Carnival of soul
from the Sunday Herald magazine - 5 October 2003 by Peter Ross

In the three years since the last Texas album, Sharleen Spiteri has changed her look, her attitude and had a baby. Here she talks about all three, as well as art, androgyny and gluesniffing By Peter Ross

SHE was famous, and then she wasn’t famous, and then she was famous again, but more so. Her name is famous, her band is famous, her child’s name is famously odd. These are the conditions under which we meet; the subject of the story encased in the bulletproof glass of fame, the writer of the story scratching at it, hoping that one of his questions will be a diamond, will penetrate, get through. In the end, of course, Spiteri casually breaks the glass from her side by saying : “We kind of came up, came through, f**ked it on the head and got on with it,” which is her cut-an-effing-long-story-short version of the rise and fall and rise of Texas.

Or she’ll answer a question about drugs by saying: “I used to think glue-sniffing was really stupid. You’d be sitting in class at school and people would be absolutely humming with PVA glue. They smelled like cat’s piss and had that big red ring round their face.”

She is refreshingly profane, Glaswegian to the max, so down to earth she makes a ploughed field look uppity. Spiteri has sold 20 million albums but you can imagine her flogging bootleg CDs down the Barras.

We meet in Home House, one of the unholy trinity of London’s private members clubs that also includes Soho House and the Groucho. At any given moment of any given day, you will find herds of celebrities here, grazing like wildebeest round a watering hole. In the space of five minutes I spot Fran Healy making Japanese girls laugh and Carol Vorderman in slinky Levis having lunch. I guess she must be pretty useful when it comes to working out who owes what on the bill.

Spiteri is in a room of her own, drinking gallons of tea, ready to talk. She is wearing a black top and black jeans, black fringe falling into her eyes, the only splash of colour courtesy of her baseball boots. The look is New York punk meets peely-wally Scot. In a nutshell: Chrissie Hyndland.

She slumps further and further into the couch as we talk. Within an hour, she’s lying down. This is her default position – she lies down in the studio when recording her vocals – but she looks genuinely tired, as you do when you have a baby daughter. Misty Kyd is one year old the day after we meet. Spiteri has no immediate plans to marry her partner Ashley Heath. “He’s the man I have my child with, so it’s just a case of making it legal,” she says. “In my head and heart we’re there already.”

I’ve interviewed her before. In 1999, just before Texas released their fifth album The Hush, we had an argument about the suggestion that they work with well-respected collaborators in order to buy themselves credibility.

“The people who say that are cynical f**ks,” she told me. “It’s a real shame for them because they obviously have no true love of music.” I came away amazed by how grumpy she was, how unlike the glossy pictures and sweet songs. I liked her, though, in the way you like Oscar the Grouch or Victor Meldrew or Alan Hansen; some people look good with a chip on their shoulder.

Today she is, astonishingly, even touchier. While motherhood mellows some women it has had the opposite effect on Spiteri. “It’s made me a lot harder,” she muses. “It’s almost like having some form of Tourette’s.” Before, if someone said something she didn’t agree with, she says she would bite her tongue. “But now I go ‘F**k! Bullshit! That’s crap what you’re saying.’ I don’t have the time to shoot the breeze and talk about it because I’m thinking I have to get home in half an hour and get Misty’s bottle ready. I just want to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff that before I would have just gone along with.

“I don’t think anyone thought I could get any harder, but I have.” She grins and puts on the voice of the guy who does the trailers for action movies: “The new, rebuilt, harder model.”

Spiteri has had to be hard. After the overnight success of I Don’t Want A Lover (the first song she and co-writer Johnny McElhone worked on together) and the 1989 Southside album, Texas experienced rapidly diminishing sales in Britain. Their second and third albums made little impact, and it is testimony to Spiteri’s tenacity that rather than let the band split up she spearheaded their reinvention as an unstoppable pop machine.

Yet even with the gazillion-selling triumvirate of White On Blonde (1997), The Hush (1999) and Texas: The Greatest Hits (2000), Spiteri has not been given an easy time of it. The press have been very sniffy, accusing her of using sexuality to sell records, of putting commercialism before art, of relegating the band to little more than session musicians, even of sleeping her way to success by dating Ashley Heath, a sophisticated media player now an editorial director with the Emap publishing house.

“I don’t really care,” she says when I ask her about these criticisms. “I don’t need a pat on the back to do what I do. There was a point where I would have loved it, and it would have helped, but I’m kind of bored of that now. You become more realistic. You look at a lot of bands that are given the kudos of being artistic and creative and wonderful and experimental and cool and trendy and all the rest of it, and they sell jack-shit records. To me, what the public think of us is more important than what anyone else thinks.”

