Can we kick off with the fairytale discovery of Dagenham's very own Cinderella? Sandra Goodrich, a seventeen-year-old Adam Faith fan from Dagenham, Essex, blags her way backstage sometime during 1964 at an Adam Faith concert. After an impromptu audition in his dressing room, the great man is so impressed that he tells her she's going to be a star. Within minutes, she is introduced to the legendary Evelyn Taylor, added to her management roster and reborn a star . . . did any of that ever really happen?

had a long conversation with Tris about that story. I asked him: 'Do you want the folklore to remain or not? Let it remain if that is the story that people find the most romantic.' But for anyone who knows me, it is the last thing that I would do. And that is what gets me about the story: how could people think that I would ever do anything like that?

I won a talent contest at the Ilford Palais - no I didn't, I came second. A guy there claimed that he had an uncle who was an agent, which I didn't believe because I thought that he was trying to chat me up. Anyway, the agent turned out to be real - it was Terry Oates the music publisher. I met Terry with some other guy who was also a DJ - well before your time - and they asked me to sing, which I couldn't because of my nerves. I eventually agreed to rehearse with an Ilford-based band called Tony Rivers and the Castaways. I learnt to sing a few songs with them, and Terry came down and had a listen to us all and eventually put us on a show in Hammersmith.

Faith was top of the bill, and the Hollies were the support act. I was an also-ran on the bill along with the Castaways. I was supposed to do three songs but I was so nervous that I only managed to do, I think, two songs. My whole family had come and my Aunt Jen had tried to brace me with a port and lemon. Anyway, I couldn't finish my set. When I came off, all the bands were there and were incredibly encouraging and I forgot that I was nervous. Then they dragged me along to Adam Faith's dressing room and I sang for him with Russ Ballard on the guitar. Eve came in and took one look at me and I was sort of struck dumb: my nerves returned and I couldn't sing again. But based on what Adam was banging on about, he became my co-manager with Eve. He discovered me, although he had never seen me on stage - the other guys had though.

But what I love about the box set [Nothing Comes Easy] is that one of the Hollies' sons, Tony Hicks, is the engineer on the whole set. It was wonderful because the Hollies are kind of like bookends for me - one at each end.

But for some reason people like this story of me banging on doors saying: 'Here I am! Discover me!'

After your first release on PYE, (There's) Always Something There To Remind Me had a far more direct and classy impact. It was certainly helped along by the striking visual impact that you had through the then new medium of television: unveiled to a much wider audience was a barefoot waif-like girl, cleverly lit by a single spot. Was this a concerted image-making campaign?

Jetsetter: classic 1960s airport shot

It wasn't - there was nothing contrived about it. I just turned up as I was, and there were people in the studio who just knew what they wanted. They had ideas about how I could be presented and I went along with them. The cameramen seemed to want to take care so much about their shots in order to get things right. And I had no idea about this impact that you are talking about because at the time I was on the other side of the camera and so it was something that I was quite unaware of.

You were one of the first female singers to look, dress and talk like her fans, one of the first 'stars' with whom an audience could identify. How did that crucial link come about?

I think that probably you are taking it kind of literally. By the time that I got to London, I found myself with people who were making style and fashion. So they would do it first, I would wear it and it would catch on. I don't mean it to sound egotistical, but it wasn't that I looked like my fans, it was kind of the other way around.

Lynne Franks has said that you were 'the mod icon'. Although in the early days you looked like you might have spent a lot of time on the back of a scooter, were you really a mod?

Did Lynne really say that? At first there were elements that I suppose were 'mod', but that was all really a completely separate thing to what I was doing. You're right that there are those pictures of me on the back of a scooter - and I would have liked to have spent more time on one - but I never did. I only managed to find one guy with a scooter - in Chigwell - who distracted me from my GCEs, and that was the end of my academic career. No, I was not a mod.

When Dusty picked 'Tell Him' by the Exciters as a track for her Top 10, She thought that the phrasing and the vibrato were 'very Sandie'. She asked this whether you had heard it?

Yes, I have actually.

So was Dusty right: did that black-American sound sum up your taste in music then? Was that sound an influence?

