Shakespears Sister - Songs From The Red Room
MusicBuzzUK
Siobhan Fahey returns from the dark side of pop
From Bananarama and Shakespears Sister to break-ups and breakdowns, Siobhan
Fahey is back from the dark side of pop
Fleur Britten
Siobhan Fahey is hunting for wood. She leaps up from the sofa in her friend's
photographic studio, growing increasingly frantic about finding anything
that remotely passes as wooden. "Touch wood," she exhales eventually, "I
really do think I've been set free."
The newly blonde Fahey, founder member of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister,
has finally moved on from the "intolerable anguish" of depression that has
plagued her since she was 12. Also gone is the requisite goth-black hair and
the sun-hating (on hot days, she says, she used lie in cold baths all
afternoon - now she finds the cold restricts her joy). "I am devoting myself
to making myself happy," she says in a smoke-worn voice, now quite mellow
again. The catalyst was, she says, her parents dying in 2006. "I still don't
quite understand it, so it scares me," she shrugs, "but it's been some sort
of lightening up. Maybe it's a release from my old identity."
Whatever it is, this "deep shift" seems to radiate through her every cell.
She looks shockingly gorgeous, and few of her 51 years. Her petite frame is
poured into skinny jeans and a smattering of Westwood separates, topped with
a blonde Ziggy Stardust mullet. Her strong, feline bone structure fills out
an incredibly well-preserved complexion. Nor does her music sound like that
of a 51-year-old. "Sometimes, I do think I should have made an album full of
ballads for the over-forties," she smiles wryly. That would be the sensible,
commercial option. "But that's not who I am." Last week, she bounced back
after a five-year recording hiatus with Songs from the Red Room, the fourth
Shakespears Sister album and Fahey's second without Marcella Detroit since
their bitter split in 1993. No drippy ballads, just a burst of catchy yet
cosmic, intelligent pop: "I just refuse to stop being myself," she says
gently.
So she hangs out with her kids, Sam, 21, and Django, 18 (from her marriage
to the music maestro Dave Stewart), and their friends. They go to festivals
together (she's attended Coachella in LA for the past four years), and even,
she announces matter-of-factly, takes magic mushrooms with them. She spends
three months of the year in LA, visiting Sam, a (perhaps inevitably)
"insanely talented" musician. So does she get Botoxed when she's there? She
frowns (because she can): "I still feel like I'm 21. And it goes hand in
hand - you look the way you think." It runs in the family, she claims,
adding that her mother left "a good-looking corpse" after dying of a brain
tumour, aged 72. Three months previously, her mother had been in Ibiza,
"behaving like a teenager, drinking and dancing all night" (despite the new,
sunnier outlook, Fahey's gothic humour twinkles on). "She looked about 55,
maximum," she says. "All the nurses would gather round her bed and say,
'Jay-sus! [she adopts her parents' Tipperary accent] Look at the age on
that!'"
Her father's death three months later precipitated Fahey's "gap year", spent
mostly in the LA sunshine, turning around her dark days. Fahey's father, "a
caner", died with dementia, having become completely dependent on his wife
after 50 years of marriage. "He was the classic romantic Irishman," she
recalls. "He loved language, but he was wild and reckless." Did Fahey
inherit that? Her hard-partying days are well documented. "Yeah, yeah," she
smiles. "But his example taught me caution."
One senses that life's hard knocks have taught Fahey caution; there's now a
measuredness, a calm sense of reason, to the old punk soul. And those
knocks? There was the stint in a clinic for depression after ending up in a
wheelchair with an agonising ruptured disc. "You know the body is very much
linked to your mental state, and in 1993 the strain of my life took its
toll," she says. There was the gradual breakdown of her marriage. "We were
completely and utterly different people," she explains. "We really didn't
know each other well enough when I got pregnant and I'm sure we'd never have
got married otherwise." Plus there was Stewart's reported hypochondria, "his
constant attention-seeking behaviour that I found irritating".
