It is safe to assume that Sandie Shaw will not be cheering on the
innuendo-spouting flight attendant troupe known as Scooch, the British entry
to the Eurovision Song Contest, on Saturday night. The very mention of the
contest that has frozen her as an icon of the Sixties — she won in 1967, at
the age of 20, singing Puppet on a String, barefoot — brings a
glaze to her eyes and a weary pursing of the lips beneath her heavily
layered fringe. She has marked the 40th anniversary of her victory by
recording a new version of the song, Puppet’s Got A Brand New String,
which you can download free at her website.
The popular view of Eurovision — laugh at the songs, silly outfits, etc — has
been shaped, nay infected, by Terry Wogan, she says. “He takes the p*** out
of it,” Shaw fumes. Yikes. Take cover. “I don’t know how much time he spends
in Europe, but if he did he would know how lucky those people were and he
wouldn’t take the bloody p*** out of them. I love them for their sense of
fun, their sense of can-do. They’re not like English people. Whatever
situation they’re in, they will find a way to enjoy it.”
Shaw talks passionately about the founding principle of Eurovision as a
“cultural exchange platform”, but also revels in fans writing to her asking
for pictures from 1967 so that they can drag up as her at Eurovision
parties. She might have watched if her one-time collaborator Morrissey had
been selected as the British entry. No, of course, she“s never voted, she
harrumphs (”I’m over it!”), although she did vote for Gareth Gates in Pop
Idol.
Shaw will watch a film this Saturday night “or not watch television at all”.
Enough frivolity: she wants to talk of the tour of Europe that she just made
on the Orient Express (“not very luxurious, actually”) in which she went to
eight countries in eight days, including Hungary (“buzzing”) and Romania
(“desperately poor”). It was the first time she’d been back to the old East
since her victory. “In those days I was denounced as a symbol of Western
decadence by governments and by Pravda. The crowds loved me,
although I was always happier when I got back to Vienna and so-called
civilised territory. Going on this trip was like closing a circle.”
She says she always gets caught up in momentous events while travelling. On
this trip she became involved in a political demonstration in Istanbul. She
felt the presence of her dead mother there, remarking how beautifully clean
Turkish lavatories were. “Oooh, Sandie, look,” she laughs,
remembering her mother’s voice in her head.
It’s a year of anniversaries for Shaw: 40 since Eurovision, she’s just turned
60, and it’s 30 years since she became a practising Buddhist. Turning 60 is
“fab. I went to pay for a prescription the other day and the lady said no.
Isn’t that fantastic? I have my bus pass and I’ve never used a bus or Tube
and, oh, I’ve got a pension. I always thought I wasn’t eligible. I mean,
y’know, singing, no one considers that work but it’s probably harder work
than any other job I can think of . . .” At this point, I kind of raise my
eyebrows as if to say “Really? So humanitarian aid work in a war zone is
easy?” But Shaw, in her own way, has recognised that she’s made a mistake,
qualifying her remark by adding quickly that “managing people” is far harder
than actually being a star. Then she shudders. “They’re such a pain in the
backside . . . Well it’s what I’m like.” She laughs like a drain at this
self-recognition.
We meet at the Arts Clinic, in Marylebone, which she set up with her third
husband, Tony Bedford, in 1996 to help creative people “who might be ill or
depressed or just stuck”. At the clinic there’s a team of psychologists,
healers and therapists for every woe. Shaw reveals that she gave up
counselling patients herself last year to “spend time on myself” and her
desire to spend time with the people she loves, “so when I get older and
can’t remember things, they hold the memories for me”. She and one of her
daughters are off on a wine-tasting tour of South America. She may get into
football with her son Jack.
Shaw is a strange mix of therapy- and plain-speak. She can be utterly spacey
and, in a beat, very sharp; a little bit grand but also ordinary. What a
weird battery of metaphors she deploys — talking about future ambitions she
says: “You know when they cut roads to make motor-ways from countryside? You
know if they stopped the road it would all grow over. That’s what I feel
like.” Which I take to mean: whatever will be will be. Batty perhaps, but
concealing a survivor’s shrewdness.
Shaw, or “Mrs Bedford” as she is referred to by the clinic’s receptionist, is
wearing a grey jumpsuit with lots and lots of coloured jewellery that
reminds me of parrots on a perch. She dismisses talk of being an icon but
probably quite likes the idea. “What’s that? Well, my grandchildren love it.
Funnily enough I don’t feel like a relic. You can have it all, but not all
at once.” But you did, I say. “What?” she fires back. Have
fame, all at once, I say.
“I never wanted fame,” she snaps. “Not in the way these kids want it today. I
just wanted a different kind of life. I was going to join the Army. My dad
had been to India and Burma in the war and brought back pictures. My
godmother had books and pictures of extraordinary things from around the
world, and I wanted to see them for myself.”
