Posted November 25, 200915 yr http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/t....icle6925325.ece 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 hybridisation continues. Fahey still lives in London, staying with one of her sisters or her artist/DJ/drummer boyfriend 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.....806&sr=8-11
November 25, 200915 yr I've had the album for a few weeks - it's shockingly good, you know.... a kind of cross between Giorgio Moroder, Client and Lene Lovich. She's quite a lady :heart: Looking fabulous too... http://siobhanfaheyrealm.blogspot.com/2009...bhan-fahey.html http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle6925325.ece
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