HOLLYWOOD WIVES

TO TIDE THEM OVER WHILE THEY WRITE THEIR FOLLOW-UP TO THEIR CRITICALLY-LAUDED 'SACRED HEART' LP, SHAKESPEAR'S SISTER HAVE RE-RECORDED 'DIRTY MIND'. STEVE SUTHERLAND MEETS THEM IN MOVIE-LAND TO DISCUSS THEIR ATTITUDE PROBLEM. PICS: TOM SHEEHAN.

'WHAT'S THE MOST BRILLIANT THING ABOUT HOLLYWOOD?" I dunno. The weather? The money? The palm trees? The Cars? Swimming Pools? Movie Stars? "Nah." Siobhan shakes her head. "The most brilliant thing about Hollywood is the ladies toilets. It's amazing, every time I go out here and go to the toilet, as I'm washing my hands or doing whatever I have to do, some woman comes in and starts talking to me about her life and I mean everything about it.

"The last time I went out, I was in this tiny toilet, waiting, and this girl came behind me and I couldn't believe my ears. She said, 'Oh my God, my best friend's just been shot to death'. Well, what would you do? I just said 'Oh God, I'm sorry about that. How on earth did it happen? And she said, in this dramatic Scarlet O'Hara type of accent, 'Huh sista shot huh to death'. "Well I didn't know what to say so I went to the toilet and when I came out, she was sitting down looking all lost and I went "Sorry, are you alright? and she went, 'Yeah, do you like me hair?' I couldn't believe it. I was staggered. I went 'Uh... yeah, very nice' and she went, 'D'you think it goes with my skin tone? Yours is great. Where'd you get yours done?' "Jesus Christ! It was incredible. It would be so brilliant, if you wanted to write a book, just to hang around the ladies toilets." Or if you wanted to make an album. "Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that."

SIOBHAN Fahey and Marcella Detroit are in the Onyx Cafe near where Franklin intersects Vermont. Just up and over the hill is Griffith Park Observatory, which was used to symbolise the cold, uncaring nature of the universe in James Dean's most famous movie, "Rebel Without A Cause". And just a black away, on Sunset, where the Vista Theater now stands, D W Griffiths once built the towering city of Babylon, the visual embodiment of all man's evil, for his epic silent film, "Itloerance". The Onyx is a beatnik hangout. The last time Siobhan was here, she says, there were bloaks were goatees playing chess and canvasses were being hung on the walls.

Today, however, the entertainment is provided by an over-excited espresso machine and a tape recorder playing The Smiths "The Queen Is Dead" very loud. Siobhan and Marcella have taken a a day off writing their new album in Marcella's bedroom to talk about "Dirty Mind", their third or fourth single.... I'm not quite sure.. to be taken off the critically lauded "Sacred Heart" the album they recorded together as "Shakespear's Sister" when Siobhan quit Bananarama in the winter of 1987 and moved here from London to marry Eurythmic Dave Stewart.

The single version of "Dirty Mind" bears scant relation to the one on the album. Basically, when they completely re-recorded it with Duncan Bridgeman, who produced Transvision Vamp, because their label Ffrr, wanted something to coincide with their Brits nomination in the Best New Act category. The album version wasn't deemed "up and energetic" enough so we've done this "massive sort of Nineties ska party version" which, sadly, loses the menacing poise and spiteful clarity of the original in pumping up the bpm.

"The funny thing is, the last I heard the video's not gonna be shown on the Saturday morning children's shows in Britain because of the lyric," says Siobhan. "Apparently, parents don't want their kids walking around singing, 'I've got a dirty mind', when ironically, it's a comment on all that." Just as their "You're History" single inverted the sexual roles and lashed pop for it's lazy portrayal of stereotypes, so "Dirty Mind" is crucial to the SS manifesto. It works on many levels but mainly castigates the hypocrisy of pop.

While most of us are disgusted that papers like The Sun stick tits on page three and then print prurient editorials chiding the BBC for allowing Dave Allen to swear, we seldom stop to think of the double standards being perpetrated by the watchdogs who govern what we can listen to. "It's okay for five year olds to walk around singing 'Naught girls need love too' but its not all right for them to go around the place singing 'I've got a dirty mind' ", says Siobhan. "It's like, you're not allowed to say shit or f*** on America TV, you're not allowed to show topless women and yet you get 35 channels, five of which are nations and everything else just shows full-frontal nudity and gawd knows what else."