It is at around this point that Spiteri and I become embroiled in a conversation about the nature of art. Such conversations are difficult enough at 3am while listening to Leonard Cohen and eating crisps ; at 3pm in a posh London club while talking to a pop star they are thoroughly unwelcome. And yet, as it turns out, this particular conversation is extremely revealing.

“Is your sense of self-esteem very bound up with the success or failure of Texas?” I ask.

“Yeah, of course,” she replies. “When you make a record and millions of people out there want a piece of that then yeah, it’s good for your ego. Songwriting is really good for your confidence. That’s when you become an artist, when you can share that moment with some stranger. When it’s just mine, it doesn’t exist; it’s never art when it’s just mine.”

“Some people would disagree with that,” I say.

“Well how is it art when it’s just yours?”

“Because you can make something beautiful in its own right.”

“No,” she insists, “that’s not art. Just ’cos it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s art. What art is is when someone creates something and someone else looks at it and sees something in it. That can be something completely different from what you created. That point where it joins in the middle is where it becomes art. Where two people connect is where it becomes art. It takes you and me. I can make my feelings known in a song but it’s not art until someone else hears it.”

“So,” I say, “the larger an audience you have, the more meaningful the art becomes?”

She nods. “The bigger an artist you become.”

Note that word, bigger. Not better, bigger. It is a huge mistake to say, as many have, that Texas have decided selling lots of records is more important than making good music; for Spiteri, it is impossible to make good music without selling lots of records. The art is in the audience perception. For her, the old philosophical riddle of whether a tree falling with no one around to hear it makes a sound is a no-brainer: of course it doesn’t. And making records is like felling trees; she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t think you would hear the crash.

The new Texas album Careful What You Wish For seems set to follow the example of its three predecessors and set up home at number one. Much has been made of the new sound, but it’s more of a makeover than a full-on facelift. The Banshees and Blondie-isms have perhaps been stepped up, and the soul/disco moves toned down, but this remains a Texas album with all that implies – slick, melodic, precision-honed to sound good on the radio, sell in huge quantities and spawn lots of hit singles. Collaborators include Trevor Horn, Ian Broudie and Guy Chambers, the man behind all those chart-scorching Robbie Williams songs. None of these people are known for their association with flop records.

However, there is another side to Texas which never gets talked about: that they are among the most experimental acts working within the pop mainstream. Their music is so insanely catchy that it’s easy to miss that fact, but listen back to their body of work and it quickly becomes apparent. From glossy Americana (I Don’t Want A Lover) to northern soul (Black Eyed Boy) to post-modern soul (Say What You Want) to the Moroder-meets-Abba disco chug of Summer Son, they buzz from genre to genre like horny honey bees. Then there are the surprising moments within the songs – the eastern guitar motif on In Our Lifetime, the dancehall rap on new single Carnival Girl. It’s hard to think of another pop group who would think to collaborate with the Wu-Tang Clan as Texas did on a version of Say What You Want.

You can’t really compare Texas to someone like David Bowie, who changed music, but they do have a similar unwillingness to settle into a particular sound or look, and they love to mess with the parameters of the pop song. See also Prince and Beck, or the way The Clash mixed up punk and reggae and Motown on London Calling, a key album for Texas.

I ask Spiteri why no one ever gives the band credit for their eclecticism.

“Because there’s a lot of bias,” she says. “Number one, I’m a woman. We’re a female-fronted band. How many female-fronted bands do you see that get any credit? Can you name any?”

“Well,” I begin to say, “even Hole don’t get much respect …”

“Oh f**kin’ hell,” she interrupts. “If she [Courtney Love] wrote some hit records she might get it. Sorry, but how many great things has she ever done?”

What I was going to say was that Courtney Love, like Spiteri, has been accused of being shaped and manipulated by talented and powerful men. But before we can get into this, she is telling me that another reason Texas doesn’t get much respect is “because we’re Scottish. There’s always been bias there. We’re not part of the establishment.”

That’s an interesting theory. It reminds me of an interview Spiteri gave to France’s Jalouse magazine in 1997. Patti Smith and Joe Strummer “imposed” themselves on the cultural scene, she said, and I think you can see something of the same force of will in Spiteri. She has in some ways imposed herself on the establishment. She is friends with Paul McCartney, and through him, Stella, whose wedding on Bute she recently attended. Madonna is another pal as is the Arsenal striker Thierry Henry, who announced the birth of Spiteri’s child by revealing a T-shirt that said “For the new born Kyd” after scoring against Man City.

