I never get anything I really want
Article published in Rave magazine – January 1965
Sandie Shaw: Pop Stardom: Hang on a tick, pop-pickers . . . I’ve got to get my breath back. I’ve been meeting the toppers in this business for years, but a session with Sandie Shaw!
IT’S TOO MUCH!
I ask you-what can you do with a girl who thinks that having a disc at No. 1 is just a giggle? A girl who won’t take success seriously . . . who tells people right out what she thinks of them.
While others are scheming and dreaming of a tinsel stairway to stardom. just hear how candid Sandie rates her own achievement; “When I’m married with a couple of children, I just want to look back and say I had a bit of fun once.”
There couldn’t be more than one of this dolly. After her, they broke the mould.
It’s Aston Martins and Jags for the Beatles, sports cars for Dusty Springfield-but Sandie has a hankering for minicabs. She takes one up to London from her Dagenham home every day.
A peal on my doorbell announced her arrival. I swept the door open in welcome, and in strode Sandie in her yea yea suit.
Very sporty she looked with all that check tweed, belt and knitted stockings.
In fact if you didn’t know Sandie you might think she was the leading candidate for the title of Outdoor Girl of the Sixties.
“And where did you spend this fine crisp morning?” I inquired, pouring her a ration of her favourite refreshment—a bowl of salted peanuts.
Grateful sigh
“In bed’, she said, grabbing the nuts and subsiding on to the sofa . Sandie is a firm follower of Napoleon’s advice to his soldiers: “Never stand when you can sit, and never sit When you can lie.”
“She crunched in silence for a moment, then said: “That’s how I’d spend every day if I could. Lying around with books and the telly, phoning up my friends and having them call round to see me. Lovely.
What kind of books do you read?” I asked.
Sandie gave me a goofy smile, her eyes glinting behind the tinted glasses. “Romantic novels, mostly. Specially, the ones about what’s-her-name, Angelique.”
“With the kind of life she leads, Angelique will get herself into dead trouble one of these days,” I said. “I don’t know how ‘she gets away with it.”
That’s her lookout”, said Sandie. “I just look after Number One.”
A strange admission from a singer who had zoomed into the top spot with one of the most romantic pop discs of 1964. But yet not out of character.
For Sandie Shaw is an intriguing mixture of contradictions. Inside her, a great femininity is in constant competition with a cynical mistrust of a world on the make.
“Are you a happy person?” I asked.
“No”,. she said. “As soon as I’m happy I want to kill it.”
She astonished me. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s as if it was too much for me.”
Sandie Shaw: Pop Stardom:
Sandie stared across the room. “You see, Alan, most people sort of aim at happiness and don’t quite reach it, and then it goes.”
I said, “Have you ever had a moment in your life when you felt you’d really reached _happiness?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Never at all?”’
“No. I nearly got there lots of times. But it’s happened so often.”
“Have you ever had a big “romantic upheaval, a real setback in your life?” I asked.
“Oh, every week,” Sandie replied, smiling.
“Seriously, do you mean you fall in love every week?”
“I suppose I just have crushes. It’s stupid, really. But it’s just part of living, isn’t it?”
She laughed again. “In fact, if it hadn’t been for a crush I wouldn’t be where I am today. All that bit about Adam Faith hearing me singing in the Roulettes’ dressing room and getting me discovered—oh, yes, it’s true all right.
“But the reason I was with the Roulettes that time was because I liked the drummer, Bob Hewit. He seemed on his own to me—the lonely one.”
“Your motherly instincts coming out?” I queried.
Sandie laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think it was my girl instincts. Anyway, I just wanted to pay my respects, and I went round to see if I could see the Roulettes.”
Startling
The coffee percolator began to clatter warningly. “And so here you are, a top singer”, I said, pouring out two cups.
Sandie shook her head. “No. I’m not. For two weeks I had a record that topped everyone else’s sales. That doesn’t prove I’m a good singer. It just proves I had a record that topped everyone else’s sales.”
This was a startingly different reaction from the usual self-assessment of new pop stars.
“What do you think about your own voice?” I said.
“I think it’s lousy. I think it could be a lot better. The only reason I made my first record, ‘As Long As You’re Happy’, was that all my life I always wanted to try something new.
“I’m very vain, Alan. Even at school I used to dream of myself as a top fashion illustrator, a top model, a top actress. I wanted to be talked about.
“But I didn’t really do very much about it. I hadn’t any real ambition. “I don’t think you get any real ambitions until you’re twenty or so.
