The Supplements highlighted the fact that light entertainment was not your ideal vehicle. There is one particularly pained appearance of yours on a variety show with Cilla Black, which the press read to be an indication that the two of you didn’t get on.

I’ll tell you, Cilla is a lovely woman – the sort of person who worries about things long after everyone else has forgotten about them. It’s true that I probably wasn’t very happy about appearing on a Cilla Black show, but that had nothing to do with Cilla, it was to do with the format of the show. All that stuff about the two of us not getting on together was all down to Bobbie and Eve and whatever they had going on. Eve always wanted me to upstage her, which I couldn’t do – in any event it made for bad television and just looked terrible.

You seemed to throw every effort into your final studio album of the 1960s, ‘Reviewing The Situation’, but in an interview with Kris Kirk, you claimed that you couldn’t remember the album at all. Most performers tend not to forget making an album, so did you have a problem with it?

No. I really liked Reviewing the Situation and, apart from ‘Hello Angel’, it is my favourite album.

I had nothing to do with the re-release of the album [on RPM] and somebody would have asked me about the album and I would have given an answer just to get rid of them.

Some of the tracks are just not what listeners would expect from Sandie Shaw – the Dr John track ‘Mama Roux’ springs to mind.

It’s a New Orleans kind of track and I really the lyrics. It is all so incongruous. I like all the tracks for different reasons. I think it’s a great album and it’s an album that I really wanted to do.

But Evie was horrified when she found out what we were doing and sent Kenny down to supervise it. He came back and said: ‘No, it’s all fine, it’s in tune.’ Then PYE tried to bury it. It wasn’t part of her career for me and she didn’t think that it was the sort of direction that I should go in.

In stark contrast to the material on ‘Reviewing The Situation’, by the late 1960s you were the darling of the lifestyle magazine. Penny Hunter-Symon reviewed your floorshow at the Talk of the Town and described you as ‘glittering like some exotic bird of paradise. As what another reviewer dubbed ‘the vamp, the super-sequinned star’, suddenly what you wore seemed more important than what you sang. Was that whole image down to Eve?

No, that was Jeff using me as a bloody clothes horse. All those outfits from late 1967 onwards were Jeff. I hated it. I really hated it.

Eurovision 1968: all smiles for the camera and Katie Boyle

So you started off as this figure who looked and talked like her audience . . .

. . . yes, and then they turned me into something else. But it must have been quite a challenge to dress me up because I did look nice. It must have been great to think, ‘Gosh, I’ve got that to work with.’ So I can understand everyone else getting excited about it, I really can, but it’s not me. I really am a barefoot-on-the-beach person.

Actually, as an aside, that same reviewer commented: "She wears comparatively little make-up."

Compared to what?

Sue Steward, the feminist music writer and critic, has exposed the potentially dehumanising process that women performers undergo when they are photographed or filmed – features are removed or accentuated at the whim of the image maker. How did this process affect you?

When I was younger, I was really confident in front of the camera. But then you realise that other people do care and things that you wouldn’t have taken much notice of suddenly become important.

When I did the BEF stuff, I was still in my 30s and looked stunning, but I didn’t think so because I thought that people were virtually dead after they were 35! It took a lot of coaxing for me to get back in front of the camera back, until right at the end when I felt OK about the way I looked again and I thought, ‘Oh, I feel comfortable in myself again.’

With the 1970s dawning, you emerge from the 1960s with your image fixed as a singing, swinging dollybird, while your own place in the rock hierarchy has become less assured. Was there a feeling that being a recording artist had become an uphill slog?

After ‘Reviewing The Situation’, I was very disheartened that I couldn’t continue to explore those things. So from roughly 1970 onwards, I tried to keep a mid-track between the things that I wanted to do and putting out releases that were kind of OK by me

Rare early 1970s shot

but which they weren’t really where I wanted to go musically. Having Gracie would have distracted me, too.

A friend of mine saw you live in the early 1970s and said that you just seemed tired and indifferent: were you?

