Sandie at Eurovision

The 12th Eurovision Song Contest,
by Stephen Wright-Bouvier

The Burghof, Vienna, April 8, 1967. The former Habsburg winter residence was the last place on earth that twenty-year-old Sandie Shaw wanted to be. She was backstage, waiting nervously to perform 'Puppet On A String' in the 12th annual Eurovision Song Contest.

Through one twist of fate after another, the singer who just three years earlier had been tipped by the style cognoscenti as the female answer to The Beatles, was about to gamble her career and credibility on a two-minute-twenty pop song that for her conveyed absolutely no truth whatsoever.

Faced with the very real prospect of a slow drift into obscurity, as just another of the class of '65 who failed to make the grade, Sandie decided that she was going to win the Schlockfest in a way that no-one had ever won before.

Just three years earlier, everything was so very different. Born Sandra Ann Goodrich in Dagenham, Essex, the daughter of a welder and an insurance clerk, she could have walked straight of the set of 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning'. Her ordinariness marked her out as she drifted through school, day-dreaming about stardom. Sandra was so convinced of her own destiny - a hazy notion of being a model, a singer or an actress - that she skipped sitting the last of her 'O'-Levels at sixteen and chugged off on the back of her boyfriend's Lambretta. For anyone else in Dagenham, it would have been the start of a journey into oblivion.

At this point, the common mythology is that Essex's very own Cinderella, an Adam Faith devotee, blagged her way backstage, demanded an audition, met legendary showbiz manager Evelyn Taylor, and, re-christened Sandie Shaw, hit the big time. Only this Cinderella avoided any glass-slipper problems because she never, ever, it seemed, wore shoes.

But in the real world, Sandra had been doing the rounds of dancehalls and cinemas in and around Romford for about two years. Sometime during 1963, she entered a talent contest in Ilford to impress a boy she fancied. She came second, but fortunately for her, Terry Oates, a music publisher, was in the audience. He was impressed enough to put her with an Ilford-based band, Tony Rivers and the Castaways, which in turn led to a show at the Hammersmith Palais with Adam Faith at the top of the bill. Sandy Goodrich, as she was billed, was second from bottom.

She was supposed to do three songs but only managed two - nerves got the better of her. The Hollies, sharing the bill, thought she was fantastic; she thought "they were taking the piss". Dragged off to Adam Faith's dressing room, she fumbled her way through 'Everybody Loves A Lover' with the Roulette's Russ Ballard on guitar. Adam agreed with the Hollies. Enter Evie, tugging on a cigarette. The showbiz grande dame took one look and pronounced her verdict: "crap". Not that this deterred Adam: "Don't worry, luv, I'll fix it wiv 'er. You're gonna be a star."

A few weeks later, Evie, in spite of her indifference to her new client, pulled off the masterstroke of teaming Sandie up with Romford-born songwriter Chris Andrews, who had succeeded in reviving Faith's waning star with beat-inspired hits such as 'The First Time'. Conveniently enough, Evie handled Chris' music publishing. Sandie's first recording, 'As Long As You're Happy Baby', failed to chart, although it earned her a booking on the televisual style guide of the day, 'Ready Steady Go', and drew comparisons with recent chart topper Cilla Black. Suddenly, Sandie was starting to get noticed in all the right places by all the right people. All she needed now was a hit.

Ironically for a market she would never crack, the breakthrough finally came in October 1964 following a trip to America by Evie to "search for a song". Artists and managers on this side of the Atlantic were keen to pull of the coup of latching on to the next big American hit from hot properties such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin, or Burt Bacharach and his lyricist writing partner Hal David.

The moment she heard '(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me', Sandie knew she could take the record to Number 1. Her "raw amateurishness", as Adam put it, combined with a delicate choral backing courtesy of classical musician Les Williams making his pop record debut, gelled into a teen psychodrama that had Sandie wandering through the old haunts alone, each step a neurotic, painful reminder of some unforgettable love.

