Siobhan Fahey.

music
1/13/2010

Sequins or lamé?


by Tim Blanks


Siobhan Fahey has got the head-dress for her one-off performance at the Underbelly Hoxton on Friday night, but she can’t decide what works best with it to convey the hybrid persona – somewhere between silent movie siren and electro android - she’s adopted for Shakespear’s Sister.



It’s three years since Fahey was last on stage, and a lot longer than that since Shakespear’s Sister last troubled the charts,  but, with a new album, “Songs from the Red Room”, released on i-Tunes this week,  she’s ready to re-launch herself.  “I’m free now, my kids are grown, and I’ve missed performing,” she says.  “I can be who I am as an artist again.  I don’t see it as a resurrection, I see it as owning my past.”  

And there’s a whole lot of past to reclaim, decades of punk, pop, goth and glam.  Given the hiatus, “Red Room” is a remarkably confident and seductive update of them all, with a cover version of Linda Lamb’s cult favourite “Hot Room”  thrown in as a reminder that Fahey never lost touch.  “I never wanted to be one of those sad people who stick around after their sell-by date, when they’re no longer inspired and/or relevant,” she muses. “But there’s been a bit of a shift in the zeitgeist.  It feels like people seem to find it interesting and relevant again, which is exciting.”  

“It” is the strange animal that is Shakespear’s Sister, which is still, as it has always been,  essentially Fahey and whoever she feels like working with at the time (even during the Marcella Detroit years, though she didn’t feel like working with her for very long).  “I didn't mean to make a Shakespear’s Sister album,” she says of “Red Room”,  “but that’s what it sounds like, because Shakespear’s Sister is me.”   From anyone else, that declaration might sound like the very definition of a solo project,  but Fahey is adamant that such a scenario holds no appeal for her.  “Saying ‘I’m Siobhan Fahey’ is like saying ‘I’m Joe’s daughter’ or ‘Maire and Niamh’s sister’.   From the moment I left Bananarama,  I always wanted to work in a group situation. It’s like putting on armour.  It makes you larger than life, liberates you from your person-in-the-street self.”  

Still, they’re Fahey’s songs, and most definitely her sentiments,  strikingly unmellowed by age.  Though she considers the third Shakespear’s Sister album -  recorded in 1995, self-released in 2003 and essentially lost in the ether – her lyrical zenith, she insists she has tried to move away from its acidulous barbs and jabs. “They were a coping mechanism, a safety valve, but what you write comes true, so I tried to stop myself doing that,”  she says now.  That doesn’t mean, however,  that “Red Room” in any way represents the blanding of Siobhan Fahey.   The track listing embraces “Bad Blood”, “A Loaded Gun”, “Cold”, “You’re Alone” and “Bitter Pill” (which was re-purposed by the Pussycat Dolls as “Hot Stuff” on their first album. “The royalties paid for this album,” Fahey exults.)  And the music that goes with the words has the gleeful stomp of vintage glam (Bolan, Bowie but, most of all, Lou Reed in his glam Frankenstein phase.  “Red Room” could be Fahey’s “Transformer”.)  

The album’s title is inspired by Fahey’s favourite space,  the bedroom with red damask walls in her old house in Belsize Park.   A red room evokes “red rum” from “The Shining” or the secret sanctum in “Twin Peaks”  but it’s also, as Fahey points out, womb-like,  appropriate given that there is such a strong sense of things coming full circle in her life.  Big things, like happily re-settling in London, just as she was ready to up stakes and move to LA.  Little things, like recording with Terry Hall again for the first time since Bananarama and Fun Boy Three made music together in 1982.  When it comes to Fahey owning her past,  you might imagine Bananarama is the elephant in the room.   She does indeed remember a time when people would get in her face when she was on the bus and jeer, “You’re shiiiiiit.”  But they were the bad old days.  Now those same people are more likely to be sobbing, “You don’t know what you mean to me.”  Yep, Bananarama are cool, and Fahey will prove so by encore-ing with “Robert DeNiro’s Waiting”.   

And, because of Bananarama, she can also lay claim to unimpeachable pop godmother status.  When the girls first approached Stock Aitken Waterman, the producers had charted twice - with Princess and Dead or Alive.   “I wanted them to produce ‘Venus’ with that Dead or Alive sound,” Fahey recalls, “but the version they delivered didn’t have it at all.  I said, ‘Where are the cowbells? Where’s the percussion?’  So I sat with them and mixed the record.  And the Stock Aitken Waterman factory sound was born on that night.  Kylie, Rick Astley…they all came afterwards.”  

Along with a string of hits for Bananarama which made them, for a long while, the  most successful girl group of all time.  “I always felt it was ridiculous anyway,” Fahey says.  “I was a huge Supremes fan and I thought it was blasphemy.  (begin itals.) They’re (end itals.) the greatest girl group of all time.  Miss Ross would kill me.”  

But before she does that, she would hopefully give an informed opinion on the sequins-vs.-lamé debate.  “Just as long as I glitter,”  the siren sighs.


http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/songs-from-the-red-room/id338094951

TB.



Photography: Jermaine Francis.

Styling: Richard Mortimer.

Hair: Lok Lau at CLM for Taylor Taylor London.

Make-Up: Martina Luisetti using Laura Mercier.

Photo Assistant: Ben Etridge.

Digital and Retouching: Full Metal Jacket Digital.

Lighting & Studio: ProVision and ProLighting.


Special Thanks to Jon Bills @ Murray Chalmers PR.

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