Spiteri on me Sharleen

Often, the artist/scribe is one characterised largely by mutual fawning and plenty of backslapping. On first impression, this is not the case with Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri. Having spotted the Christmas Single sticker on Texas’ forthcoming single ‘I’ll See It Through’, I ask her about the prospect of releasing, well, a Christmas single.

“Is the 8th of December Christmas week?” she asks drily, shooting me a withering look into the bargain. “I don’t know if that’s Christmas…it seems a little premature to me.”
Hmm…hanging with the fashion pack seems to have given her some ideas. Spiteri is almost as well known for moving in some pretty snazzy showbiz and fashion circles as she is a musician. Having a husband who formerly edited The Face and Arena Homme Plus certainly helps (“Tom Ford is a good mate, and Stella McCartney is one of my best mates”).
“The link between fashion and music has always been there,” she notes. In fact, modelling Chanel for this year’s Prince’s Trust charity extravaganza certainly gave Spiteri the chance to reinforce that link and mix her two great passions.
“I love Chanel…I don’t link with any designer in particular and anything I’ve been asked to do in the past I’ve said no to, because I didn’t want to be linked with any one designer, but this was a one-off. Besides, if you’re going do something like (The Prince’s Trust), Chanel is a classic, timeless brand.”
Anyway, back to the notion of releasing a single at Christmas…or December 8th, whichever you’d prefer. How does she feel about the other singles vying for the Christmas Number one slot? “I like The Darkness a lot,” she admits, “they’re just a really good band, it’ll be interesting to see where they go from where they are. It’s not just the music; it’s the whole image as well that goes along with what they’re about, and I’m looking forward to seeing where that moves to. Pop Idol stuff, I couldn’t care less. Besides, I don’t really care about Christmas number ones, they’re normally singles like ‘Bob The Builder’… at the end of the day, as long as I have a nice chart position, I don’t care. We’ve never had a number one single anyway.”
It becomes quickly apparent that, rather than being the abrasive superstar I’d imagined, Spiteri simply doesn’t suffer fools gladly. In fact, with a mere mention of her 14-month old daughter, Misty Kydd, she softens considerably.
“She is a holy terror,” she laughs. “She is so headstrong, cheeky and determined. I’m constantly like, ‘Misty, give it a rest’. She drags a bear along with her everywhere right now, and she’s obsessed with animals. This morning, she was so cute, wearing a tigger suit, going, ‘Mama’.”
Has being a mother made the music game any more difficult?
“There’s nothing difficult about only – sometimes when I’m doing promotion and I take two or three flights a day and I’m away Monday to Friday, and I don’t take her with me, and I get really upset because I miss her and I don’t want to spend that much time away from her.”
Lest I get too comfortable about thinking her some kind of softie, her no-nonsense exterior appears at the mere mention of the paparazzi.
“If I go to a certain restaurant and I know there’s paparazzi there, or if I’m at a real paparazzi hangout, that’s fine, but if I’m at the swing park with my kid, that’s not fine. I don’t take my kid to showbiz places, there were never pictures of me coming out of hospital or anything. As far as I’m concerned, no-one has the right to take pictures of my child. Some of them are really nice, but some are horrible. We’re turning into a dumb-fuck nation of people who just look at pictures and make up their own stories. I don’t know what’s interesting about me buying a pint of milk.”
So does it bother her when she gets approached by strangers on the street?
“I’ve had loads of people ask me for autographs. What’s to be pissed off about if people want to say hello? I think it takes a lot of guts to ask for an autograph. I remember when I was about 13 and I remember coming back from school, and The Jam were doing something at Loch Lomond. And I went up to Paul Weller and said, ‘Could you sign this for me?’ and he said, ‘Sure’. And he bought me a Furry Friends bar of chocolate, and I still have the chocolate and autograph in a box in my mother’s house. When we first signed to Mercury, we were at some awards thing, and we were at the same table, so I told him I asked him for an autograph when I was 13 and he said, “You know what? I remember that, we were signing a contract, and we went on a boat to Loch Lomond, and I remember talking to these wee kids’. And one of those kids was me. From then on I always thought Paul Weller was the don. On the other hand, I had a cousin who was mad into snooker, and he asked Steve Davis for one, he said ‘Excuse me Mr. Davis…’ and Steve Davis just went, ‘fuck off’ to him. To this day when I see him on the telly I just think, ‘Fucker’!”.