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THE BIG INTERVIEW

Sharleen Spiteri

SHARLEEN SPITERI
By : Simon Cage

The first time I interviewed Sharleen Spiteri I was surrounded by lesbians.

Sitting at my desk, talking to her on speakerphone, the lesbians – Sharleen fans to a woman – had given me questions, all jokes on lesbian stereotypes to find out which way their icon swung. Do you like to keep your fingernails short? Were you a tomboy growing up? Would you know how to mend a car? Do you like football?

Sharleen was giving all the right answers to these questions, while the women around me grew more and more excited. Then the penny dropped.

“Wait a fucking minute,” went Sharleen, in that Glasgow accent that can make the hairs stand up on a young woman’s neck. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to find out whether I’m a lesbian. Well, I have a boyfriend...”

And she did. Does now, though it’s a new, younger, fresher model: TV chef Bryn Williams. But she is, across a table in the basement of her PR’s London office, still a lesbian’s dream with her short, slightly spiky hair, hard, broken-nosed profile and sharp, no-nonsense, non-celebrity responses.

Ask her, for instance, how she’d feel if her seven-year-old daughter Misty grew up to be a celebrity brat and she says, “I would beat the shit out of her”.

She doesn’t mean it, of course, (though you wouldn’t want to be in Misty’s shoes should that look come over Sharleen’s face: she does rate herself an eight on a scale of one-to-ten for strictness) but it’s something a regular celebrity mum would never dare to say.

And Sharleen has always loved her lesbian fans, indeed, her women fans in general: “To me, a woman liking you is the biggest compliment you can get,” she once told me. “A bloke lusting after me, I think, ‘Yeah, whatever’, but a woman going, ‘She’s cool’, that’s different.”

She’s actually one of the few acts, along with her band Texas, that seems to work for both gay men and women: Texas were at one point the act most gay men and lesbians surveyed wanted to see perform on the Pride stage, though festival commitments have always prevented Sharleen from being able to do it.

That’s not to say that she doesn’t have time for her gay fans. After that “lesbian-baiting” interview (her funniest ever, she reckons), she sent the office a hand-scrawled 12-inch single “To all the boys and girls” while her last single was Olivia Newton John’s gay classic “Xanadu” for goodness’ sake.

“Xanadu”, along with Dusty classics such as “The Windmills of Your Mind” and even Yvonne Elliman’s disco classic “If I Can’t Have You” appear on her latest album, The Movie Songbook, recorded under the direction of the legendary Phil Ramone with probably the best orchestra in LA, including musicians who have worked with everyone from Sinatra to Michael Jackson.

“I like a bit of bring it on,” she says, when I say how daunting that whole experience must have been. “I operate well with a ‘bring it on’ attitude.”

But despite her solo outings – her first Sharleen album, Melody, was huge – she’s never stopped working with her Texas partners in crime, and there is a new Texas album in the pipeline.

“It’s too early to say what it’s going to be like,” she says, scanning some texts on her phone to find out what extra songs are on a deluxe issue of The Movie Songbook coming out soon - most exciting is Diana Ross’s “Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)”. “It might all change between now and then. When I was on tour with Melody, the Texas boys kept coming up to see me. They’re like my brothers.”

As she gets up to go, having drained her tea, I can’t help notice that she’s in pretty fierce shape for a 42-year-old mum.

“I’ve never been in a gym in my life, but man do I love spinning,” she grins in a bring-it-on sort of way.

Spinning, huh? We should have put that on our list back in the day. She would have got another point.

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