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Interview by Nigel Farndale, Photography by Ellen Nolan Taken from The Sunday Telegraph - July 31, 2005

Sharleen Spiteri used to be a shy boyish hairdresser who got called 'son' a lot. But then she grew up into a famous, flirty pop star who knows 'how to be a woman' and regularly gets proposed to on stage. What went right? By Nigel Farndale In a noisy London bar Sharleen Spiteri is hearing voices. 'Sorry' she says, distractedly turning round in her seat. 'I keep hearing someone say, "That's Sharleen from Texas."' That must be the curse of being a public figure in a public place, I suggest. 'No, it's the curse of my bloody hearing. I can separate sounds really well. Too well. In the studio I have to listen to a mix from about three rooms away. My nickname within the band is Radar.' This seems quite brave of her band. Radar was the nerdy one with the glasses in M*A*S*H. Spiteri has a reputation for being a loud, feisty, broken-nosed, leather-jacketed Glaswegian. I'm surprised they dare call her anything other than 'boss', or possibly, given that she also describes herself as looking androgynous, 'sir' Today she is not wearing the black leather jacket, but black jeans are in evidence, and a black top, and these complement the 'Sharleen Spiteri look': dark, blunt-cut hair that she has to flick constantly from her dark, sultry eyes. But that is not to say she looks intimidating, or is lacking in warmth. She has big, puffy lips for one thing, and she is wont to chew on these coquettishly. And she is chatty. Very, very chatty. 'I can be a bit of chatterbox,' she warns redundantly. 'It was a habit I picked up as a hairdresser.' That was when she was 17. It was meant to be a temporary job before taking up a place at the Glasgow School of Art, but she found she enjoyed it and would have liked to keep it up had she not, on a whim, auditioned for a new band being formed by Johnny McElhone, a guitarist with Altered Images. The five members of the band - all the rest are men - decided to call themselves Texas, after the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas. Spiteri and McElhone wrote 'I Don't Want a Lover', a bluesy number featuring a Ry Cooder-style slide guitar, and it went straight to the top of the charts. This was unexpected, so much so that Spiteri hadn't even given up her £2-an-hour hairdressing job. Their success looked shortlived though, as two follow-up albums flopped, but then, nearly a decade later, in 1997, came the album White on Blonde, a mix of dance, rock and soul which produced one hit after another: 'Say What You Want', 'Black-Eyed Boy', 'Halo', etc. Now, at 37, Sharleen is a regular on rich lists and Texas have sold some 20 million albums worldwide. 'My band is very aware I am the front person,' she says, talking rapidly in her Scottish burr. 'They knew that when they joined. I told them, "The attention will come to me and you won’t seem as important, so just accept that and don't feel paranoid about it." Bands break up when egos come into it.' Spiteri and McElhone still write all the songs - they have a new single out this month - and such has been the closeness of their partnership for the past 20 years, you have to wonder whether their actual partners feel jealous. Spiteri has been living in Primrose Hill with her boyfriend Ashley Heath, a fashion journalist, for the past decade. They have a three-year-old daughter called - and, remember, we're talking about pop stars here - Misty Kyd. So: does Ashley get jealous? 'I wouldn’t think so, but that is a question I can’t answer. I spend a lot of time with Johnny and as well as working together, we are best mates. But Johnny's wife is also one of my best mates. And Ashley sees a side of me that Johnny never sees, especially as we have a child together.' Even so, it must be odd for Ashley to see men holding up placards at Texas concerts, as they do, declaring their love for Spiteri and even proposing marriage. Doesn’t that bother him? 'You're probably better asking my dad that question!' Her father works for her; he is in charge of the lighting when Texas is on tour. When Spiteri was growing up, though, he was a captain in the Merchant Navy. 'He did three months on, one off. It seemed normal at the time. We were quite chuffed about his job. It seemed glamorous. I remember the massive walk-in fridges they had on his ships. My dad was cool. He smoked weed and shit, and was a bit of a hippy.' He could be a disciplinarian, though. 'I had to be home by nine during the summer holidays and one night I was late so I ran through the park and went straight into a tree and broke my nose. I got home with my nose bleeding and my dad just said, "You're six minutes late and you're in for a week." I wasn’t even allowed out in to the garden.' That's called imprisonment, I point out. 