Coincidentally, Siobhan's chosen home, Los Angeles, is the very epicentre of this hypocrisy. The world capital of cock rock, no other music exists in LA except hairy machismo. This is the kingdom of spandex and leather where every band's ambition is to make a million releasing an album in a cover featuring a woman chained to a fence. "Madonna's Express Yourself video was just as bad though. That was shown on television and frankly, I thought that was soft porn," says Siobhan, "an insult to women".

"Dirty Mind" is also about the way sex sells everything and, in saying "My mind's f***ed up from it, it's polluted", it parallels Dennis Potter's recent and notorious television adaptation of "Blackeyes" where, through the doomed life of a classically beautiful model, he sought to examine just who's using who and concluded that, just as all advertising is pornography, so we're all diseased. "It's very difficult for women as well," says Siobhan. "I think a lot of the first album was about that - the confused messages you get from the time you're three or four years of age. You're to be really cute or attractive and pliable and pretty for all men and yet you're supposed to somehow retain a certain purity. You've gotta make your own rules in the end because you get all this conflicting pressure." It's credo easier arrived at than acted on the the omen currently working in rock are anything to go by.

Most are either strippers or hard mamas; they're seldom real, balanced people, they have to be stereotypes. This is why, according to Siobhan, America is the only country in the world that hasn't taken to Eurythmics. They can't handle Annie Lennox. They don't know who she's supposed to be. 'The way the advertising industry works, sex sells and they figure the bottom line is that's what the guy at the wants to... he want to see things, sexual things' - Marcella "The way the advertising industry works, sex sells," says Marcella, "and they figure the bottom line is that's what the guy at the bar wants to see. They guy in the pub doesn't want to see women, she wants to see things, sexual things. I think it's a transitional time in music at the moment and it's really important, in my opinion, to show another side, a side that's not so focussed on showing sexuality. I like sexuality to an extent, when it's part of you, but if it becomes this glossy image that has nothing to do with the person, it's dangerous."

"You've got to accept the sexuality within yourself and feel comfortable with it without either suppressing it or flaunting it," says Siobhan. "It's just got to become natural." Trouble is, the human being who's trying to be sentient, well informed and ell-intentional is made to feel guilty about sexuality. "Women are, men aren't! Men aren't expected to be pure. In fact, it's really great for men not be pure." Why, because sleeping around makes a man a chap? "yeah. It's all right for Mick Jagger and Michael Hutchence and Axl Rose to really put out sexually and they don't get the same stick...."

"...Whereas women are made guilty for wanting to be attractive. If they dress attractively, it's assumed a provocative gesture and they deserve everything they've got coming to them. "I've always been into the idea of dressing to reinforce the idea of individuality, to make some kind of statement although I'm a little bit lazy about it," says Siobhan, who's done up like a hip biker. "I'm not as fastidious about my dress as Boy George for example. He always looks amazing and I really respect those people who make an effort to make some kind of statement with they way they look. I think it's really exciting and it can be really funny and really ironic." Bananarama were always supposed to be ironic weren't they? "Yeah." But so many people missed the point that it seemed as if the stuffing was knocked out of the group, as if it just gave in. Siobhan nods her head but says nothing.

"SACRED Heart" was such a good album because it was so obviously made by pop fans, people who cared enough about music to want to do something to halt what they considered a decline in standards. Siobhan goes along with that: "I'm just a huge fan of pop music. It's always been my life and it's always been Marcella's life - it's almost our religion. We get so offended and upset when it becomes what it has become in the last couple of years because you know it doesn't have to be that way. "For me, when I was growing up, it was all I had. I was an obsession and it still is. When I hear certain records, its the most powerful feeling that I've ever had and probably ever could have.

It's the same as the feeling people who are painters might have from seeing a brilliant painting. And it's awful when people stop trying to do that... or the people who are trying to do it don't get signed up and don't get played on the radio. "It's really sad but that's what's happening. I mean there's some brilliant artists on Anxious (Dave Stewart's label) but they're not gonna get on the radio because they're not making great pop records, they're not making something that's derivative or like Stock, Aitken and Waterman or House music or whatever's current. The great thing about bands is that they've got a certain attitude and they put out and communicate that attitude - it's about communication. But, when it's just reduced to a danceable beat, all the guts are ripped out of it." You must be a marketing nightmare? "Yeah, definitely." "But it could be worse," says Marcella, who's wearing a long black deco coat and a Louise Brooks bob. "It could be, 'Okay, get 'em in those bustiers and get the suspenders on them', 'Y'know - it could be a whole lot worse."