Well, what does he expect? In the early 1970s my husband’s business, which was financed by me and personally guaranteed by me, had gone bust – I lost all my money. Yes, I was there in cabaret and supper clubs, but I didn’t really want to work at the time; I wanted to write and act and look after my baby. Instead I ended up having to go out and work in order to pay some of Jeff’s debts off. It was really wasn’t a good time for me. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t indifferent to my audiences, it’s just that I was not where I wanted to be. I’d never worked for money before. I wouldn’t have done it for me. It’s just not how I am. Had it been for me, I wouldn’t have cared. I would make a terrible tart, wouldn’t I?

Listening to some of your late 1960s and early 1970s tracks – Same Things or By Tomorrow – it seems odd that you have regularly claimed that you lost your confidence. These recordings were consummate 1960s white pop and smacked of an abundance of competence and self-belief.

Well I know, but I can hear what was going on in my head. In those three minutes you capture the moments of confidence. It’s the bits in between that are the problem.

A 1971 appearance of yours on Top Of The Pops when you were pregnant with Gracie must rank as one of the most bizarre in the show’s 40-year history . . .

Oh yes! First of all they said that they were only going to do head shots. I replied: ‘I insist that you do full-length shots.’ I was pretending that I hadn’t grasped the point that they were trying to make. Their next move was to bring on a stool, explaining to me: ‘You never know what might happen.’ And so I said: ‘Like what?’ They were a bit awkward by now: ‘You know . . .’ And I said, ‘No, actually, I don’t.’

Anyway, they wouldn’t let it drop: ‘Look, just sit down – health and safety.’ I think they expected me to give birth if I hit a high note. I’m sure in the end that I just sat down because I couldn’t be arsed arguing. There was a very strange attitude towards women getting pregnant. Now, of course, everyone sticks their belly out – even if they are not pregnant.

Your final two releases with PYE came in 1972 after which your contract with PYE lapsed. Did that feel like being cut adrift?

I stayed with PYE because Eve insisted that I did. That was so that she could keep her other acts at the Palladium. It was a simple as that – it had nothing to do with me. There was no merit in me remaining with PYE. PYE never promoted product – it wasn’t just me, it was everybody. Promotion and development was not what they did. They were just a distribution company

Thinking about the period post-Eurovision through to the early 1970s, had you had access to the sort of creative management on offer at the Arts Clinic, would that have been useful?

Yes.

Would it have been a useful way to manage your relationship with Eve?

No, that was past saving. What it would have done would have been to give me the confidence to break free and find someone else. I should have broken free sooner. From 67 onwards, when Eve had won some points and taken advantage, it never worked after that because I was always angry that she had exploited me. And also because I had grown out of her and that arguing dynamic. By the time I was

Typical diva shot of the time

doing Sandie Shaw Supplement, you can see that I’d completely moved on creatively. I had no-one working with me to enable me to do that. But I couldn’t have brought myself to trust someone like Andrew Loog Oldham . . . although at one point we were talking about Adam Faith managing me. And that might have worked.

People often say that you should have done this, or you should have done that . . . do these latter-day be svengalis get on your nerves?

Well, where were they when I needed them? Listen, how it turned out was perfect for me. People might find things to laugh at or things to criticise, or even to enjoy, but as far as I’m concerned it was perfect. It’s me and it’s how I am. There are times when I lose complete confidence, times when I am easily influenced, and times when I am headstrong. But I made this career because this career is how my life is. I can’t pretend not to own all the mistakes and all the successes. You can’t pick and choose in life.

Fans are quite important to understanding your re-emergence in the early 1980s and the development of your career to date – the roll call of fans in the music industry who tempted you out of your ‘retirement’ is impressive by any standard.

Kirsty McCall was one of the first who tried to bring me out of myself. She was so dry, and her lyrics are sensational. I met her at a big Virgin party. She came up to me and said: ‘I’m going to write some songs for you.’ I thought to myself: ‘Jumped up person, who does she think she is!’ I was rather taken aback by her approach and that was probably the start of it all. And I had not idea who she was, although it did stick in my mind, and I often thought ‘I really ought to work with Kirsty some day’. But I left it too late . . . I was just about to give her a ring . . .

So how did Heaven 17 and BEF with Martin Ware come into it all?

