The best little sex bomb in Texas
from GQ magazine - January 2004

There are many reasons to like Sharleen Spiteri. She's broken her nose four times. She once painted a mural of Che Guevara that covered her dad's garage wall. She understands that sexiness is more than "tits and arse. Well, straightforward tits and arse, anyway". She owns the original Blondie Parallel Lines mini-dress, given to her personally by Debbie Harry. She has a voice that can sound as heartworn as Dusty Springfield, as bed-borne as Chrissie Hynde. Her favourite term of abuse is "complete fanny".

And, unlike most women, she looks fab in mens clothing. Actually, she's the type of insouciant beauty that would look good in a black sack; which is lucky, as that's what she appears to be wearing. We're in J Sheekey's restaurant in Covent Garden. Sharleen's just come from Top Of The Pops, where she and her band, Texas, performed their recent single, "Carnival Girl", with ragga MC, Kardinal Offishall. She's still wearing her telly outfit: a black all-in-one, though she's swapped her take-your-eye-out stilettos for take-your-knee-out bower boots. Her hair is blunt-cut and tickles her eyelashes. She is small, dark-eyed, full-mouthed, French-looking; sultry, like her photos, but not sulky. In fact, Sharleen doesnt stop chatting, in her throaty Glaswegian tones, about any topic you care to bring up: films, food, fashion, stripping... There's been a suggestion that she and I, as thirtysomething bonnes viveuses, would like to spend the evening in a strip club. But the only one that Sharleen will even consider checking out is a hardcore gay men's kit-off night in a notorious East End pub.

"You'll not drag me to any of that Spearmint-Rhino-Peter-Stringfellow naff old rubbish," she roars. "We'll go to Amateur Night at the White Swan. There's £1.ooo for the best act!" She announces this to me, but also to the J Sheekey waiting staff too, who clearly know and like her. "You'd better tell me all about it," says one to her, conspiratorially. "I want size, technique, all the details..."

Sharleen is good at making friends: whether stars (Madonna, Stella, Gwyneth), or us lesser mortals. She's fearless, unsnobbish company, with a lewd anecdote or two up her sack-sleeve, and, unlike many famous people, she knows how to listen. She'd have made a great hairdresser.

"I was a great hairdresser!" she laughs. "My tips were wicked! And people told me everything - I got loads of scandal, stuff about wife-swapping circles. But what I was really known for was when people brought in pictures of celebrities and said, 'That's the way I want my hair'. I'd put my hand over the celebrity's face and say, 'Is that really what you want? Cos we don't do faces in here, we just do hair."'

She tells it like it is, does Shar. Ask her whether Texas is a democracy, and she says: "No way. Texas is me and Johnny (McElhone). The band formed around that, we write the songs together and the rest of the band either gets that or gets out. And they're totally fine with me getting all the attention. They're happy getting the money and none of the grief."

The tuneful pop-rock band that is Texas formed in Glasgow in 1986, when 18-year-old Sharleen, a hairdresser and art student, met Johnny McElhone. Johnny, then 23, had played bass in Altered Images (he joined when he was just 15: his parents had to sign his contract for him), and later, in Hipsway. On a whim he asked Sharleen if she wanted to sing for a new band he was putting together. The audition was arranged, "but I never turned up", says Shar. "I thought he was sleazing me."
Luckily, Johnny, who wasn't, called again.
This time Sharleen went along, sang Culture Club's "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me", and Texas were formed. The first song Johnny and Sharleen wrote together was "I Don't Want A Lover".

In between spoonfulls of potted shrimp, Sharleen explains that she'd never thought of herself as a singer, because every Spiteri sang. Her father's family is Italian, her mother's French, and at reunions, every family member would have to perform a song, wether they wanted to or not. "But I never got attention, because my cousins did the crowd-pleasers", she sniffs. "Never a dry eye in the house when they sang." Sharleen didn't approve of such obvious tactics, and when Texas got a record contract, she was prickly with it, insisting on always being pictured with a member of the band or with her guitar, never being interviewed separately, dressing mannishly, not smiling. Her idols were Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux. It was the late Eighties. She was Scottish. She was serious.