She says she was quiet and introverted as a little girl, growing up Sandra
Goodrich in Dagenham. She was a tomboy rather than bookish (“They don’t have
bookish people in Dagenham”), though her dad bought her an Encyclopaedia
Britannica, which she still treasures. She hated school and would
pretend to have periods all the time to avoid lessons. “Sandra, you really
should see a doctor,” a teacher once cautioned. She faked more periods when
she got a job at Ford as a trainee computer programmer. “I couldn’t be doing
looking at the same thing day after day.”
But she wasn’t that quiet really. Shaw railed at her teachers and bosses. “I
told them I didn’t want to be what they wanted me to be. These were the days
when they were trying to train clever working-class kids to be the menial
classes and I just didn’t want it. Be a teacher? Like, you have to be
joking. Work in a bank? Please, no. There were all these trees there and all
those apples to pick. [Uh oh, metaphor alert.] Now there are very few trees
left in the field, let alone with fruit left on them.”
She means she grabbed her chance, performing in dance-halls. Adam Faith
discovered her in 1963 and within what seemed no time at all she became a
star with hits such as (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me. “It was wonderful. This working-class voice was coming through. All my
family couldn’t understand what I was doing but I just saw the apple on the
tree and ate it.”
She had only one brush with drugs — “hallucinogens — awful, horrible, they
didn’t suit me. It seems stupid to me to take so much coke you can’t get it
up, then to take an old-person drug, Viagra, to get it up.” Now she’s
shouting. “ I’m sorry, where’s the pleasure in this?”
No dolly bird from the outset, Shaw hated Puppet on a String (“crap”)
and much prefers her new trancey version. On the night of Eurovision, her
career then at a low ebb, she had fallen out with her management: “I was all
on my own. I had to win.”
She was in the women’s movement, indeed will soon appear in conversation at
the first international women’s art festival in Cumbria, although she says
she is not a feminist but rather a humanist who wants both genders to feel
“liberated”. She is proud to own the copyright to all her recordings.
Shaw is periodically rediscovered by stars such as Morrissey, though she knows
her moment slipped away early. Joni Mitchell and a new generation of women
singer-songwriters came along just as she “retreated to the kitchen sink” in
the early 1970s with her first child. She calls that decade “the dark ages”.
Her marriage to the designer Jeff Banks ended after he went bust.
“It was a great experience,” she says. Really? “I can say that now
I’m not in it any more. I have a very special bond with my daughter because
of how we were thrown together back then.” She laughs, recalling debating
whether they could afford ginger biscuits at the supermarket. “I’m an
artist. All experience is good.”
On a drunken night out a friend suggested Buddhism. “Spirits were involved.
Vodka. I woke up the next morning and asked her if I started chanting would
it turn my life around. And I did. My heart used to sink at the sound of the
post. Was it more bills for Jeff? Was he going to jail? Was I? But then I’d
chant and just send them all on to him.”
Her second husband, the founder of Palace Pictures, Nik Powell, was “a lovely
man but a bachelor and I want to share my life with someone, not come second
after their work. Nick practised Buddhism for six months then suddenly
stopped. ‘Well, you didn’t say I had to keep on being one,’ he said. I guess
I should have been more explicit.”
She met Bedford, her third husband, through her family GP. Today she chants every morning
and every evening (“it’s not about sitting in robes on mountains, it’s
pragmatic and helps you think”), she studies wine, and the couple live
between two homes in England and France. Bedford, she jokes, says she has
“the ego of a small galaxy”, but she adds hastily, “there is a difference
being a centred self and a selfish person. Instead of pretending I don’t
have a huge ego” — and she hoots — “I say I do have a huge ego because I
have a huge life. My life can be about everyone else who’s part of my life.
When I was younger I was the boss. Now I’m happy to make the tea.” Hmm, I
dare anyone to ask her to make a cuppa.
Shaw is a compelling mix of the grounded and kooky. Despite the familiar
fringe — she says it’s to cover up frown-lines caused by being short-sighted
— she is not trapped by the Sandie Shaw of 1967. She is refreshingly
unnostalgic. “I was lucky to have been beautiful when I was young. It can be
pretty hard if you want to hang on to that.” She starts talking about
“visions” of the 22nd century that she’s been having. She won’t tell me what
they are. “Why should I?’ she roars, laughing, but looking dead serious.
It’s a shame she’s given up counselling. An hour on the couch with Mrs
Bedford would be a bit of a blast.
In Conversation with Sandie Shaw is at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, May 23, 5pm (01539 725133; www.womenartsinternational.co.uk);www.sandieshaw.com
Feature in The Times, printed on 7th May 2007.
