pop

Sandy Shaw, the barefoot adulteress: How the Eurovision victory was nearly derailed by her scandalous love life

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Sandie-Shaw-in-1966-2993394

She won Eurovision with Puppet On A String. But now she admits that her love life could have wrecked her career.

By Glenys Roberts | Dec 2010

With her glossy bobbed hair and her habit of singing barefoot, she was the image of the Swinging ­Sixties. The original ­Essex girl made good (having once worked in the Ford factory in Dagenham), Sandie Shaw rocketed to fame aged only 17.

She wore a fur coat even at the height of summer, drove a white Mercedes and had a birthday cake topped with her famous bare feet cast in ice cream.

Sandie’s fame was built on the success of winning the coveted Eurovision Song Contest for the first time ever for Britain with her song — which she hated — Puppet On A String.

But Sandie, now 63, [2010] has revealed for the first time that this remarkable triumph almost never happened. For an extra-marital dalliance with a television boss almost caused the BBC to withdraw her from the contest at the last moment, fearing a backlash of disapproval at her behaviour.

‘The BBC wanted to fire me because I had a divorce scandal at the time which had come out just before the contest,’ said Sandie, who has since been married three times. ‘I was involved in someone else’s divorce and they didn’t think it was the right image. It was incredibly unpleasant.’

These days, such lurid details of a pop star’s ­private life often act only to enhance someone’s celebrity. But back in the Sixties, although people thought they had become liberated by the social revolution that was under way, there was still a moral code of sorts. A whiff of scandal could ruin an up-and-­coming star’s career.

Sandie Shaw started singing at the age of six for an aunt whom she would entertain with a spirited rendition of American Fifties’ singer Guy Mitchell’s She Wears Red Feathers. As she tells it now, she was a late developer who always felt gawky and ugly — until one day she stepped on stage.

Initially prompted by her aunt to enter an Ilford Palais talent contest (dressed in kick-pleat short skirt which flattered her long legs), by the time Sandie was 16 she had moved up the ladder to perform on the same bill in ­London as rock group The Hollies and pop star Adam Faith. By the time she was 17 she had three No 1 hits, including There’s Always Something There To Remind Me and Long Live Love.

Sandie fully enjoyed her fame. With her angular cheekbones and classic Vidal Sassoon haircut, she became known as the ‘barefoot pop princess’ — the girl everyone wanted to look like.

Then, came the scandal.

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A “One Hit Wonder” with 5 Different Bands

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By Johnny Foreigner

No true Hobbledehoy can resist the pop sugar-high of Edison Lighthouse’s “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” (1970).
British session musician Tony Burrows sang lead on that delicious single with the band Edison Lighthouse.  Burrows also sang the lead vocals on several other “one-hit wonder songs” under different group names, including White Plains‘ “My Baby Loves Lovin'”; the Pipkins‘ classic ear-worm “Gimme Dat Ding”; and Brotherhood of Man’s “United We Stand”. These hit songs were all recorded within nine months of each other, but were all released around the same time in early 1970.

Burrows sang lead on a 5th “one hit wonder” in 1974 with The First Class’ “Beach Baby”.

Tony Burrows: Five “One Hit Wonders” and a lifetime of great hair.

Ear worm-iest ear worm of all time
In 1969, Reg Dwight, who would later become famous as Elton John, was an office boy at Mills Music, the London music publishing house. It was Elton John who recorded the original demo for “United We Stand.”
First Time Hearing … this is as sweet as the song!

‘We like a party!’ – why is Scottish pop so potent?

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Inside the National Museum of Scotland sits a vintage wooden harmonium, once dolorously played by a little man in plus fours and a fez, the late absurdist folk-poet Ivor Cutler, who was second only to the Fall in the number of sessions he recorded for John Peel. A relic abandoned in storage for years, the harmonium is now owned by trad-folk minstrels Capercaillie and proudly on loan to the Edinburgh museum as part of the first ever exhibition of Scottish pop, Rip It Up. “I’m so glad it was found,” says curator Stephen Allen. “I was agonising over how we could give Ivor Cutler his rightful place in Scottish pop music.”

Cutler’s harmonium, emblem of the tragicomic spirit so often found in the Scots, is now a kind of 20th-century equivalent of Beethoven’s clavichord, one of more than 300 objects – alongside photos, videos and music piping everywhere – telling the nation’s musical story from the 1950s onwards.

For Allen, though, the most stirringly potent artefact is the fluorescent green PVC jumpsuit that captivated his 13-year-old self, worn by Eugene Reynolds of the Rezillos: the fright-wigged Edinburgh troupe who stormed TV’s biggest chart show in 1978 with their novelty-punk caper that bellowed thrillingly: “Everybody’s on Top of the Pops!”

“The zip was a bit rusty,” says Allen, a man who had “Ian McCulloch hair” back in ’78, “and the full camo gear. I looked like a starved extra from Apocalypse Now.”

The sometime teenage Rezillos renegade is now the kind of person who shapes Britain’s heritage, his post-punk generation now all grown up into cultural gatekeepers, understanding that pop music, for many, gave you not only a life but an education.

“Pop culture was the gateway into other art forms,” he says. “If it wasn’t for Siouxsie and the Banshees I wouldn’t have got interested in Weimar Germany. This distance in history lends credence, brings perspective. There are now universities with professors of pop.”

This perspective underscores Rip It Up across several themes arrayed from global impact to Scottish voices to politics and identity. The spirit of Scotland can be traced, then, from 50s pre-rock’n’roll skiffle (Glasgow-born Lonnie Donegan) to 70s pub rock, disco and perm-haired heavy rock (the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, the Average White Band, Nazareth) to post-punk luminaries and tartan-pop tomfoolery (the Skids, Altered Images, Bay City Rollers).
In between there are the pop giants past and present – Simple Minds and Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics in the 80s, Paolo Nutini and Calvin Harristoday. But it’s the indie heroes who dominate in numbers, including the roster of Postcard Records, set up to launch bequiffed dandies Orange Juice(whose biggest hit lends the exhibition its name). Others featured include the Associates, Jesus and Mary Chain, the Blue Nile, Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand – and scandalously unsung acts such as late-90s art-rock surrealists the Beta Band.
With such a diverse spectrum, can there be such a thing as a Scottish sound? Midge Ure, born in 1953, co-architect of the Band Aid/Live Aid phenomenon and coolly wafting frontman-in-a-raincoat with Ultravox in 1981, ponders the question.

“There is something in the Scottish spirit,” he says. “A yearning, a romanticism. And this longing, this sadness, does come out in the music. It’s maybe a working-class thing. We always seem to be the underdogs. Country music has always been big in Scotland. But there’s also a feistiness. We like a party.” What are the Scots, then, yearning for? “Probably to get out of the slums of Glasgow!” he hoots.
There’s a lexicon historically associated with the Scottish character: hardy (the weather), passionate (alcohol), brave (heart), defiant (politics), romantic in the face of almost certain defeat (the national football team), dour (Frazer from Dad’s Army’s owl-eyed catchphrase, “We’re doomed!”), funny in the face of historical adversity (Renton from Trainspotting’s primal howl, “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re colonised by wankers!”). All of this, alongside the hardship endured in decimated post-industrial cities, the glorious, brutal landscape, and the isolation from London’s seat of economic power informs the collective consciousness [ . . . ]

Continue Reading at THE GUARDIAN: ‘We like a party!’ – why is Scottish pop so potent? | Music | The Guardian