Come on Sharleen
from the Evening Standard , 12 December 2003

As lead singer of Texas, Sharleen Spiteri is one of British rock's most enduring success stories. She's also a darling of the British fashion scene, and a power player to boot. Not bad for a hairdresser from Glasgow, says Lydia Slater

Sharleen Spiteri is in a bit of a flap. Her nanny has to have an operation on her wisdom teeth this very afternoon - ‘apparently, the root’s curling round inside her jaw’ - so, at any moment, she will have to rush home to look after her 15-month-old daughter, Misty. As the lead singer of the enduringly popular Scottish band Texas, the UK’s most successful guitar band, Sharleen has sold some 20 million records - at least one million each of her last three albums, which puts her on a level with Robbie Williams.

In October, Texas released their seventh album, Careful What You Wish For, which has made the top five all over Europe. The single, ‘I’ll See It Through’, a ballad she co-wrote with Robbie Williams’ collaborator Guy Chambers, was released this week but is already familiar to most of us from the Love Actually soundtrack. ‘Carnival Girl’, a collaboration with Kardinall Offishall from the same album, has just gone to number eight. She regularly features on rich lists, lives in the starry enclave of Regent’s Park and hangs out with Madonna, Tom Ford and Stella McCartney. Ewan McGregor gave her his sporran, which she uses as a handbag (no, really), and Thierry Henry dedicated one of his goals to Misty. In short, super-glamorous. Although, if Sharleen gets her way, you’d never guess.

She is followed everywhere by paparazzi and doesn’t like it: she was in a shop the other day, buying nappies, when two photographers started snapping her. ‘I went up to them, and said, “Guys, you’ve got to look at it from my point of view. I’m standing in a shop and everyone’s asking, Who’s that they’re taking pictures of? It’s really embarrassing, and I look like a twat, so give me a break.”’

Abashed, the photographers slunk away. ‘I don’t make phone calls to tell them I’m coming out of The Ivy, so I feel I have every right to tell them to sling their hook,’ she goes on firmly. Which isn’t how the paparazzi see it (she’d have been furious if she’d spotted the taxi driver lurking outside the hotel who snapped her with a long lens from his cab).

She wears an understated celebrity uniform of Paul & Joe jeans, a stripey Breton jumper and a blue peacoat; her hair is a spiky, blackbird’s nest that she likes to cut herself. Plonking herself down on a sofa, she orders a cup of tea and starts gassing, in her loud and unself-conscious Scottish accent, with a facility for chit-chat that’s probably a throwback to her past as a hairdresser.

She was no ordinary hairdresser, though. Working for Irvine and Rita Rusk in Glasgow, she quickly rose from salon junior to become a model and stylist, travelling to New York, the Ivory Coast and Paris to style models and celebrities. It is clearly a world she enjoyed and had no intention of leaving. When a man who was setting up a new band heard her singing along to the radio and begged her to audition, she went along reluctantly. Five minutes after singing ‘Karma Chameleon” and promising, incorrectly, that she knew how to write songs, she was in. The following year, Texas had a number-one hit. Easy.

She likes to have an easy life, too. She doesn’t, for example, have a swimming pool, though she could well afford it (in 1998 alone she earned £1.7 million) - ‘I think, “Oh, it would be nice,” but someone has to come in and clean it, and who’d let them in if we’re away?’ - no forests of white orchids (‘What if they died? Bad karma!’) and insists that, although her kitchen contains an Aga and a conventional oven, ‘the Aga was there when I bought the house and I already had the other oven. I didn’t decide to buy two.’

Her workaday approach may explain just how she’s managed to avoid the traps (drug addiction, breakdown, sex scandal) considered obligatory for lead singers in rock bands. In fact, she admits cheerfully that, after a concert, she’ll get back on the tour bus and play Scrabble. Very rock’n’roll. ‘Oh, that makes us sound like a really boring band,’ she says, looking stricken. ‘But it’s the kind of Scrabble that gets to fisticuffs.’

