Banana Shaken

From a lonely Catholic girl to the gang of three, she drank and danced her way through Bananarama until one day she realised she didn't like the music anymore. Finding salvation through The Smiths and new playmates through The Eurythmics, she became Siobhan Fahey - wide of Dave, mother of Sam, sister of Shakespear, and the Eighties' last great re-invention.

CANNES - PRONOUNCED CON - IS A SUN KISSED HEAP OF LEGO BUILDINGS, home of the £2 packed of crisps, the £3 single-scoop ice cream and pork cracklings peeled off foolish pale bodies for free. The French Riviera is juts like the English one, except there are more English people here and the palm trees aren't made of Taiwanese plastic. Welcome to Torquay at 90 degrees in the Shade. Somewhere along the villas on the fir-tree lined hills, where tennis balls thwock, crickets crick and cicadas sick, past the construction cranes building hotels pour les grockles (tourists), a shy English woman is putting on her make-up for a photo session with THE FACE.

A few short months ago she was washed up on a beach of Stock, Aitken and Waterman shingle, an irritant interest only to those who count hits and cash. Now she's Shakespears Sister, a bard for a generation that forgot how to be real and found that it wasn't too late to remember. Siobhan Fahey is the leader of the world's greatest two-car garage band, yet another Eighties re-invention.

A meeting at the house she shares with her husband, Eurythmic Dave Stewart, is ruled out: she doesn't want the pop star lifestyle recorded in print. Photographer Juergen Teller says the house isn't particularly ostentatious: a pool, some nice furniture, a two-car garage where Siobhan parks her French-plated Alfa Romeo. Comfortable in comparison to the flat in Holloway Road she used to live in, but as Juergen points out, the sort of thing a well-off doctor could afford. Excuse me miss, your paranoias showing.

Shyness seems a more likely explanation when you meet her. She's not the sort of pop star to fall into your arms at the first meeting (nor, unfortunately, at the second or third) and her manner is like her manor: elegant, not showy. Perhaps that cliched English reserve is an important component of her nature, but there wasn't much evident of that when she was one of those Bananarama girls, out raving, pissing it up and maybe worse. Like her album "Sacred Heart", this sister of Shakespear (the 'e' was dropped due to a last minute mistake in the artwork for the first single) has a complicated mix. "There's no point in doing the obvious," she says. "That's one of the major reasons I left Bananarama: you knew what the records were going to sound like even before the songs were written."

Night is falling. The tinkle of a piano blares from a loudspeaker across a liver-shaped hotel pool, loud enough to render those who wish to avoid Timeless Melodies unable to do so. You're supposed to think of Casablanca; but the tuning of the piano is such that it sounds like a Cockney knees-up. Should Siobhan break into My Way or "The Polka From Pennsylvania" - she once worked in an East London pup where they put the flags out for the Falklands - I wouldn't be at all surprised. The dissonance of it firs her Take Three Girls tales. "What you saw of Bananarama was absolutely nothing what we were like as people or what inspired us at all. I was in the band for eight years, and for the first four it was a great laugh and a great 'learning process'. Because we broke the rules of what a girl group should conventionally do and sound like, I used to kid myself it was really anarchic and relevant. The next four years was a disenchantment process. Being in a band is as intense as marriage, without the sex, and you don't even entertain the idea that you're frustrated or bored, because it seems tantamount to infidelity. So it was a long time before I actually made that move.

"When I did leave the band it wasn't because I had this album burning inside of me and I was cogniscent of the fact, although I did but wouldn't admit it to myself. I didn't put anything of myself and my ideas into Bananarama; this is the first time I've been in control of a record and that's why it's so different. People might have had preconceptions about me based on what they'd read, but I might as well have come from nowhere for all they knew about what I was really like."

If it had been possible to keep it secret that Shakespear's Sister was Siobhan Fahey's band then she would have done it. From the record, few would have guessed her origins: there's the droning vocals of "Dirty Mind", the glitter Band daftness of "Primitive Love", but neither would point a grubby finger directly to Bananarama. The dead giveaway is the closing "Could You Be Loved", a chanty version of Bob Marley's song cut before the true direction became apparent. Siobhan didn't want it to be on the LP, but even that track has real singing about the unison vocals, something that her old group wouldn't contemplate.