I think that I started off just generally liking good pop tunes like Johnny Tillotson, Bobby Vee, Four Seasons. My tastes became more sophisticated once I'd come up London. Like everyone at the time, I was influenced by black music. We were all trying to do our version of it. Even the Beatles did that - it never sounded right, but it opened the door for all of that stuff to be done properly.

My influences were - and I know that this sounds very strange and not very cool - Edith Piaf, Jaques Brel, Peggy Lee and Nina Simone. I had very strange tastes in music. I liked that tradition of something almost like a troubadour - someone who just stands in a spotlight and emotes all over the audience. Black music didn't really strike me as being like that at the time.  I think that what we were trying to do was to put American pop - white and black -together with continental influences.

You were always presented as an Adam Faith fan; but wasn't it really John Lennon and Paul McCartney whom you idolised?

No, I was never a fan of Adam Faith. I liked him in my early years at school when all my friends were into Cliff Richard. For the record, I'm in love with John and I'm an admirer of Paul. Ringo is uniquely Ringo. George was always the mystic really. I think he probably lived a very satisfying life. His songs are always very spiritual and have depth. McCartney is a fantastic writer, but when you listen to the songs, although Lennon had the charisma and the ideas, when you put them song for song against each other, the songs that last and have that eternal quality are Paul's. I hate to say this, because I am still in love with John, but Paul's songs are just amazing. They really are clever.

Taking the 1960s recordings as a block, how did a Sandie Shaw track progress from conception to that treasured piece of vinyl? Who were the key players in addition to you?

Chris and I used to hang out, we'd talk, and that would give him ideas for songs. Then we'd sit around the piano and he would show me his ideas and he'd suggest a lyric. I would make suggestions and he'd show me how that would sound and I'd either say 'yes' - usually - or 'no'. Next came the arranger - mostly it was Kenny Woodman. Eventually, we'd go to the studio with at least two songs, or possibly three. We might not get round to the third one, but we'd always do at least two.

In the studio the band would tune up and run through the backing, which I'd hear in the control room with an engineer - Bill Street wasn't the only engineer we used, because sometimes there were others.

Our recordings were all very amateurish in those days because on a four- or an eight-track there is not actually a lot that you can muck around with. Once we'd listened to it, I would go to my booth and do a track, listen to it, go out again and do three takes. Et voilà, the 'treasured piece of vinyl'.

You've commented in recent years on the fact that you produced your own records, even though Eve Taylor told you not to take the credit in case people thought that you couldn't afford to pay a 'proper' producer. What exactly did producing Sandie Shaw entail?

The role of the producer wasn't actually important then. The producer and the A&R man were very much the same person. But we didn't have a producer, so I was left to do all those other functions such as choosing the song, finalising the arrangement with the arranger, setting the sound with the engineer. I'm not saying that I was running the whole show, but the responsibility was with me. The role of the producer only became important when people started to divvy up points - whenever there is money involved, that's when it starts to become important.

But, you know, I'm a woman and I like to work with people and take on board what other people say, so I would much rather say that we had a production team for which I took responsibility because they were my records.

Apart from a couple of hits early on in your career, you never cracked the US market. Jeff says that you were barred from entering America because of your views on Vietnam; how true is that?

Oh, there were lots of reasons. First, the unions suddenly got arsey and they tried to stop me going because they were being overrun. It was a bit like Equity getting uppity about Americans working on stage over here. I was just the unlucky one when they decided to drop the drawbridge. They made it so that you had to apply for a visa in every state, which stopped you from touring. So I was OK to go to New York and could have got a separate visa to go and work in California, but I could never tour because of that.

Jeff was adamant that it was down to Vietnam?

I think that they looked at different things that you had done and said. I was very critical and they didn't like that.

Did your success in Italy - the image of some grand idea of femininity, the Italians' infatuation with their female stars - chart one possible direction that your career might have taken in the UK and possibly elsewhere?

Avant garde: with sculptor Salvatore Fiume

I think that was very much to do with the Italian language and being in love with that place. I don't think it actually translates outside Italy. I might have dreamed that that might have been possible at one point, but realistically it wouldn't have work. The music and cultural tastes doesn't translate outside Italy.