Anyone anticipating a new, maternal softness to their latest album, though, will be disappointed: Careful What You Wish For kicks off with a raunchy hymn to telephone sex. ‘To me,’ says Sharleen, ‘songs are something to take you away from everyday life, so why would I suddenly be writing about how I’m such a great mum? I hate it when people do that, I just find it very self-indulgent and selfish.’

Her appetite for touring, on the other hand, has been affected. ‘There have been some weeks when I’ve had to spend four days away from Misty,’ she says, ‘and after our last concert, in Brussels, I got a car to drive me to Calais and got on a ferry at 1.30am. I grew up on ships, but it was so stormy I was puking all the way, got in at 5am and at 7.30am, Misty was up and in bed with me.’ Unsurprisingly, Sharleen is now working out the logistics of taking Misty on tour with her. ‘I think I need her more than she needs me. I enjoy being with her, I enjoy her company,’ she says.

Misty Kyd (named after Sharleen’s favourite film, Play Misty for Me, and her favourite album, Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which she played while in labour) is her daughter with Ashley Heath, 34, the London-born editor of the magazine Arena Homme Plus and editorial director of Pop magazine.

‘Misty Heath,’ she goes on dreamily, ‘it’s pure Kate Bush. Ashley and I both love Kate Bush.’

She and Ashley have been together for nine years, ever since they met at a Paris Fashion Week party and she took an instant dislike to him (so violent that she now thinks it must have been love at first sight). They met up again the following night, at dinner with mutual friends, and got on ‘very, very well’. ‘Oh, you can’t really talk about these things, can you?’ she says, coming over all shy. ‘It’s so personal.’

Sharleen is modelling Misty’s upbringing on her own, which was unconventional but, by all accounts, extremely happy. ‘I had a great childhood,’ she says, I’m unbelievably close to both my parents.’ She is going to Glasgow the following day to see them: they are still together and, since his retirement, her father has worked for her, helping out with the lighting. ‘We had to get him out of the house,’ she says, ‘he was driving my mother mad.’

Her childhood wasn’t the suburban hell which traditionally spurs young rebels into the music industry in pursuit of something altogether different and more exciting. On the contrary: it could have been an extended rehearsal for her present career.

Originally, her father, a first-generation Scot whose family hailed from Sicily, was a captain in the merchant navy, and would spend months at sea. ‘We always knew when he came back because you’d hear his records blasting away,’ she says smiling. (It was he who introduced her to the Stones, the Beatles and Bob Dylan.) Sometimes the whole family would set off on her father’s ship for a fortnight (hence, no doubt, her insouciance about the prospect of touring with Misty). ‘I learnt a lot about the sea,’ she says, ‘I saw loads of wildlife. Old sea tales, mad card tricks, gambling, I learnt all those things at sea on my dad’s ships. They had a bar, and I learnt to pull pints when I was six. And when he’d go away, my mum (who is French), my sister and I would have a great time, making stuff. My mum’s a great seamstress; she’d have us standing and pinning things on to us.’ The idyll was dented by her parents’ move from Glasgow to Balloch, a small town on the shores of Loch Lomond. At her new school, Sharleen found herself a target for bullies. ‘I decided to take a technical drawing class,’ she explains, ‘because I wanted to do architecture. It was a class full of boys, and one of the girls said I was chatting up her boyfriend. It was absolute bullshit, because I don’t think there was a single boy at that school who fancied me, let alone me chatting them up. I wasn’t really into boys, to be honest.’ One suspects that the bully was rather more perceptive than Sharleen herself: with her strong, fierce features and slender figure, you just don’t believe that nobody found her attractive.

It started with teasing over her ballet classes (another preparation for stardom?), which she’d been taking since the age of four; she gave up at 14, in an attempt to placate her tormentors. ‘It’s the one regret I have in my life,’ she says, ‘not that I never became a dancer, but that I let bullying grind me down, I actually let them get to me, with their “Ooh, look at you in your little ballet dress, snobby, snobby.”’

After six months, matters came to a head when the chief bully cornered her in the corridor with a gang of her acolytes. ‘I just lost it,’ says Sharleen. ‘I went mad; they had to get two teachers to pull me off her. They said they didn’t know what came over me, I was such a quiet girl.