In 1989, "I Don't Want A Lover" went Top ten in the UK, and Texas' first LP Southside, sold 1.3m copies. But the two follow-ups, Mothers Heaven and Ricks Road, didn't do so well, and around 1995, the band went into crisis mode. "We were nothing in Britain," says Sharleen, "but, because we were successful everywhere else, the record company were tiptoe-ing round us. I knew I wasnae important: I felt like screaming, 'Stop wrapping me in cotton wool!' Also, in Glasgow, everyone knew us, we were big fish in a small pond. I'd rather be a small fish in a big pond. The whole atmosphere was making me claustrophobic. So I moved to Paris."

Paris proved "un tonique" for our Texan trouper. Sharleen wrote "Say What You Want" on a Paris rooftop, drinking a large glass of red wine. She met fashion journalist Ashley Heath, her partner, at a party. (They bonded over an argument about music.) Being away from home, and being able cope with that, boosted her confidence. Though you wouldn't think it now, Sharleen was "very, very, quiet" at school: not quite the ugly mate, but the one that boys approached, not to ask out, but to ask if her friend would go out with them. "The whole time I just thought, `What the fuck am I doing here?"' She left at 15: she has no contact with any former classmates.

Anyway, in 1996, the Shiny! Sexy! New! Texas appeared, with Sharleen very much to the fore. For the first time, she had the self-assurance to use her languidly erotic looks. In videos, she rolled around in sea shallows, and made fully-clothed love to some lucky model. In pictures, she pulled at her hair and bit her lip. She was incredible sexy, but not straightforwardly so; what she was, was cool. It irritates Sharleen when people think that this was somehow acquired illegally: that her chic was painted on late, without serving her dues, manipulated by the boyfriend or her record company. As she points out, she found her feet first in fashion and art, and her hairdressing skills took her on shoots around the world.

Sharleen does have that fashion instinct: she loves seeking out new designers and musicians, collaborating with them before they get too well-known. "But everyone gets to know about them in no time at all now!" she laughs. "You know, there is no story behind how I got cool. Of course I'm trying to be cool. Everyone is. And I always was cool: at least I thought so. Even in 1989, when I was wearing a biker jacket and jeans, trying to be more androgynous than everybody else, referencing the Clash, I thought I was dead, dead trendy. I did it myself. I didnt even have a stylist until [the band's fifth album] The Hush."

And of course, she could have done Miss Wet T-shirt until she dissolved and it wouldn't have made any difference if Texas hadn't come up with the songs. But they did: White On Blonde was a Number One, four-million-selling smash, that produced four Top Ten singles ("Say What You Want", "Halo", "Black Eyed Boy" and "Put Your Arms Around Me") and earned Sharleen and Johnny an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection. The band's next two LPs, The Hush (1999), and The Greatest Hits (2000), also stormed the charts. Texas have now sold 20m records worldwide.

Weirdly, though, it wasn't until 2001, when the band took another break, that Sharleen truly came to mainstream attention. Over the last few years, Sharleen Spiteri has moved from being the hip bird out of Texas to becoming Heat fodder. Blame that heady contemporary combination of famous friends, and getting pregnant. Still, the interest took her by surprise. "You expect to have your photo taken if you're at a fashion show, or coming out of a posh restaurant," she says. ": when you're struggling with your shopping, looking like a whale? Cheers. Being pregnant is really the best time to be papped, you know."

She's squared up to paparazzi in the past, slamming her car into reverse and almost driving into a following photographer, then getting out and ranting at him through the window. "The whole time I was having a go, he and his mate wouldn't look at me, they just looked straight ahead. The before he drove off, he said, `See that car on the other side of the road? He's following you too."' Still, she managed to avoid an embarrassing picture when, at eight months pregnant, she locked herself out of her house near Regent' Park and had to hoik herself and her bags over the iron gates: "Now, that really would have been a horrendous sight."

One shot that everyone did see was of Sharleen's friend, Arsenal's Thierry Henry. On 10 September 2002, the day after Sharleen's daughter, Misty Kid, was born, Arsenal played Manchester City; Henry scored the winner and ripped off his shirt to reveal a slogan that read, "For the new born Kid". "That could have cost TT 30 grand," grins Sharpen. Luckily they decided not to fine him."