'Yeah, but it taught me a bloody lesson.' Has wealth and fame changed her relationship with her parents? 'No. I was always close to them and I still am. I'll take my mum out to dinner with my girlfriends and we'll have a giggle and a laugh.' Are these the starry girlfriends one reads about in the society pages? The Madonnas, the Stellas, the Gwyneths? 'Nooo. My best friends are Gilleen and Raggy. They are ma girls. They are like ma backbone. We're the three witches. We look after each other.' Does she divide her friends into celebrities and non- celebrities? 'No, no, no. Not at all.' But surely celebrities find it easier to relate to each other because their circumstances are mutually abnormal, that is why they tend to flock together? 'I don’t think of it like that. I've met these people through work, as it were, and being in a place they would be. Just because you are both famous, it doesn't mean you are going to get on. Trust me I've met a lot of famous people I don't like. Really don’t like.' And the ones she does like, how easy is it to go from superficial encounters at starry events to deep friendships? 'I met Stella [McCartney] first, many years ago when her dad was doing a TV special and I was invited to sing on it. We just clicked and drifted into friendship. She invited me to one of her shows in Paris. I invited her to one of my shows. I thought she was cool, she thought I was cool. We got on well together as two women. It wasn't at all starry.' And Madonna? That friendship, I gather, wasn’t even a matter of them bumping into each other. Madonna summoned Spiteri for an audience. 'Madonna just rang up and said, "Do you want to come to dinner?" and it was either a yes or a no and I said, "Yes." That's just an easier way for her to meet people she thinks she might want to meet, because there is always such a fuss around her when she is in a public place, What can I say? I enjoy her company, her conversation. She's lovely.' She has some glamorous male friends, too: Tom Ford, Ewan McGregor and Thierry Henry among them. The last-named announced the birth of her daughter to the world by scoring a goal for Arsenal, then lifting his shirt to reveal the words, FOR THE NEWBORN KYD. Has parenthood had an impact on her social life? 'To an extent. You have to think about babysitters. I'm always thinking, "Oo, it's 11 o'clock. I’d better get to bed because I'm up in the morning at seven with Misty"'. Spiteri rummages around in her shoulder bag and produces a photograph of her Aryan looking daughter. 'My mother is German and her blonde hair and blue eyes have jumped a generation to Misty. My grandmother's French, my grandfather's Italian, so I'm a bit of a mongrel.' Children of the rich and famous have a habit of growing up dysfunctional, does that worry her? 'Look, I know Misty's going to grow up very lucky. She's already got privileges. She went to bloody Live 8, for God's sake. At three years old! But I think about how Stella grew up to be so normal despite having such a famous father and I don't worry. For me, more than anything, I hate bad manners. I just want Misty to have good bloody manners and to understand what it means not to have everything you want.' The McCartneys sent their children to state schools in order not to spoil them; will Spiteri do the same? 'No. It's partly because I think it will be easier for Misty not to become the centre of attention if there are other children at the school whose parents are pop stars. It will probably help that Misty has the surname Heath.' Does Spiteri think she might change her name to Heath at some point, too? 'I don't know. Marriage is not a big issue in my life. It's neither here nor there for me. It's not for feminist reasons. I don't want to be "the future woman" or anything. I just don't care enough about all that.' She may not be the woman of the future, but does she think of herself as 'a working mother'? 'I'm completely hands on. At night I'm normally the one who puts Misty to bed. But I do have a nanny. I wouldn't want to have Misty hanging around the studios.' Does she feel guilt as a mother going out to work? 'No, but I cry more easily than I used to. You become more emotional. But I don't feel guilty, because I know Misty is well looked after. If she wasn't happy, I'd give this up in a second. In fact, I keep thinking that's what I might do anyway: run off to the country and breed chickens. And I would love Misty to have a brother and a sister.' As we talk an unexpectedly pragmatic side to Spiteri emerges. She turned down modelling contacts for Calvin Klein, and even the Nicole Kidman role in Moulin Rouge, it transpires, because she didn't want to compromise her image as a serious musician. 