Shakespears Sister was born, like her son, in Los Angeles. "Let me scotch the rumours that I live in LA. I don't. I was was just there from when I was seven months pregnant until a month after I had Sam. I was working through my pregnancy doing Bananarama things. But in the last month of my pregnancy I had some time on my hands and I realised that I absolutely hated when I did so desperately that I just had to leave. It didn't matter that there was just a blank space in front of me, I just had to face the future and stop clinging to the past."

At the same time, Siobhan bumped into the man from across the street, who turned out to be Richard Feldman, owner of a garage studio. After a couple of sessions it became apparent that their collaborations weren't the usual banana trifles. Sensing something better than a buck, Feldman abandoned his LA writing career and shipped out to England to continue the project, bringing with him Marcella Detroit, the guitarist-singer whose piercing wail provides such a contrast to Siobhan's sultry croons. Feldman needed to have his horizontal hold adjusted, though. "Richard was freaked out by my lyrics. Marcie just totally locked into what I was doing and was really excited by it. She would say, 'Richard, you don't understand....' The problem was (a) it wasn't routine pop, and (b) it wasn't what men want to hear women sing about. It was very much expressing a strength and intelligence, and if women expose that in themselves men don't like it. That's always been one of my quandaries. In Bananarama, people always used to go, 'Tell us about the male groupies, then,' and the fact is I'm not a flirtatious girlie kind of person and never was. Shakespear's Sister expresses my personality: reserved, inhibited, a little dark, tense...."

In fact, mysterious though it may be in comparison to Bananarama's banalities the sonnets on "Sacred Heart" are open-heart surgery: lust, angst, agony. Siobhan's psyche is on the sleeve in black and white. Tonight she thoughtfully sips her vodka. The piano plays "Just The Way You Are". Bananarama was just the way she ain't. "Well, I was really f**ked-up anyway, generally speaking. It did all happen by accident....and yet there are no accidents in this world. I was so obsessed with music from an early age, and I have a great fondness for language and it was the combination of music and language which excited me. I was too afraid to go for it, so I had got some mates together and went for it half-heartedly. "I'm neurotically shy, which was why I was in Bananarama in the first place - I needed a gaggle of girls to hide in. The trouble with growing up in England is that you are really taught to stay in your place and not express what you're really like. I spent years trying to hide in a crowd, I didn't want to stick out because you get a pile of s**t if you stick out in England. Honest to God, you don't see England until you spend time somewhere else."

Bananarama served its purpose. It was something for her to hide behind - when Dave Stewart first asked her out, she bought the girls along too. They were The Banana Bunch, terrorising clubland, and being obnoxious. "We were a little bit menacing....a gang.... I'm going red thinking about it. I spend my teens without any friends at all, so when I had them it all came out. Once we made it we were accepted, but where was it when I needed it? It was that sort of mentality." It is dark. Another drink arrives. Siobhan was a bedroom teenager and her twenties refuge was Bananarama. Now, she doesn't even need a drink. "I personally respect music so much, it's been my lifesaver. I had a very solitary teenage, it was lonely and desperate: I'd have probably topped myself it it wasn't for Roxy Music and Joni Mitchell. That music is somebody telling you what your life is like in the most poignant terms, they've been there, they know what it's like and they've come out the other end. It makes you think, maybe I'll hand around a few years and put the razor away.

"I swear to God that I'd become cynical about music before I'd heard The Smiths, because of what I was doing and what I was surrounded by in the charts. I spent the whole of my twenties getting blitzed out of my mind to escape and then I heard their music and it reminded me of what life was really like. There are a couple of tracks that made me cry so much when I heard them - 'How Soon Is Now' is the main one. It reminded me of what I really was when I was escaping to clubs and getting out of my mind. It was therapy. I became totally entraped: it was just so good to hear someone writing about real life... it;s just so bad nowadays, no wonder there's everybody taking ecstasy and waving their arms to house music to get away from it."