Bacharach melodies are notoriously difficult to sing, but Sandie hit lucky. The range required to pull off the song-an octave and a third-was comfortably within her range of around an octave and a sixth. While she might have struggled with a more demanding Bacharach confection such as 'Don't Make Me Over', her assured reading of '(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me' appeared deceptively effortless. Helped by Evie's inspired media campaign focused on maximum television exposure, including appearances on Rediffusion's 'Ready Steady Go' and ATV's 'Thank Your Lucky Stars', the song hit the top spot during only its third week on chart.

Material as strong as a Bacharach classic is a hard act to follow. The trick was to come up with a follow-up to emulate her first hit. Andrews served an ace in the shape of 'Girl Don't Come'. Its trombone intro was more than passingly reminiscent of '(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me', so much so that it was easy enough to start humming one song and end up singing the other. It peaked at number three and cemented her arrival among pop's proletarian aristocracy, a world where a girl from Dagenham with a helping of talent, a mountain of good luck, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time, could make the exclusive premises of chart success seem, rather like the Ritz Hotel, open to everyone.

But even though 'Girl Don't Come' was the obvious commercial follow-up single, it initially featured as a B-side to an exquisite pseudo-Bacharach creation called 'I'd Be Far Better Off Without You', which like '(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me' and 'I'll Stop At Nothing', had followed the classic Bacharach pattern of mirroring tension in the storyline with a melody rising ever skywards before resolving in a power-packed chorus. Sandie's record label, Pye, gave in to public demand and skilfully re-promoted the track as an A-side.

But 1965, the year of the folk-rock boom, was Sandie's year. Just as 'Girl Don't Come' vacated the chart premises, 'I'll Stop At Nothing' soared to Number 4, introducing for the first time Ken Woodman, Sandie's musical director and arranger throughout the 1960s, to a wider pop audience. Woodman, another of Evie's clients, was a former Royal Marines trumpet player. Throughout the decade he would prove to be a remarkably astute middle man between Sandie and the session players who so often, as she saw it, set out to thwart her efforts with their three-hour limit on sessions, troubling interest in pornographic magazines between takes, and outright resistance to trying anything beyond the norm.

The earliest Sandie Shaw tracks on this album were recorded on as few as four tracks - by the close of the decade, she was working with eight. In the early days, only the vocals were screened in the studios, making the clarity achieved on the final mix a tribute to the production team, comprising Woodman, a sound engineer such as Bill Street, and Sandie. Only Evie told Sandie never to take a production credit in case everyone thought she couldn't afford to pay a "proper" producer.

Sandie followed up 'I'll Stop At Nothing' with her second number one hit inside a year, 'Long Live Love', having turned down the chance to record 'It's Not Unusual'. Having heard a scratchy acetate demo of the track, Sandie said that whoever had recorded the demo should put the record out. "God bless Sandie Shaw", was Tom Jones' verdict nearly four decades later. 'Message Understood' hit the number six spot as 1965 drew to a close.

Her seventh career release, 'How Can You Tell?' brought the first suggestion that the unbeatable combination of Shaw-Andrews might not be quite so unbeatable after all. Its release was driven mainly by Evie, who saw the release of a record as a process akin to producing Ford Cortinas on a Dagenham production line. Sales of her second album 'Me', failed to match the Number 3 chart placing of her first, 'Sandie'. Relying on the formula of her first album, the album featured material as diverse as 'When I Fall In Love', popularised by Nat 'King' Cole, a Lionel Bart hit, 'Do You Mind', and a farrago of Chris Andrews material.

'Tomorrow', released in January 1966, brought her back to the Top Ten, although the follow-up, 'Nothing Comes Easy', stalled at Number 14. The pattern of reduced chart placings was cemented with her other two releases of the year, 'Run' and 'Think Sometimes About Me', both faltering at Number 32, in a year where Sandie increasingly concentrated her efforts abroad.

