McElhone by swapping ideas over the fax and phone. Her life was turned around even further when she met a friend of a friend at a party and fell in love. His name was Ashley Heath and he was a writer for The Face (he’s now an editorial director). "There weren’t any games," she says. "None of that. It was very natural."

It was while she was sitting on a Parisian roof-top, drinking a glass of red wine, that Sharleen wrote Say What You Want. She won’t say what the inspiration was - "I never talk about stuff like that because it stops the song from belonging to the listener and makes it mine again" - but it sounds like a very personal love song.

When Sharleen returned to Glasgow, the band recorded their fourth album, White On Blonde. Chris Evans took to playing Say What You Want non-stop on Radio 1 and invited Texas to appear on his TV show, TFI Friday, three times in the space of two months. The single became a massive hit and the album went on to sell four million copies. The band’s 1999 follow-up, The Hush, kept up the momentum, and The Greatest Hits, released last October, is a chance for newer fans to acquaint themselves with Texas’s past.

Before the current tour, the band recorded a series of tracks for their next album and, last November, Sharleen was invited to appear alongside Madonna at her one-off show at London’s Brixton Academy.
"Madonna is a very good friend of Stella McCartney, who’s a friend a mine, and she invited me and Ashley over to her house for a small dinner party," she says. "I do something quite different from Madonna, but as a woman I feel that I stand for the same things she does. I’m doing everything that I want to do for the reasons I want to do them. To me, she’s a very normal woman, and someone I really respect." Although Sharleen shuns the party circuit - "That’s not really my scene," she insists - if she ever does venture onto it, some story about it usually ends up in the newspapers. For instance, a photograph of her with the actor Ewan McGregor at a gala screening of the cinema classic Breakfast At Tiffany’s a few weeks ago sparked the caption: "Juicy Gossip".

"Ewan’s mum was putting that event together and she invited me to come along," she explains. "But I love Ewan, I adore him. He’s a good mate and he’s done quite a few things for me."
Sharleen could have ended up acting opposite McGregor had she accepted an offer from Baz Luhmann, the director of Romeo and Juliet, to star in his next movie, Moulin Rouge. (The role eventually went to Nicole Kidman.) "They asked me to do it, but I was recording The Hush at the time, and it was much more important for me to make that album than to be in a movie," she says. "I get quite a lot of offers, though, and if the right thing comes along, maybe I’ll have a go at it."

In the meantime, she seems happy playing Texas’s Greatest Hits to the people who matter most - the fans. "In the early days, I remember being very conscious of really wanting everyone to like our music," she says. "Now the only people I care about are the ones who go out and buy Texas records."

When you see Sharleen Spiteri onstage telling anecdotes or inviting the most potentially troublesome member of the audience to share her microphone, her appeal is pretty obvious. She is one of those rare stars who can actually remember what it feels like to be a fan.

Onstage and in conversation, Sharleen seems to have retained the essence of the 12-year-old schoolgirl who once bumped into Paul Weller on the banks of Loch Lomond, and who has never forgotten that not only did he sign his autograph for her, he also gave her a bar of Furry Friends chocolate.

back to the articles page

If you dont see a toolbar on the left then please click here