Hi everybody.

I thought I would do a 'New Year's Address'. Hopefully this will be the start of monthly informal newsletters. Anyway, that is one of my New Year Resolutions. I decided to do it in response to all those emails you have been sending me. Thank you. All very interesting. I did not realise there were so many of you.

I hope you had a good time over the holidays. We had Caribbean, English, and Italian themes on different days. The Italian Christmas Day was the best. The Chef was Alessandro and Anoushka and Amie ably assisted him. The menu consisted of secret family recipes passed on from his mother in deepest Calabria.

I suppose an explanation as to why the sandieshaw.com Website is not yet up and running is in order. It is for a very good reason. At the beginning of last year I had planned as my Millennium gesture to come out of hiding and to bring all my back catalogue of recordings together, consisting of over 200 titles in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German, to be completely re-marketed as a whole entity for the first time with my complete involvement. I would be able to take advantage of all the exciting technology developments of today and apply them to my musical story dating from 1964 to the present.

Uniquely, I own the copyright to all my recordings - so I stopped licensing tracks, except for film and TV usage, in order to 'clean up' the market in preparation.

As part of this I approached Castle Records, who had a manufacturing license for some of my earlier English material, in order to bring them on board. To my surprise they were not only rude and dismissive, but without my prior permission they knowingly infringed my copyright by re-mastering my original productions, along with many other misdemeanours. I had no option. I decided to change something extremely radical in my professional life - to sue Castle Records. You may have read a little about it in the press.

At first I was really hurt and sad by their response, then really frightened at the prospect of litigation. But gradually as I prepared my case I began to realise the enormity of their exploitation of me over the years, since the age of seventeen, and I became more focused and ready to fight and now I am even beginning to enjoy it.

The case comes to court this summer and I look forward to telling my full story there. Meanwhile everything is on hold pending the outcome. I will have a provisional Site up and running for the spring then a big new launch after the summer.

On a more up-beat note, I have been in the studio with Howard Jones and Andy Gray of Big Brother theme fame. We have some great tracks. This month I am planning to do some work with the legendary Arthur Baker. A lot of groovy people want to record with me˜. who knows where it all might lead

See you in February.

Sandie