Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 08:19:10 +0000
Subject: Welcome to Shakespears Sister mailing list!
Greetings one and all!
This e-mail is intended to be an introduction to the
Shakespears Sister mailing list. For the moment, the exact
format is still undecided, and it will all be manually operated.
I have not undertaken such a venture before, so there are
inevitably going to be stuff-ups and delays. Please bear with
me! I welcome any criticisms or suggestions; this is not "my"
list... I'm just filling a gap "in the marketplace" so to speak.
After this e-mail, each message forwarded out to everyone will be
numbered and dated. This should allow us to keep track of stray
messages.
The main aim is to provide a mechanism to pass on
information, as quickly as possible, to those interested.
However, anything that you may wish to discuss or report is
welcome. At this stage (March 1996), new material is anticipated
at any stage, but until it actually does surface, we'll just have
to reflect on past glories!
Please send anything of interest to me at:
devery@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au
BUT PLEASE include Shakespears Sister, SS, Shak.Sis. or similar
in the subject heading to allow me to quickly identify the e-mail
as relevant.
The following are some excellent Shakespears Sister web sites:
Andy Gordon's Unofficial SS Homepage:
http://whirligig.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ajg94/sha/smain.html
Voyager's basic discography:
http://w3.one.net/~voyager/ssal.html
For Bananarama fans, your best starting point would be:
http://www.eel.ufl.edu/~rda/brama/
A complete Shakespear's Sister discography is under construction.
Thank you for your interest.
Mike Devery
Melbourne, Australia.
SSML-1, 25 March 1996
Hi everyone,
Welcome to the first real Shakespear's Sister mailout!
First of all, Jennifer reports that Boy George makes
several references to Siobhan in his autobiography "Take It Like
A Man":
*******************************
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 09:29:03 -0500 (EST)
From: jennifer christine galey
i'm just full of useless information. i'd love to tell
more about boy george--i remember several bananarama references.
i'll look through it again. in one part he is on a plane with
dave stewart (siobhan's husband) and they are discussing
mushrooms and acid trips. who has heard marcella's album,
jewel? i was more than a little disappointed. it's as if she
suddenly turned boring and is aiming for an older audience or
something... but i do like a few songs--i'm no angel, cool
people, etc. and she has such a lovely voice on prima donna--but
did anyone think maybe this song was in reference to siobhan?
my sister and i dressed up as shakespear's sister for a
halloween party. i made her be marcy because she's taller and i
wanted to wear a garland crown. that white make-up is really
difficult to wear. and i lost my crown somewhere that night...
--jennifer
*********************************
The following information came from an Australian interview
of Pete Tong (UK BBC-radio dance DJ), during his DJ tour in
January 1996. It was published in "Beat" magazine.
"Interviewer (Andrew Mast): ...You also do A&R work.
Pete Tong: That's my proper job.
AM: What artists have been most successful for you, and are
there any that you have overlooked when looking for new
talent?
PT: Goldie was my big success story for last year. I also look
after Shakespear's Sister and Orbital -who are 2/3 of the
way to completing their next album. I don't look after that
many acts anymore, purposefully so; a real artist should take
up a lot of time."
Later in the article, mention is made of Paul Oakenfold
(DJ, remixer of U2 etc etc; head of Perfecto Records): "...he has
cut down his remixing schedule though, remixing only once a month
and only for his own roster of artists (though he has just done
mate Pete Tong a favour by remixing Shakespear's Sister new
single)."
**********************
Finally for now, the following is an extract from an extensive,
and very interesting, Siobhan interview published in a book of
interviews of female rock musicians in 1994. You may find this
in your local academic library.
Women, Sex and Rock'n'Roll: In Their Own Words
Interviews conducted by Liz Evans, June 1993-March 1994.
Published 1994, by Pandora, London.
Siobhan Fahey: "They don't expect boys to pretend to be
nice, but they do with girls, and I'm not a nice person!"
Introduction (by Liz Evans): Having trashed the grinning
blonde of Bananarama dance routines and synchronised singing
several years ago, SF has re-emerged as a witty, subversive pop
star with her own project, SS. With dramatic effect she questions
the role of traditional beauty. Twisting the trappings of glamour
into something dangerous, she mocks the perfection for cosmetic
masks by smearing black eyes onto a faultless foundation, drawing
scarlet dots on her cheeks and wearing deathly pale or deeply
dark lips. Her carefully-
crafted songs contain tales of badness, shattering the innocence
and false nicety of the female pop persona, and her performances
are deranged and out of control......
By inscribing her negative feelings into the current pop
charts, Fahey is confronting her pain, while opening up a
Pandora's Box of suppressed female emotion for all the world to
see. Glamour is often disturbed and Fahey is not only
acknowledging that, she is celebrating it.
Siobhan Fahey: "I don't have a hometown, I don't come from
anywhere, I don't belong anywhere and that's always really
freaked me out, to the point where my husband Dave's going, 'Why
the fuck are we living in London?' and I just go, 'It's my home,
I don't like it here but I live here!' I've been on this sort of
neurotic search for a community to belong to for some time now.
It's horrible, and it's probably the root cause of my alienation.
I do feel very alienated from the rest of society and I have done
forever really, so I don't know what I would have done if I
hadn't become a pop star really. It's the perfect job for people
who don't fit anywhere else.
When I was a child, my home life was pretty unstable. My
dad just went where the work was basically. He was in the army
for the first nine years of my life so I spent five years in
Germany and then he was a contracting engineer so he'd just go
wherever the money was. We lived all over Britain, in Scotland
and all over England. It was horrible because I went to eight
different schools, and you know what a nightmare it is starting a
school. So by the time I went to my eighth one I was 14 and it
was so traumatic I never really got over it. And I became
completely -you know the girl in the class that everyone laughs
at and no one sits next to? That was me. And I had to cope with
that from 14.
I used to find solace in food during my adolescence as
well, so my weight shot up. I was heavier at the age of 12 and 13
than I'd ever been. I hated it so I started starving myself. I
did it for a year and it was annoying because I didn't really get
very thin. I only lost half a stone, and because I was so
depressed as well, my system ground to a halt. When I moved to
London it was fantastic. I was out every night all night and I
lived off beer and
coffee and cigarettes because I couldn't afford to eat, and that
sorted my body shape out immediately."
************************************************
Quote of the issue:
Siobhan Fahey: "...I'M NOT A NICE PERSON..."
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