Throughout the decade, Sandie recorded in French, German, Spanish and Italian, with her Italian recordings ranking as some of her most lyrical commitments to final, even alongside their English equivalents. Although some of the foreign language recordings were simply a new lyric recorded over a playback of the original master recorded back in England, Sandie's Italian record company, RCA, allowed her to work through new material in the studio, and decide which songs worked for her and which didn't. As the decade wore on, parallel careers in Europe, South America and Australasia spared Sandie the ignominy of a summer season in a seaside resort.

Shortly after the release of 'Think Sometimes About Me', the BBC approached Evie with an offer to die for - in more ways than one. They were desperate for Sandie Shaw to represent the U.K. in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest. Sandie said no. The knowledge that she was about to be cited as a co-respondent in a divorce, having once been engaged to a someone who appeared to have forgotten that he was already married, helped to change her mind. So too did Evie, who passed on the message from the BBC that either Sandie did Eurovision or she didn't work for them again. Senior BBC figures who ought to have known better argued that Eurovision could "rehabilitate" her public image.

Four candidate songs, including 'Tell The Boys', for Sandie's performance in Vienna were chosen from a shortlist whittled down by the Music Publishers Association. A fifth, 'Had A Dream Last Night', written by Chris Andrews, was given a 'bye' into the final round. Sandie performed each song on the Rolf Harris Show, praying that the public would prefer either "Tell The Boys" or Chris Andrews' creation over a song about women dancing around men like puppets. "Puppet On A String" was so awful, she reasoned, it had absolutely no chance of being chosen.

By the time Sandie arrived in Europe's cream cake and cuckoo clock capital, the atmosphere that Evie had managed to engineer between Sandie, the BBC and Rolf Harris and his entourage was so toxic that no-one was on speaking terms. Everyone avoided Sandie, who in turn kept her distance, warned by Evie that they were out to destroy her. Bewilderingly unaware of Sandie's high profile on continental Europe, the attention Sandie attracted in Vienna mystified the BBC.

That Sandie was ever able to perform amid what she later told me was Evie's "emotional terrorism" remains a mystery. As she walked on stage, Sandie knew she was going to win. The applause started from the moment her name was announced, and continued long after she had stopped singing. On stage, in a heart-stopping moment, the microphone failed; back home, people put it down to a plot by 'continentals' out to sabotage our Sandie. France, Switzerland and Norway gave her maximum points. Only the Spaniards couldn't see it our way with a miserly null points. Not that their votes mattered, because after six of the sixteen voting nations had spoken, Sandie was beyond the reach of the runner up, Ireland's Sean Dunphy.

Back at Vienna airport, Evie pushed Sandie to the front of a very long queue at customs. Making light of the situation, an Austrian official quipped: "She's not the Queen of England, you know." "Actually, that's where you're fucking well wrong mate," Evie snapped back. "Right now she is the Queen of England". Evie had a point. Commercially, 'Puppet On A String' was a triumph. Advance orders from Germany alone on the night of the contest topped 500,000 copies. The single hit Number 1 in practically every country where the contest was shown, and beyond. Evie boasted to NME that Sandie had received offers of cabaret work totalling #500,000.

The transition from kitchen-sink drama walk-on to global star was complete as Sandie embarked on a tour that would see her perform for audiences including the jet-set of Monte Carlo and Cannes, Rita Hayworth, the Aga Khan and the Shah of Iran. She had traded in her boyfriend's Lambretta for a VC-10.

Once the flurry of excitement over the Eurovision win had died down, the old problem of declining record sales returned to haunt Sandie. Keeping faith with the Martin-Coulter partnership, she recorded 'Tonight In Tokyo', which stopped abruptly at Number 21. The follow-up, 'You've Not Changed', another Chris Andrews mini-masterpiece, fared a little better, reaching Number 18.

The first release of 1968 , 'Today', rose as far as Number 27. It was, said Sandie, "an average good Sandie Shaw disc", and that despite a Motown inspired beat cutting through it like a sledgehammer. Three subsequent releases, 'Don't Run Away / 'Stop, 'Show Me' and an inspired cover of Harry Nilsson's 'Together', all failed to chart.