But Bananarama still reached people: listening to Simon Bates' Out Tune one morning (don't ask me why), Siobhan was shocked to the point of tears to learn that Bananarama's "Rough Justice" had helped a woman get over the death of her sister. That record was made when there some real banana in the band: by the time Stock, Aitken and Waterman were involved it was all E numbers. "It was very difficult for me because I didn't get on with Peter Waterman. His is an egomaniac, and a real lad. His sensibilities are so different from mine; he's not the sort of person I would ever become friends with. He's a comical character and I was able to accept him as that: when you grow up in England you learn to deal with lads. "The great thing about working with him is that he's not in the studio, he just goes around telling everyone how great they are. Mike Stock and Matt Aitken are the ones who sit in the studio and work with the artist. He was really horrible to me when Dave (Stewart) won producer of the year. He was enraged and very bitter and took it all out on me. I was stunned, really shocked and I was like, 'Get him away from me, he's said such horrible things I can't have him near me.' But he didn't come into the studio when I was there. I think he felt the same way, and because I'm not girlies and submissive, I don't think he knew how to handle it."

Things are changing in the business: the polarisation that took place in the sixties is happening again. You're either thinking (Tracy Chapman, Neneh Cherries, Shakespear's) or you're not (Kylie, Bros etc). The event that finally caused Siobhan to cross that line was the birth of Sam. "It's the most normal thing in the world to be a mum and a pop star. What was a huge turning point and what shocked me and made me love her for it was Neneh Cherry on Top Of The Pops. She was wearing this micro-mini, a bare midriff and a bra of top and she looked like a really sexy girl and then she turned to the side and I went 'God, she's really pregnant....what's wrong with it? That was brilliant, it makes such rubbish of this pretence that everyone's gotta be 18 and virginal to be on television. I'd dress to disguise it, I was misled."

The next day we meet in a cafe near the seafront. Once again, she is a curious mixture of shyness and openness, willing to reveal her anxiety but not sure she should be doing it into a tape recorder. No, she wouldn't work with Dave, because she's trying to find her own direction, and besides, it would be embarrassing, like Paul and Linda. She says she hasn't so much re-invented herself as re-discovered herself. "I sound like a real hippie, but that's what it was." So why the continued shyness? "You never lose that, but you learn to live with it. I get apologetic for living, it's pathetic. Maybe it's because I'm a Catholic! I'm lapsed, but it still has great spiritual significance for me, not because I think Catholicism is superior, but because I'm Catholicism is superior, but because it's the only one I know." At least Catholicism has a woman in the hierarchy, even is God is a geezer...

"There's a respect for women there, there are women saints, and nuns... I don't think God has a sex - sex is immaterial in the spirit world. I could have been a man in my past life: I probably was, I've got an awful lot of muscle! I believe I was about before, not because of any instinct about it but because I read some books on it and it just makes perfect sense in the context of my religion and within my concept of spirituality anyway. There's so much proof in terms of mediums and psychics with real powers, I'm dying to do past life progression as soon as I get in one place for long enough. It could point me in the right direction, what I'm supposed to be doing in this life. I was definitely a wronged serving wench in a previous life!" Perhaps she means when she was Bethnal Green barmaid...

The ex-wronged servicing wench attends the Eurythmics album launch party that evening on the beach at Juan Les Pins, Sixties playground for the Jet Set mentioned in "Where Do You Go To My Lovely" - perhaps the worst song ever written. It looks like they're still here: the DJ finds it exciting to play The Beatles "Love Me Do" twice. It was the funkiest thing he had. There are no B'rama styled excesses for Siobhan, but with crap like that one of the wheels of stone (steel wasn't invented when the Beatles were going) you could hardly expect her to be raving, despite being surrounded by the pissed and coked, some of whom are having sex on the beach in full view of the video cameras. Instead a clear-eyed Siobhan, relieved that she doesn't have to put more of her psyche on view, sticks with the Eurythmics posse, feared throughout the ligging world for their common sense.

Shakespears Sister is still part of the hype, even when the fireworks splitting the night sky are celebrating the wrong LP. Here she is with a new career ahead of her, a son, a husband full of support, a house in a super-heated Torquay, and still she's unsure of herself. She's even given half the credit to a dead playwright. The directness of "Sacred Heart" betrays it all: it seems that only Siobhan Fahey Stewart doesn't know how strong she is. Me, I grab half a packet of crisps, swap it for a 25km cab ride, and I'm outta here.

This article appeared in The Face Magazine in October 1989.

Last Updated: 26th October, 2001