'I thought, if I do a movie, I may be rubbish at it. I know I'm good at this, though. Music. And this is what pays my bills.' (I'm tempted to remind her of David Brent's opinion of her alternative job prospects in The Office - 'We're both good in our own fields. I'm sure Texas couldn't run and manage a successful paper merchants. I couldn't do what... well, I could do what they do, and I think they knew that, even back then - probably what spurred them on'- but think better of it.) So, she's sensible with money? 'I'm not stupid with it. I don't know what I'm worth, to be honest, but I do make sure I know what is happening with my money I don't know how much time I have left doing this and I don't want to end up middle-aged and having to sell everything.' I ask if Spiteri worries about ageing: might she consider cosmetic surgery when she is older? 'Never say never. I was supposed to have my nose fixed for medical reasons when I broke it, because the gristle has grown in the way and I sometimes find it hard to breathe. The only reason I never did was I was worried it would effect my singing voice.' Does she use her looks to manipulate people? 'Am I a flirt, you mean? Of course. You've seen the photographs of me. You've seen the videos. I know how to be a woman. I don't manipulate people with it, though. I have a look, but I'm not beautiful. I'm androgynous. I think I look better now, though, than I did when I was younger. I grew into my face. As a kid I was skinny and geeky-looking, not an attractive child. None of the boys ever fancied me. I was always the mate. It was a bit gutting.' Was there a moment when she recognised that men did fancy her, after all? 'I don't know what they do find attractive. I think I look a bit strange, to be honest. I hide under my fringe and I have a big nose and a big mouth. I know my big mouth is a good feature and I do use it. But there's no point having a nice mouth if you're not a nice person, so I try to be nice. It's complicated, attractiveness. I don't even know for sure what I find attractive in a man.' Given that she thought she was unattractive as a teenager, did she feel self-conscious standing up on stage as an 18-year-old? 'I couldn't look at the camera. I was awkward and I knew I looked like a boy. 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." She's more complicated than she seems at first, this Sharleen Spiteri: a self-deprecating rock star; a bohemian friend to the stars who likes to have a quiet game of Scrabble on the tour bus after a concert; a mother who worries about her daughter's manners, and makes financial plans for the future. More confusingly, she seems to have been a painfully shy teenager who became an extrovert, first as a chatty hairdresser then as a rock star. I'm confused, I say. How does that transition work, exactly? 'Well, I was fine on stage because I just became immersed in the music and blocked everything else out. And being chatty with strangers as a hairdresser was fine because they were one-on-one relationships. But I had been very shy at school, in a group, you know. I found it difficult to communicate with a class I felt I had nothing in common with. I was interested in music and art and being a goth. The other girls were only interested in pulling boys and drinking wine down the Goldfish Bowl in Loch Loman. I look at people with complete confusion when they talk about school being the best years of your life. I hated it.' Spiteri is less vain and egotistical than I expected, and I am pleasantly surprised when she insists on paying for our drinks. Afterwards, as we walk round the corner to her record company to watch her latest video, she tells me that there are some days when the paparazzi will follow her car and take pictures of her popping to the corner shop for milk 'and I hate that. Hate it.' And even when she turns up for a formal event and there are photographers waiting outside 'the palms of my hands start sweating and I can't breath and I think, 'Why am I doing this?"' Yet in her new video her lack of self-consciousness is remarkable. Indeed, she spends most of the time writhing around provocatively. 'Oh yeah,' she says, when I point this out. 'It was an easy one to film, that. I was on my back most of the time. Like I said, I do know how to be a woman.'

Dress by Louis Vuitton. Stylist: Cheryl Konteh. Hair: Raphael Salley at Streeters. Make up: Sam Bryant at Holy Cow

Text originally posted on texasindemand.com

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