In a move that smacked of desperation, Mike Mansfield suggested that Sandie cover 'Those Were The Days', just ahead of Mary Hopkin releasing the same track as a single to coincide with the launch of the Beatles' Apple record label. Sandie beat Mary to a slot on 'Top of the Pops', but was left standing in the sales race as Apple ran adverts in the music press asking people to listen to both versions and buy the one they preferred. The controversy over its release did her more harm than good, and for a while Sandie said she felt like the "Queen of the blue meanies" - a laconic reference to the villains in the Beatles' film "Yellow Submarine".

One brighter spot at the end of the year was a six-part weekly TV series for the BBC, 'The Sandie Shaw Supplement'. In a bid to escape the music hall tradition of the famous singer fronting a show who sang, danced badly and feigned romantic interest with a celebrity chum over a duet or two, Sandie opted for a format that anticipated MTV by some two decades.

Mixing archive footage with live material, Sandie was filmed in a variety of novel and exotic settings. Playing on the 'sandy shore' pun, a liveried flunky served her a Martini by the sea, she rode a white charger across a beach, then she hammered an impossibly exotic Lamborghini Miura across the Manobier missile range - it goes without saying that the Lambo featured in an episode entitled 'Quicksand'. This was the perfect britpop collision of Sandie's early ambition to attend art college, music and design, with styling courtesy of newly acquired husband Jeff Banks.

Opening 1969 with a well-received season at London's Talk Of The Town supper club, Sandie was to enjoy her last major chart success of the decade, 'Monsieur Dupont'. Originally a massive hit in Germany for Manuela back in 1967, Dupont was one of those records that it was impossible to escape in 1969, short of accompanying Neil Armstrong to the moon.

Sandie performed the track repeatedly on 'Top Of The Pops' that year, all sleek hair, barefoot and in a minidress, the epitome of Swinging London. Her final chart placing of Number 6 was done no harm by the news that she had been arrested in Paris while dressed as a gendarme on a quest to find a real Monsieur Dupont. Safely back in London, Sandie revealed that a Paris police chief had told her that "he wished his female agents looked like me".

Her final chart release of the decade, 'Think It All Over', reached Number 42. One final release, 'Heaven Knows I'm Missing Him Now', also failed to chart, as did her final studio album of the decade, 'Reviewing The Situation'. Between Eurovision and the close of the decade, Sandie released three studio albums: 'Love Me, Please Love Me', 'The Sandie Shaw Supplement', and 'Reviewing The Situation', none charted. Although her earlier albums such as 'Sandie' and 'Me' had relied on a mixture of cover versions and original Chris Andrews material, post-Eurovision she approached albums as free-standing projects.

'Love Me, Please Love Me' marked her move into more cabaret and supper-club focused performance, it's release coinciding with her first season at the Talk of the Town. Tracks such as 'Smile', 'Yes, My Darling Daughter', a song more often associated with Dinah Shore, and 'I Get A Kick Out Of You'. Following in the tracks of its predecessor, 'The Sandie Shaw Supplement' tracked her progress even further away from her 1964 beat origins on the back of a Lambretta towards the feather and chiffon-clad supper-club exotica of what one reviewer called "the vamp, the super-sequinned star . . . glittering and glamorous like some exotic bird of paradise."

'Reviewing The Situation', Sandie's favourite album apart from her 1988 release 'Hello Angel', was recorded amid near secrecy. Evie did her best to kill the project, fearing that its release would hamper her efforts to move Sandie's image firmly towards the dreaded role of light-entertainment bozo. For Sandie, the recording was an attempt to play around in the studio with her touring band, a departure from the echo-laden pop and ballad vocal sound featured on the 'Supplement' album.

Today, she doesn't mind Eurovision at all - she presented the Song For Europe prize to Javine back in 2005. She isn't even nasty about Evie. It's just that Eurovision isn't what she wants to be remembered for. So don't expect her to be giving tours of the Vienna Burghof any time soon.

Stephen Wright-Bouvier