They were introduced to me – perhaps at the same party I was at when I met Kirsty – and I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know who anyone was. I always have lots of young people around and I think that it was a friend’s son who loved them and said that I had to work with me. I’m pleased to say that I did work with them because they were fantastic and they put really great musicians around me. It was the first time that anyone had taken the time to listen to my voice and just put me with musicians that had a sound that would compliment it.

I loved the way that my voice suddenly came into its own in the 1980s when I was doing ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ and became easy and natural. The early stuff is great, but it is all about a person trying to find her voice. You can’t hear Hank Marvin on the track and he was upset, rumour has it, because he didn’t have the lead part. But it’s not my fault, Hank, because I didn’t mix it.

Then Chrissie Hynde is knocking on your door asking you to do a sound check with her because ‘we think you are brilliant’?

Yes, that was nice. I didn’t know what to wear: what do you wear to pop in on the Pretenders? [laughs] I hadn’t intended to go on stage and I had just been standing in the wings. But Chrissie introduced me to everyone and I just couldn’t stay in the wings, so I had to go on. We did ‘Girl Don’t Come’. I didn’t know Kid then, and to be honest I didn’t know much about her work. I sang ‘Kid’ live at one point, but I never recorded anything with her. We always said that we’d write together but we never did. But you never know.

And at some point, I did a record with Chris Neal that we never put out. I had been listening to the final mix on my tape machine at home when Morrissey came to see me.

In pensive mood

The story about your collaboration with The Smiths and your dalliance with an indie label are well documented; less well documented is how you came to record a Lloyd Cole track?

I was working with Malcolm Dunbar at Polydor. I did a couple of singles with him: one was ‘Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken’ and the other was ‘Frederick’. It was supposed to be an album, but I didn’t because he was moved somewhere else. I had no rapport with Carol Wilson and so I went back to Geoff [Travis] [at Rough Trade] to do it.

I loved all of Lloyd’s album [his debut album with the Commotions, ‘Rattlesnakes’], but Heartbroken was the track that I chose do. Was he on the same label me? I’d love to know if he was. [He was, Polydor]. Anyway, I asked his manager if he was up for me doing it and finally did it with Clive and Alan. I love it. I think that it is absolutely magical.

When I interviewed you in Manchester in 1986, you told me that you were working on an album that was going to be about ‘passion’: what happened to the ‘missing’ Polydor album?

Did I tell you that? It must be true. Actually I was referring to what became ‘Hello Angel’. Well they were passionate tracks, weren’t they? As I said, I had no rapport with Carol Wilson – you’d have thought I would have had with a woman. Although she knew Nik, we didn’t share the same musical taste. Fuck knows what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to go backwards, and I wanted to go forwards.

You said that the 1980s were more liberating, but doesn’t your experience with Polydor show that there were still record companies that stifled artists?

There still are. You have to find the people that you can work with. The people who run A&R departments have to go by their instinct for what they do and don’t like. Sometimes you don’t get on with a person, which is what is so awful about corporates because you go in to see the person you saw last week and it is suddenly someone different. So I don’t actually work that closely with a record company anymore because you can’t depend on there being any continuity. It’s not stifling, it’s just that that’s how it is. You have to be clear in your mind what you want to do.

Funnily enough I think that the big companies will cease to flourish – there will just end up with there being two of them in competition with each other. Then companies like Sanctuary will come into their own because they can sell 100,000 copies of something and make money on it. They don’t have huge overheads and they are not into huge marketing exercises. They work with artists who are already known and who already know what they want to do, so it doesn’t cost the same. I think that things are going to change quite a lot in the record industry. It is not going to be the same as it was. It will merge into something like the software industry.

With her support act at the Manchester University gig: where is he now?

You came much to the fore in the mid-1980s as someone who championed gay issues such as HIV/AIDS. Why become involved with an issue that 20 years ago was a commercial kiss of death, and which led one journalist to ask you: ‘Aren’t you worried that people will think you are gay?’

It certainly was. It was pre-Diana. Lots of people hadn’t come out at that time. I used to work with gay people all the time and it was second nature. I just don’t feel right unless there is t least one gay person around – it just doesn’t seem the right dynamic because of what I’ve been brought up with since I was 17. So for me it was quite odd to think of other people in that way.