But YOU did translate into that country and scored hits in a market that bands like the Beatles and the Stones weren't cracking.

That was because I sang in Italian. Italians were still stuck in that old way of singing and they didn't know how to sing in a pop way. An Italian told me this the other day. He said: 'Yes, we suddenly heard you singing Italian in a pop style and it was mesmerising.'' I had a totally new way of doing things.

There is your recording career on the Continent, too. So starting with Spain . . .

I spent a lot of time on the Spanish recordings because I had to make sure I had an authentic South American accent for that market. The problem today is with the quality of what is left - the mastertapes were supposedly lost in a fire. I liked singing in Spanish because you can have great hair-swishing moments in Spanish - it's a lot like singing in French really.

As for Germany, I think that I have a lot more in common with younger Germans now. And what is good about their music scene is that they have kept the interest in artists alive, people like Suzi Quattro, by putting on these massive shows.

Your profile in continental Europe was no doubt one of the reasons why the BBC pushed you to represent the UK in the annual schlockfest. However, during the course of February 1967, the press coverage that should have been devoted to Eurovision instead focused on a divorce case in which you were named as a co-respondent. While a sexual history is almost invariably an asset for a male pop star, you became one of the first women that the tabloid press set out to 'get'.

I don't know if you understand what a truly awful time for me that was. I mean, I wasn't a hooker and I wasn't even putting it about; I was simply engaged to the wrong person. You know, I haven't a clue why it was such a surprise to anyone that I might actually be sexually active. When you look at pictures of me at the time, and it is quite obvious that I am, and you can tell from looking at me that I am obviously very knowing.

"I looked like butter wouldn't melt"

The whole thing just seemed so stupid. I look as if butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, all sweet and young, but I didn't look naïve.

And the person it hit hardest of all was my dad. He was such a shy man, and yet he had to sit in court and listen to it all. He wasn't allowed to speak out, even though he wanted to stand up on my behalf and say that it was all lies.

The reaction to it all does appear to be a case of a woman being measured against a double standard, and its impact in possibly distorting your career development is surreal by modern standards. Mick Jagger's exploits never attracted similar opprobrium. In fact, he was free to pen the seemingly mysogenistic lyrics of Out Of Time - one can readily visualise him spitting those words at Chrissie Shrimpton as Marianne comes on the scene - with no adverse comment.

The Stones came into it all in the sense that they were involved with that drugs bust that saw Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones receive prison sentences. And I think that a lot if it was all about slapping down younger people by the Establishment. It was as though the class system, which was still very strong back then, was hanging on by its finger nails - this was it's dying gasp. The whole status quo just changed in the 1960s and so that nowadays nobody votes for the Tories because the distinctions between them and New Labour have become irrelevant. Society was half-celebrating the rise of your working class heroes such as the Beatles, George Best and your Sandies of this world, yet there was also this jealousy of their success. The 1960s was very much a mix of these themes and I was just caught in the crossfire. I don't think that I was that significant at all, but I represented something that they didn't feel comfortable and I had to pay for it.

You have written about the poisonous backstage environment yourself in World At My Feet. Rolf Harris has recently written in similar vein and says that you were all smiles for the camera until the snappers had their shots and then stalked off with Evie, refusing to speak to anyone. Did you and Rolf not hit it off?

No, it wasn't like that at all! I love Rolf Harris and think he's adorable. I'd love to talk to him about that time. I didn't know what was going on at all. I was told not to speak to anyone because, so Evie claimed, they were trying to kill me off. I think that Evie used that whole thing to try and keep me in my place to get her final control. I was just doing what I was told.

Jeff has gone on the record and said that the ultimatum from the

"Either you do Eurovision or you don't work on the BBC again": with the Ladybirds

BBC was stark: 'Either you do Eurovision or you don't work on the BBC again'. Is that true?

Well, it was to Eve actually who said that and she then passed it on to me. They were the BBC for heaven's sake. They were the bastion - in some ways they still are - of correct, conservative behaviour. And obviously, they didn't think that I represented that. However, so it went, if I did Eurovision, that would change people's minds and kind of wipe it out.

