No smoke without fire
from the Sunday Times - 19 October 2003 by Dan Cairns

Celebrity cool aside, it’s the tough Glaswegian in Sharleen Spiteri that’s helped make Texas a platinum-selling band, says Dan Cairns

"If you dared say something about me that wasn’t true,” says Sharleen Spiteri, the lead singer of Texas, “I’d go round your house and punch your face in.”
It’s doubtful that this statement accords with most people’s image of the diminutive 34-year-old who has, since her band turned back the commercial tide in 1997 with their multiplatinum comeback album, White on Blonde, enjoyed (or, as she might see it, suffered) a reputation as both sultry cover girl and celebrity mum. Somehow, the profanity-rich pugilist in her was overlooked. Perception is, in the weird world of fame and entertainment, nine-tenths of the law; but appearances, as Spiteri proves, can be deceptive.

“People say, ‘Why haven’t you written any songs on your album about your daughter?’” (Spiteri gave birth to Misty last year.) “I’m like, is there something f***ing wrong with you? Are you mad? Why would I put a song about my kid on a record? Because I haven’t got any f***ing ideas left?” The record in question is Careful What You Wish For, the Scottish five-piece’s sixth studio album, which, characteristically, comes after a lengthy break — four years, in this case — for the band. “You could look at it as us being really cocky and confident,” says Spiteri about the hiatus. “Or you could look at it as us being really stupid.” On the basis that selling 15m albums justifies a fair degree of confidence, there remains the stupidity factor: certainly, judged on the breathers that are a feature of their discography, Texas seem almost to enjoy flirting with disaster and public forgetfulness. Yet the very fact that they are still around shows why they might feel able to take the breaks they do.

After bursting into the charts in 1989 with their first single, I Don’t Want a Lover, the band saw their fortunes slowly dwindle. By the time of their third album, 1993’s Ricks Road, the British public had pretty much turned their backs, and the record-company axe loomed. For many groups, that would have been it. Except that Spiteri is made of sterner stuff.

“Even when we released Southside (their debut album),” she recalls, “by the time we put it out, the people who signed us had gone, so nobody knew who we were. There were bands on the label that were cool and trendy. When I Don’t Want a Lover became a hit, the company was like, ‘Where did that come from? Are they on this label?’ And we’ve been that kind of band throughout our career.”

She may now be synonymous with paparazzi shots, trendy musical collaborators and intimate dinners with her famous friends Madonna and Stella McCartney, but the key contributor to Texas’s survival is in fact the antithesis of cool. Far from, as the recent tabloid heat might suggest, operating within what Spiteri calls “that little bubble of negativity” that is the celebrity world, Texas have spent most of their career benefiting from being outside it.

That way, few people paid attention when they began to slip off the map. That way, too, their “comeback” seemed either miraculous or, for the large portion of record- buyers who were discovering them for the first time, not a comeback at all. White on Blonde did turn up the heat, though. And the 5m copies they sold, in 2000, of their greatest-hits collection switched it to max.

“I had a run-in with some photographers this morning,” Spiteri sighs. “I said, ‘Please, I don’t want to have my photograph taken.’ And they didn’t bat an eyelid. They just kept going. So I turned round and said, ‘Why don’t you two just f*** off?’” The fact that this anecdote is delivered in a still startlingly rough-edged accent, so broad it seems to herald the delivery of a Glasgow kiss, hasn’t deterred the paps. They arrived on Spiteri’s north London doorstep after the band’s album covers, and accompanying publicity shots, post-White on Blonde, became ever more sweaty and postcoital; by the time the singer gave birth to her daughter, they’d practically set up shop on the pavement. “The one that really got me,” she laughs, “was the double-page spread of me with my head in a buggy, trying to fold it down. I can’t put a buggy down — what, because I’m a musician?”

Until the flashbulbs started popping, this was never a dilemma for Spiteri. In fact, it wasn’t just the tabloids that were indifferent. More significantly, the British music press regarded her band as the very essence of workaday, deeply uncool music-making. If her recent appearances in celebrity magazines have done anything, it is to increase people’s ingrained unwillingness to take what Texas do seriously. Myopically, critics viewed the new sound Spiteri and her co-founder, the former Altered Images guitarist Johnny McElhone, introduced on White on Blonde as opportunistic. The fact that Texas’s new album repeats White on Blonde’s supposed “formula” of disco, Motown and guitar pop will be grist to their mills. The fact that it features a sequence of 12 immaculately crafted pop songs by a British band who manage the curiously old-fashioned feat of selling millions of albums both here and abroad is somehow by the by.

“It’s not that I think Texas are a revolutionary band who have changed the face of music,” Spiteri says. “We’re not. We’re a pop band; we write popular music. But you can’t sit down and write a record ‘for the UK’. It’s not possible. At the time we made White on Blonde, we were fighting for our lives. We didn’t know if it would work; that’s what people forget. But, trust me, Oasis didn’t invent the line ‘We are the greatest band in the world’. Every band believe they are the greatest band in the world.”

She’s refreshingly, unfashionably up-front about the benefits of success, where other musicians hide behind euphemism and false modesty. “Financially, I don’t need to work,” she admits. “I’m doing it because I enjoy it, and, yeah, because I have an ego. I believe I should be up there with the best of them.” She pauses to consider this. “I don’t do that whole he’s-a-man-I’m-a-woman, I’ve-got-a-hard-deal thing. That’s the way the world is, not just the music business. But you work a little bit harder — and have to justify it more times than a man ever will.”

On her own terms, and by her own definition, the Texas singer is a success story. Those unable to recognise this may have a little catching up to do — or risk a home visit from Sharleen Spiteri.

Careful What You Wish For is released tomorrow on Mercury

www.texasindemand.com
True believers’ site


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