This was fatefully timed with the grim Shakespears Sister split: "Once I'd
made Marcy an equal partner there was a terrible ego struggle, as she wanted
to be the front person in the band that I'd started. I really hate
confront-ation and she was very confrontational." Was there a terrible
showdown? "Several!" she snorts. "She was constantly at it. I was like, oh
Christ! I was just counting down the gigs where I didn't have to see her."
By 1993, Fahey was a solo artist (a place she "didn't embrace", she says
with understatement) and, by 1996, a single mother. She lights up a Silk Cut
inside the studio in gracious rebellion: "The whole thing unravelled and
turned into a nightmare. They were a difficult few years." She pauses,
adding: "I think that depression is closely linked to worrying about whether
you're a bad person or not."
Fahey's self-esteem was crushed in early childhood, she believes, as an
Irish girl living in Britain. Her father moved the whole family over,
including her two younger sisters, when he joined the British Army. "I grew
up on an army estate and it was like, 'You're a paddy, you're thick.' I
absorbed some pretty negative messages about myself." But then Fahey feels
that she never belonged in Ireland either: "My Irish cousins don't recognise
me as Irish. I'm this weird hybrid." So what does she feel in her core?
Fahey erupts into laughter. "Keren and Sara [her Bananarama bandmates] used
to laugh at me, saying I wasn't cool because I'd be like, 'Hi, how are you?'
with everyone instead of, 'Uh, whatever'. In my heart and soul I feel Irish.
I find the English very cold." So did her self-esteem improve with this big
shift? There's an improvement, she says, "but when it's woven into your
fabric, you have consciously to check your thoughts all the time". Hence
performing as Shakespears Sister when she alone is Shakespears Sister - it's
a platform to hide behind. "Besides," she chuckles, "Siobhan Fahey is a
bitch to Google."
Meanwhile, the Anglo-Irish hybrid�isation continues. Fahey still lives in
London, staying with one of her sisters or her artist/DJ/drummer boy�friend
of eight years (she rents out her own place, saying she can't live on her
back catalogue alone). She and her boyfriend mostly live apart because that's
what seems to work. (It's another case of Fahey defying categorisation:
"When you've been married and had kids, it's like, why do you need
a �prescribed, conventional life?") Meanwhile, she still likes to visit
Ireland - Tipperary, Dublin, where her cousins live, and Clare, where her
uncle lives. "And since my parents passed, I have been visiting the places I
never got to go to before." Such as Dingle, her mental fantasy of Ireland.
And in LA, she started to learn Irish, her father's first language. "Part of
me believed that if I learnt Gaelic, it would unlock the cultural psyche,"
she says, because, culturally, she feels British. But, she confesses, she's
some way from finding the key in her studies: "It even takes a while before
you can pronounce what's written on the page".
It seems that Fahey the lone outsider is keen to hold on to both these
national identities. To her, even fame has its benefits, making her no more
the stranger: "It's comforting to be known, like someone who has lived in
the same village all their life. As a child I moved every couple of years,
so I always felt invisible." The one thing there's no room for, however, is
depression: "I want to close that chapter," she sighs. "I don't want that
tag anymore. It's like the wind is behind me somehow now." Touch wood.
Shakespears Sister
Songs From The Red Room
Format: CD Album
Catalogue Number: PALARE001CD
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Palare
Release Date: 16 November 2009
1. Pulsatron (Whitey mix)
2. Bad Blood
3. Was It Worth It? (With Terry Hall)
4. It's A Trip
5. Hot Room
6. A Man In Uniform
7. You're Alone
8. Bitter Pill
9. Cold
10. You're Not Yourself
11. A Loaded Gun
12. Bad Blood(Jagz Kooner Mix Edit)
13. Pulsatron (Gully Mix)
14. Cold (Death In Vegas Mix)
SOUND SAMPLES:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002TTZ....6272806&sr=8-11