April 1967 at the BBC: photo-op with Spanish music critic José María Iñigo

A lot of the things that happened at that time were coloured by what Evie said. She used it as a way of her getting her own way. So I don't actually know what the truth is. Even Jeff doesn't know what the truth is, because he would have got it through Eve. So I actually don't know; that is the honest truth.

The 1960s have become part of the GCSE history syllabus of all things, presented as a time of unparalleled liberation and freedom for women no less. Isn't the reality, however, that Puppet On A String sums up the 1960s that most women had? Did sexual freedom exist for the majority of women?

When I look back on it I don't think that men had come into their own either. I don't think that the time was very comfortable with sexuality period. So it wasn't just women, it was everybody. In my view, if women aren't happy, then men aren't happy either. I see the 1960s as just an extension of things that happened during the First World War when a generation of men was decimated. Then after World War II, women actually went out to work, especially in areas that were not traditionally areas where women worked. And by the 1960s you find yourself with young people with the economic power to question things thrown into the mix and they turn things on their head - everything else kind of followed on from that.

I think that everybody reassessed sexuality in the 1960s so that today people are getting more comfortable with all shades of doing things. Post-feminism, people have realised that you can't just separate one sex off from the other. But it's such a long time ago and I'm not sure how much of it affected me. If you have financial power - as in success - and if you are in the music business, you cross a load of boundaries in a way that other people can't.

You walked off GMTV at the first mention of Puppet On A String, but this time out there wasn't even the merest flicker of tension or irritation at the mention of Eurovision - is this all down to a fusion of psychodynamic practice and Buddhism?

I've no idea. [laughs] I must be cured though. I think everyone has different journeys and this was mine. I'm quite comfortable with it now - probably wouldn't have been earlier. Maybe it's my hormones, Stephen. I've got no idea. I can see the funny side to things now. It was all a bit earnest before, but it's done.

So it must be 10 years of therapy?

I've never been in therapy! But helping other people has given me a much wider perspective. If you are talking to a record company executive one minute, and then to a band member who is playing up the next minute, and then to the wife of a band member, and then to a PR, you get a much more rounded view of where people are coming from. You stop being so subjective and so up your own arse.

We've talked about Eve Taylor, your business manager, and I'd like to return the focus to her. The self-styled queen bee of showbusiness, she managed you from 1964 and roughly 1972, briefly returning to negotiate your 1977 contract with CBS; what are your thoughts on your time as one of her acts?

She had here moments. She wasn't entirely bad - she was completely mad, but not completely bad. If one tries to see her in a very favourable light, you would say that she was struggling as a woman. There were few women in her position, and lots of deals are done in the equivalent of a men's club. So she was excluded from that and had to fight quite hard to be heard. She was in her 40s and not at her sexual peak, so she couldn't do the flirty bit that was probably the way that women used to manipulate their way around. She used everything to get things done, some of them things that I didn't approve of.

Eve did have a great sense of humour and she was funny - seeing the funny side of what was going on certainly helped. Adam felt this incredible hatred all his life; it is beyond me because I can't feel like that. Her other acts hated her: I was more malleable, I think, because I was a young girl; Val Doonican was a middle-aged man; Chris was never that close because she just dealt with his publishing that in fact went through other people; Adam found it quite difficult because he was quite young when he met her; Jackie Trent had Tony Hatch to protect her; and Mike Reid was quite a 'heavy dude' anyway.

Did you ever feel grateful to Eve?

Oh yes, but it is tinged with things like the Eurovision saga. Left to my own devices I would have been a B-side person and would have had a completely different career. One of the reasons that my work is still here is because of Eve. You see, when she fought on your behalf and it was done for the right reasons, rather than for the wrong reasons, she was very good. She was very loyal and also her ego got merged with the product and so she was looking after herself at the same time. But it all got a bit twisted.

And when you come up with this Eurovision stuff, I realise how twisted it all was. I adore Billy Cotton, and he is such a lovely man - I even went on his edition of 'This Is Your Life' - and I never understood why he was made to be such a horrid person. No doubt it was down to Eve's complete and utter paranoia. It also gave her a chance to control me. Up until that point, I had been unmanageable.

first album post-Eurovision was Love Me, Please Love Me, a collection based almost entirely around jazz standards. Dusty and others knocked out similar standards collections, and today everyone from Sinead O'Connor to Robbie Williams has had a stab. Why the enduring popularity of mainstream jazz albums for pop performers?