Spiteri also has a neat line in befriending the stars she adored as a teenager. Debbie Harry is “a mate” and so is Kevin Rowland. She knows Bob Dylan, although it’s doubtful whether anyone can truly be described as Dylan’s “friend”, so she has settled for the next best thing and hangs out with his son, Jakob.

We get talking about image. I’ve always thought it strange that Texas get criticised for placing such emphasis on presentation given that for many of the coolest bands – Dexys Midnight Runners, Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols – the look was a crucial part of the overall package.

“The band that everyone’s talking about just now are The Strokes,” says Spiteri, “and they are so thought out and contrived that it’s frightening. But that’s not a bad thing at all. It’s a great thing. We’ve always worn our references on our sleeves.”

She mentions The Clash, whose London Calling sleeve was a homage to Elvis Presley’s debut album, and points out that early in their career Texas deliberately had themselves photographed by Pennie Smith, who shot the picture of Paul Simonon smashing up his guitar on the sleeve of London Calling. The joy of pop is in this intertextuality, she argues. “Inventing yourself is what you have to do. Every band has invented themselves but the difference is that some of us own up to it and say ‘So what?’ There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. The ones that hide their references are f**king liars.”

I ask which musicians shaped her. “Patti Smith was always very important to me because she had dark hair and looked a bit like a boy. I could relate to that because I was not cute and cuddly and Debbie Harry-like and gorgeous. I never looked like that. So my references were Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde because they were the closest to me. “You take the pop sensibility of Blondie, and the attitude of Patti Smith, and the snarlingness of Chrissie Hynde, and then mix me in with it and you get Texas. That’s how it works,” she says.

Such references have informed the photographs of Spiteri which are being used to promote the new music. Taken by the fashionable likes of Juergen Teller and Ellen Von Unwerth, the new shots are grainy, grungey, mostly black and white, often Spiteri’s face is obscured; the contrast with gorgeous shoots of the past could not be greater. “I’ve done the shiny glam thing,” she explains. “And especially with the celebrity thing being so big at the moment and everybody trying to hide shit, we wanted to go in the opposite direction. Let’s scrub it all down, really f**k it up.”

“Is androgyny attractive to you?” I ask.

“Massively. Always has been because I got called ‘son’ up until I was about 18. I’m not kidding you, even in Texas at the beginning, I used to get called son a lot. I’d get on buses and the driver would say, ‘That’s one-twenty, son.’ I was 18, 19, 20 years old and having to tell bus drivers ‘I’m a girl.’”

Spiteri is now 35. She has been in Texas for half her life. She once said that she didn’t want to be fronting a band when she was 40, and with that milestone coming up, it seems natural to ask what the future holds. She doesn’t know if she’ll still be in Texas when she is in 40, she says; if not, she thinks that she and Johnny McElhone will have set up as songwriters-for-hire, penning hits for other people.

She’d like to have another crack at America before calling time on Texas, she says, but it’s up to the record company to get behind them. White On Blonde and The Hush are so far unreleased in the States, although Spiteri did once hear Summer Son playing in the men’s underwear department in Macy’s.

“I don’t know if they’ll give the new album a go,” she says. “They’re f**king idiots if they don’t, given the amount of records we’ve sold. But our name’s a real problem in America, so maybe we’ll put the album out just under my name. My band wouldn’t have a problem with that. They’re like, f**k it, if it’s selling records we don’t care.”

Somehow, we get talking about karaoke. The other night Spiteri was out in Soho with a gaggle of friends and ended up doing I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The only time she ever sang one of her own songs at karaoke was at a Christmas party thrown by a friend. She did Say What You Want.

I tell her that I’ve heard Mick Jagger dances to Brown Sugar when he’s out in clubs. “Damn right!” she yells. “I’d get up and dance to my own record. If someone was playing my record at a club I’d jump up and go, ‘This is a good record, isn’t it?’ Course I’d dance to my own music. I dance to it with Misty now. The two of us were dancing in the kitchen the other day, and the video for Carnival Girl came on MTV, and she was going ‘Mamma! Mamma!’ and I’m singing ‘Come on let’s get down tonight.’

“Misty loves it. She laughs her head off. The two of us dance in the kitchen. She hangs on to the table going like this …”

Sharleen Spiteri, mother of reinvention, rises from the couch, reaches over the teapot, grabs the edge of the table, and waggles her bum in the air. She was famous, and then she wasn’t famous, and now she is famous again, but sometimes, maybe even increasingly, she’s just someone’s mum.

Carnival Girl is released tomorrow. Careful What You Wish For is released on October 20

05 October 2003


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