"TT" often pops over for a chat. Does Sharpen ever feel weird when famous people come round? Only once," she muses, "when Debbie Harry came over, and was sitting in my kitchen eating dinner, being so nice. She was such an idol of mine when I was young. But otherwise, it's only when it freaks someone else out. I don't divide my friends into celebrities and non-celebrities, don't think like that. So they mix up in my house, and it's only when a friend phones up the next day and goes, `That was some evening!' that I think about it."

Still, I think it's important to Sharleen to be accepted by credible famous people, because she's spent so long having her band dismissed by snotty critics. Despite her own hipster kudos, despite the band's collaborations with the Wu-Tang Clan, Rae and Christian, and now Kardinal Offishall, Texas' music has often been labelled "safe", or naff". Having TT and Debbie et al onside shows that she is cool and that, allied with her immense songwriting success, means she can cheerfully say, "Sod the lot of you". The girl is fashion-conscious, she wants respect: you can't blame her. Anyhow, celebrity fact alert! Coldplay's frontman Chris Martin now lives in Sharleen's old flat: "We call it the House of Hits," she grins.

And there are more of those coming: Texas' latest album, Careful What You Wish For, is Peppered with potential hits that play to the band's proven strengths: catchy, dreamy tunes, evocative guitars and Sharleen's gorgeous voice. The new single, "I'll See It Through", has all this in spades, and sounds like Dusty Springfield singing Burt Bacharach. But there are plenty of other singles there: "Telephone X", a Blondie-style stomp; "And I Dream", which recalls the exuberance of Madonna's "Ray Of Light"; the title track, a hand-clapping singalong. After 16 years in the business, it's obvious that the girl knows what she's doing.

Unfortunately, after three hours at Sheekey's, I'm not sure that I do. The wine has gone down very easily, the conversation hasn't stopped. We've discussed DIY - Sharleen's great at it, especially shelves; underwear - "I am very particular about my knickers"; scars - Sharleen has five: forehead, hand, left eye, both knees; the hyperactivity of parents - her retired merchant seaman father does the lights for Texas' live show; the madness of boyfriends - Heath initially told his mum and dad that Sharpen worked in Glasgow Airport, but forgot to tell her: "I couldn't work out why his mum kept asking me about Duty Free." Misty Kid gets a few mentions: she's a climber, like her mum; stubborn, like both her parents. We spend quite some time talking about song-writing.

Sharleen starts a new notebook for each Texas album and fills it with ideas and lyrics. Sometimes she only needs one, sometimes three. Careful What You Wish For was a two-notebook LP. She has no formula for writing, and she'll always sacrifice a word for a melody.

But, well, bollocks to such serious talk! It's stripper-time! Off we go in search of a place where pecs are expected and the knackers hang free. The White Swan is legendary as being the place where Michael Barrymore came out; it's an old-school gay man's pub, rather than a metrosexual bar. Its Amateur Night has gained a bit of a reputation recently, as a night of laughter and never forgetting.

We pull up outside and skip to the door. There's a sign that says "Men Only Tonight", but we are undeterred; after all, Sharleen is a "dykon'' in a boiler suit, and my shoes are certainly sensible. But a big, bald man stops us at entry. "No women," he says, shortly. Sharpen argues; her female friends have been in before. No luck. We try chatting up some arriving punters, to no avail. Sharleen doesn't resort to "do you know who I am?", but you'd think they would: she played the London Astoria's self-explanatory G-A-Y a week-and-a-half ago, and was recently featured in gay magazine Boyz.

She tries again. The big, bald man says bigly, baldly: "Go away." Curses! Thwarted. "Goes to show that you can be as famous as you like and it's not a passport to everywhere," shrugs Sharpen. "Shall we go back to mine? I'll get my boyfriend to strip."

We do; he, thankfully, doesn't. And, chat-chat-chatting in her big comfy kitchen, the plasma screen playing MTV with the sound down, Misty's toys strewn across the floor, you understand why Sharpen attracts cool people. It's hardly sensational but, the simple facts are: Sharpen Spiteri is talented, hilarious, and the sexiest night out you can have when everyone keeps their clothes on.

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