Do you still following AIDS as an issue in this country, with the increasing rates of infection among the young?

I think that AIDS as an issue is bigger in Africa to be honest. Yes, it’s quite frightening. It is a bit like feminism because a lot of them have forgotten the lessons.

As someone who’s built up 40 years of press cuttings, has journalism left a foul taste? Would you go so far as to dislike journalists?

There are different kind’s of journalist, aren’t there?

Celebrity journalists?

They’re not journalists, they are just gossips with a pen. But that’s not their fault, I suppose. They are just giving people what they want.

Bearing in mind that it isn’t yet a criminal offence for a journalist to review your make-up rather than your performance, don’t you need them to promote you as much as they need you to fill the blank space that they couldn’t sell to advertisers?

Yeah, but I don’t do celebrity stuff, I just couldn’t. I’ll leave that to Lulu. If you don’t employ a press company on a monthly salary (which costs a packet!), you don’t have to get involved; you don’t have to go to those things where you are photographed. I’m not the only one: Chrissie Hynde won’t do them either – she just won’t.

I’m not a celebrity, I’m a recording artist. That’s what I did and that’s what people know me for. They don’t know me for appearing on silly shows. I’m happy for people to recognise and enjoy my work – more than happy for it – that was the whole purpose of it. But there is something unsettling and unhealthy about celebrity.

Does this antipathy towards ‘celebrity’ explain why, in spite of two divorces, neither you nor any former husband have resorted to the pages of the News of the World to air your grievances?

I try not to be unkind to any former husband. It doesn’t pay to be because it is someone’s father. I don’t have any difficulty being nice about Nik because he is a wonderful person and I love him to bits. He is one of my best friends – ever. He is a really nice guy, and I defy anyone else to say anything different if they meet him.

Our family consists of lots of children with lots of different mothers and fathers. There are about 14 young people in our family, and their partners, and all the parents are mixed up from different places. One has to bear this in mind because it is someone’s mother or their dad. It makes you feel much more kindly towards an ex because of the children.

Your career started in some ways when you entered a talent show – and came second! What do you make of the monster that this once benign format has evolved?

My daughter, Gracie, is in TV and she works on reality stuff. We have lots of conversations about it because she is a different generation and has different sensibilities. But she still has trouble with the whole idea and the meaningless of it all. Light entertainment is supposed to be meaningless, but it is not entertainment any more, it is more gladiatorial.

Whereas you and the other 1960s girls were distinctive, the Pop Idol format seems to be about reducing performance to a light-entertainment mush, inoffensive to the extent that the white girls try to sound black, and the black girls, more worryingly, are ‘whitened’.

Backstage reading the student rag, Mancunion

Yes, they all do that fake black-white yodelling. All the boys sing the same songs and they are all copying each other’s voices, and there is nothing original and nothing new. There is actually nothing original and new in the whole universe. Being creative is putting two things together that don’t normally go together. Crossing boundaries is art and the other thing that makes it an artform is that you put two things together that have never been put together. I think that everything already exists, but it is how you see it and juxtapose it that makes it become art.

So has pop music finally run out of steam?

I think so.

If there is a Sandra Goodrich out there today, bored to tears in a Dagenham factory, about to send in her audition CD to one of the talent-trawl shows, what would you advise her?

I wouldn’t advise her to do that if she wants and exciting and original life. I would advise her to go and study Chinese. That’s the truth. The whole thing is to find new territory – that’s what I was trying to do – and there is no new territory in entertainment anymore. There is nowhere to go. Debbie Harry was right when she said that women are the new Elvis. Debbie had been asked how she saw the future of pop music: she replied that Elvis was the first rock icon, and that there was no longer anything new for men to contribute, with women becoming the new Elvises.

After your collaboration with The Smiths, teaming up a 1960s diva with a contemporary act was very much the way back in for the ‘older, mature woman’. Is age still a barrier?

You can’t do it after a certain age. Fans are happy to grow old with you, but they are not happy to accept someone who is already old – so far! But if a 57-year-old came along and wanted to launch a recording career, the reaction would be ‘what?’