"The funny thing is, I am bustier in the new video!" laughs Siobhan. "And when I saw the finished product, I'm going, 'Look, why didn't you use that clip where I've got Love and Hate on my knuckles? That's really integral to the whole thing'. And they go, 'Oh we couldn't because your tits looked too big'. But that was exactly the point. I knew what I was trying to do with the way I looked and they just didn't get it." The trouble is, when you're trying to do something individual, something out of the ordinary, you can easily be dismissed as eccentric, wacky, quirky, not to be taken seriously. "Up until now we've encountered surprisingly little of that attitude," says Siobhan. "The press has been good to us. I keep wondering when the axe is going to fall.

But I'll tell you what - I know exactly what you're talking about because Dave gets that all the time. It's like, 'Wacky millionaire Dave, look what he's spent his money on now, the kookie weirdo Yorkshire terrier'. It's all fear because they don't understand and they feel threatened so they pat him on the head an put him in a safe spot. You've just got to laugh. What more can you do?" DAVE Stewart deliberately didn't get involved in "Sacred Heart" but now Shakespear's Sister have earned their own reputation, will he help out? "No, not at all. In fact, he's so busy I hardly seem him. He's hardly heard the songs we've written. I think I've followed him around with a recording Walkman with a tiny speaker going proudly, 'What'd you think of this one then? We're always sort of vying over he wants to play me his tracks and I want to play him mine."

Would you have moved to LA if you hadn't married Dave? "I don't suppose so, no. I certainly never had any great desire to live here. In fact, I had a great fear of what it might do to me. Most English people have that - you're scared that you're gonna bland out or something. But, although we live in an incredibly bland place, the San Fernando Valley, what we've created inside our four walls in incredible - it's like this wild commune." Has living in America changed your attitudes at all? "Yeah, definitely. I feel much more totally detached from the scene here. We're just completely locked into what we're doing. I don't hear Radio 1, so I don't get affected by that at all which is a brilliant thing, I think, because sometimes it can make you paranoid and make you lose your bottle a bit. It's great now because I'm more in touch with my real roots and my read influences and not just what's going on around me."

So what do you listen to? "I always listed to K-Rock which plays a lot of English music. It's the only thing I can bear to listen to. Funnily enough, it seems to make more sense to me here than it does in England because actual good English music is played more on K-Rock than it is on English radio!" So you still feel British? "Oh, more so here than I do in England. I never felt English in England.... I suppose that's because I'm Irish. Haha. It's really funny but when I was interviewed last year in Britain, I remember I used to say that I felt a citizen of the world and that I didn't like the notion of passports or nationalities and that I loathed nationalism. Well, I still do but, when you come away from you're roots, that's when they become more important."

So what do you miss most? "Apart from my sisters, the TV." It's pretty much unwatchable isn't it? "well, yeah, but you can get some good things once you work out what's on what channel. There are three channel that I've found to be good. One of them buys huge chucks on European television all the time. Like 'Big World' is on there at the moment and there was an amazing documentary about Kerouac the other night. You can get some great things if you know where to look. "I'll tell you what I really love about living here - Venice Beach. I just love it there. I feel so at home. It's such a brilliant place. Every freak in America obviously migrates to Venice and on Saturdays and Sundays there's just an incredible weirdness. I was there last Saturday and a man came up to me, an amazing looking man about 50, really well-built with a really sort of worn-in face, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Have you got 30 seconds to hear a poem?' The he started to go, 'Life. The meaning of life...' And he performed this poem in a booming Shakespearean voice, all about his attitude and his experiences. And then he goes, 'If you liked it, would you like to show your appreciation?' So I gave him some money and he said, 'Thanks a lot. I've got another one. Would you like to hear that?' and he gave me a poem for free". Sounds like a mad man to me.

"They look that way because of a combination of diet, exercise and surgery," says Marcella. "They're all trying to be something, somebody else. They all want to be actors and actresses." "But their idea of looking good is looking like this cardboard cut-out of Bo Derek. Yeuch!" says Siobhan adjusting her baseball cap. "Weird." And with that the odd couple head off up Vermont in Marcella's European two-seater sportscar, driving North and the sun sets red on the Hollywood Hills. Extract from Melody Maker, March 1990.