It's because it is great fun to sing with a big band behind you, and those kinds of arrangements are brilliant. There is nothing like having a lovely, smooth band sound as an accompaniment. It makes you shiver. It is lovely. But I haven't heard that album and so I can't tell you anything more about it than that.

The following year came the Sandie Shaw Supplement, a series of six television programmes for the BBC that with its unique juxtaposition of documentary footage and your own live performances was without doubt the precursor of modern formats such as MTV. Were you aware how groundbreaking it was at the time?

I sure was. I was made to be aware of that. At the time, the natural route for a girl was that you would make some records, get yourself a television series, and then do a summer season. It was just the most awful haul. After the '67 success, the BBC wanted me to do a series, so I set out to find a format that was acceptable to me.

The format of the day was that a singer would do a show with an orchestra, introduce a guest, maybe sing a song with the guest, say a few jokes, do a sketch. The thought of doing that, variety and entertainment, was just terrible. Other people have done it better than me. This is something that Cilla Black is very good at - or was really good at - and it's not what I wanted to do.

I asked Bill Cotton, in fact, if he could find me a director who could do something a bit different. He introduced me to Mel Cornish who was very young and radical. I proposed a theme that was based on the Sunday supplements. Back then, the supplements were where all the meaty bits were in a newspaper - they design and layout was really sharp. I came up with a set of titles for the proposed show, and then we started to think about which songs would do with what.

And at that point Jeff got involved. It looked very glamorous because Jeff knows how to stitch bits together to make them look glamorous. He came up with fabulous ideas like the Lamborghini Miura on the beach. He styled everything and brought photographers down from London, while I picked off-the-wall songs. You know, I wasn't driving the Miura? There was a man crouched with his head between my legs. It sounds disgusting, doesn't it? But that was the only way we could do it because I couldn't actually drive a car at the time. I just aimed the car straight. It was all filmed at Manobier near Tenby on a missile range, so I had quite a long stretch before I could hit anything.

It was a remarkable blending of rock and MOR material: in one of the supplements you performed '19^th Nervous Breakdown' and then a Hans Christian Anderson medley, while in another your nude performance of 'Satisfaction' bared all opposite an impression of Marlene Dietrich.

I would love to see that! Do you have a video of it? I suppose what we were trying to do was a precursor of videos. I love 'Whicker's World', so maybe I would have been influenced by that too.

But there was no huge Saturday night budget going on there because the BBC didn't realise what I was doing - although Bill Cotton did and he kept everything on tape and gave it to me in a funny format.

The small budget was the reason why I ended up doing 'Satisfaction' with no clothes - we ran out of money. I wasn't naked, because in fact I had a towel around me, so they filmed me from the chest up. We had no budget to retake anything.

And that's when all the trouble began . . . you see, it was my idea to do the song like that: 'No clothes? Fine, we'll do it with no clothes. Suits the song.'

And Eve just went berserk. And if I wore anything that didn't have enough sparkle on it, she would scream at Jeff. And '19th Nervous Breakdown'? Well, she bawled at me: 'Have you lost your mind? Why are you doing this?' There was all this screaming going on in the dressing room. And the poor director, Mel, I think was the only person who actually agreed with me. So we were kind of like tiptoeing between all this debris from where Eve and Jeff had thrown things.

a few years later I took the tape that Bill had given to me back to the BBC archive people and asked them to put it on videotape for me. They said: 'Well, it's illegal for you to have this.' And I replied: 'Well, Bill gave it to me.' They insisted: 'No, you can't have this because it belongs to us,' and proceeded to wipe it. Can you believe that? And they just kept two, which are the ones that you see down at the MFT. ['Quicksand' and 'Salt, Pepper and a Touch of Garlic']

 

In the concluding part of this interview next month, Sandie charts his disappearance from the recording scene, reveals for the first time who really made her want to record again and talks in exclusive detail about her work as a creative consultant.