Forgetting the tacky compilations, the first stab at managing your back catalogue came in the early 1990s when your post-Eurovision albums were put out on RPM.

I had a manager at the time and that was what he wanted to do. I was studying at the time and so I let Charles do it. I was ‘involved’ but not fully involved.

With Rob Marche and Mark E. Nevin

Bringing things bang up to date, your entire back catalogue is in the process of being reissued by EMI. Wasn’t that a strange choice given your criticism of money moguls in the music industry?

Is it a strange choice? They are a very British company. Tris Penna used to be an executive there and so it really works for me, plus I’m really good friends with the group CEO, Eric Nicoli. He was really supportive of me during the legal battle, which is why I have given him a credit on the box set. Some of it was too much, and I didn’t want to go on. He is the most extraordinary man, and that is what really clinched it for me.

Warners were a possibility because they handle Chris Andrews’ publishing. An American company was another possibility, plus an independent company here. I liked EMI’s ethics, and that comes from the chairman down. Eric loves music, which is so unusual. And he was a real champion of the people who work at EMI, which is also unusual because normally they don’t get involved in that and just look after numbers. I thought that that was so different to all the huge multinationals and yet they are a corporate, but very much in their own way. I feel confident with them.

The other surprise has been their approach to your back catalogue, which has been to get people involved like Tris who are dedicated Sandie Shaw ‘experts’

Well, with Tris on board, it was a definite runner because he knows everything. That really made the difference. Other people offered more money, but that wasn’t really the point. Fans got involved to fill in gaps in Tris’ knowledge, so it was all like a little club really.

You spent the best part of thirty years studiously indifferent to your experience of Sandie Shaw, and then the past started to encroach . . . did going back hurt emotionally?

My father died and the attic was cleared out. It turned out that my dad had kept scrapbooks of every single thing. He had kept it all with such loving care because it was his daughter, rather than some famous person. At the same time, I found all my old arrangements – the parts that Kenny wrote out. They are all mildewy like old books. I love the smell.

During the legal case, things started to turn up. I’d kept nothing because I’m not sentimental like that. And because of the relationship that I had with the whole Sandie Shaw thing, I never wanted to keep anything. I always thought that if it is worth keeping, others will do it.

Then I got to hear the Italian stuff that I hadn’t heard for ages. I hadn’t had access to the material for 40 years. I also found it interesting – but mindboggling – to hear everything in sequence. It was difficult to hear myself after all that time because it sounds like I sounded when I was that age. A photograph is not in three dimensions, but there is something about a voice that sort of is, and when I listened to it the sound reminded me of the place I used to be. Obviously that person is still inside me somewhere, but it is a very peculiar experience. The earlier songs were about the tentative attempts of a person to find her voice.

Dramatic moment: whatever happened to "the vamp, the super-sequinned star?"

Melanie Brown, better known as Mel B, was reported as employing you as a manager. What can you tell us about your time as Mel’s manager and your work as a creative consultant?

No, I’ve never managed her. Why would I want to manage someone and be bossed around by them? I would advise and I would consult but I certainly wouldn’t do it by having a contract with someone. The maximum time I would work with anyone, maximum, is six months.

I’m not usually able to talk about Arts Clinic people because if people know that I’ve worked within someone, they might assume that my client was in treatment, which isn’t always the case. So as a rule I say nothing. But because Mel has mentioned it in her book, it would look silly for me to say that I had never been involved.

I was Mel’s creative consultant for six months. I think that I did really well with Mel because I could see her as an actress. She has presence on stage and she can access her emotions really well. I introduced her to different producers and persuaded her to do some acting tuition. I’ve heard that she was on Broadway recently and I hope that I was some part of getting her there. She has a little mention of me in the back of her book.

I love being a consultant, though. You need to work with a person and help them to realise what they want and vocalise it themselves.

 

Sandie, it was a pleasure. Thank you for this unique peek behind the scenes, and good luck with the rest of your sabbatical.

[Pictures: fans and visitors to this website have the permission of the copyright holder to use and distribute the black & white images featured in the second part of this interview for their own private, non-commercial use]