She was never bullied again, but says she still feels sick thinking about it. ‘It was a horrible, horrible experience, that prickly feeling of “Oh no, here they come, it’s starting again.” I learnt a lot of things at school but I can’t say I enjoyed it at all. I couldn’t wait to get out.”

So she left at 16 and was accepted for Glasgow School of Art, to study fashion and design. In the preceding summer holidays, she got herself a job at the Glasgow hairdressing salon. ‘The people were cool, it was all glamorous, quite showbiz,’ she says, brown eyes sparkling, ‘and I thought, “Ooh, this is exciting.”’

She abandoned her art-school plans and became a hairdresser, by all accounts, including her own, a pretty good one, as well as a model for the salon’s range of hair products. Some of the publicity photographs are hilarious, Sharleen made up to the nines in typical Eighties style, hair moussed into a rock-like quiff, but she refuses to be embarrassed about her past.

‘Everyone’s got those photographs, haven’t they?’ she points out. ‘There’s some really dodgy Texas ones, and I look at them and go, “Oh God, that was a moment.”’ Besides, she says, she really enjoyed hairdressing. ‘I made a lot of great friends and some of those people are still good friends to me.’

Sharleen’s move to the pop world was a lucky one. She played the guitar and sang, but the rest of her family were musical, too. ‘We’d go round my grandparents’ house at the weekend and everyone would get up and do a song.’ At 17, she auditioned for a new band set up by Johnny McElhone from Altered Images.

They discovered a mutual passion for the film Paris, Texas. So the band found its name, Sharleen hung up her scissors, and within a year, Texas had a top-ten hit with ‘I Don’t Want a Lover’. The first album, Southside, released in 1989, sold 312,000 copies in the UK. Great things were predicted; but the second and third albums sold a fraction of that. ‘They weren’t good enough,’ she says baldly. The result was that Texas vanished from the scene as suddenly as they had arrived, and Sharleen decided it was time to change her life again.

‘I was getting really claustrophobic,’ she says. “I needed to wake up in the morning to different air and a different smell. But I never thought, “Here’s me on my arse.” I was like, “Oh well, let’s get on with it.”’

Not wanting to abandon the chance of fame, but wanting to abandon her life as it was, she emigrated to Paris for a year. ‘It cleaned my head and kicked me up the backside,’ she says. There, she started writing White on Blonde. When the album came out in 1997, with a sultry Sharleen on the cover shot by the iconic photographer Juergen Teller, it went straight into the charts at number one. Ashley Heath was given much of the credit for Texas’s reinvention, an interpretation that winds up the image-conscious Sharleen. ‘Sure, he introduced me to Juergen,’ she says, ‘but I just wish people would look at the facts. I was a hairdresser, I wanted to go into fashion.’ And, she points out, it would be odd for anyone, let alone a rock band, not to rethink an image for a decade. Anyway, it had the desired effect. Sharleen was suddenly on magazine covers everywhere; she was asked to model for Calvin Klein, Miu Miu and to star in Moulin Rouge. She turned them all down flat.

‘It would have been great to do something like that,’ she says, ‘but it wasn’t for me. And once I make a decision, that’s it. I never look back.’

She also got the call from Madonna, who grandly invited her to an audience at her house. ‘Well, that’s what you do in that world,’ Sharleen says, defending her. ‘It’s not like you’re going to go out clubbing and run into people, is it?’

She’s now a confidante of the Queen of Pop. ‘I enjoy her company, I enjoy her conversation, she’s a lovely woman,’ she says. And she’s close friends with Gwyneth Paltrow and with Stella McCartney, since meeting her on a TFI Friday Paul McCartney special (on which she’d performed at McCartney’s special request).

‘We just hit it off and we’ve been best friends ever since. These are really genuinely good people and that’s all I care about. They are the people I meet in the circles I move in, and we either get on or we don’t. It’s exactly the same as being in the office.’ And if you’re a world-famous rock star, maybe it is.


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