“I’m seventeen, and I go where the wind blows me. I don’t see the point of trying to go all-out for success.
“I reckon if you’re meant to do something you’ll do it.”
Sandie tucked her long legs under her on the sofa and sipped her coffee.
“You looked shocked when I said I’m vain, Alan. But most people are if they’d only admit it.”
I had a quick vision of some show business people I know admitting it!
“Sandie, you’ re alarmingly frank.”
“I’m just normal. All I want is to be able to go along until I’m about twenty-two, get married and have some kids and just be ordinary.
“I just want to be able to look back and say: ‘All right, so l had a bit of fun once.’
“Somehow, I don’t think I ever will do, though. Anything I really want never comes.”
New status
Apart from the money and the new status of being a celebrity, the change in Sandie’s own personality has been very slight.
In the first place, she says:
“I don’t think anybody in the pop business does last.”
“Oh, come on, Sandie”, I said. “Why, you’ll be able to keep me when I’m a fading disc-jockey.”
She shook her head again. “It’s you that’ll be keeping me when I’m a fading singer. As long as you know the truth about yourself, it’s all right. As long as you can laugh after it’s over and say ‘Ho, ho, I fooled them for a while.
“Sandie”, I said, “you sing ‘Always Something There’ as if you were genuinely, broken-hearted. Is it tied up with some sad personal experience?”
“l do feel broken-hearted,” she answered. “It’s partly experience, partly trying to imagine how it’d feel if it was happening to someone else.
“Like when one of my friends is down and I think, ‘Poor-girl, she’s just had a bad love affair’. And then I have to comfort her, and I’m living it all myself in the end.”
One thing that struck me as we talked—with Sandie doodling away on a note-pad — was that she had arrived alone this afternoon. No admirers, no new friends or followers.
She is still very cautious about people in the pop business.
“I’m not consciously trying to conform to the pop crowd” she said.
“My closest friend is still a girl I was at school with. She’s Kath, too—with a K. In fact, she’s really my only close friend.”
Sandie Shaw: Pop Stardom:
“How does she feel about your success?”’ I asked.
“She thinks it’s funny that a stupid thing like me could do it?”, said Sandie.
“Maybe she’s right. I thought I’d be the least fanciable bird on the pop scene. I’m so tall and skinny and not like all the big buxom ones.
“But the thing is, I get letters from fellows all the time. I thought I’d get letters from kids. These are from fellows of about twenty-two to thirty . . . would I like to join them for dinner . . . would I send them a picture.”
Sandie’s mother has given up her job handling motor sales accounts to take care of Sandie’s mail. But Sandie keeps all these new worshippers at long range.
“What have you learned since you got to the top?” I asked, refilling her coffee cup.
“It’s all false,” she said very quietly. “Everybody puts on a false front. If you take it away they’re bare and they sort of retreat.”
“Do you think I’m false?” I said.
Sandie looked into her cup. “You shouldn’t ask me that, Alan.”
“Seriously”, I said. “Do I seem false on television or radio.”
Sandie gazed straight at me. “Yes. You seem to make yourself a false person. Everybody does.
“You all say the same thing at the same time every week. You get into the habit of doing it. And habit makes you live falsely. You start doing what habit tells you to do instead of doing, what you want.”
I grinned ruefully. After all, I’d asked for it.
“There you are, saying ‘Stay bright’ every Sunday when maybe you don’t feel bright at all’, said Sandie. “That’s not the real person. See?”
“Oh-ho”, I said. “Just you wait, Sandie. Just you wait until one night you ’re feeling like death and you’ve got to go out on stage and look bouncy and cheerful for thousands of people who’ve paid to see you.
“If you’re an entertainer, there’ll be time after time when you have to choose between being false to yourself or false to your public.”
Sandie thought that one over. “I don’t care what people do as long as I’m all right,” she said. “They can be as false as they like as long as they know it. The ones who irritate me are people who don’t know they are fakes.”
Principles
Where, I asked her, would Sandie’s fierce principles have stood if she had gone ahead with her dream of being a top fashion illustrator? What’s more false than the fashion game?
She said, “But, Alan, I HATE clothes. Let’s all go back to the forest and eat peanuts.”
Sandie yawned reluctantly and stretched her elegant lath of a figure to its full 5 ft. 8 ins. She put on her shoes and ate the last peanut in the bowl.
“Isn’t it sad”, she said. “With my figure I could eat anything I liked, and yet I’m not particularly interested in food. When I’m working I even forget to eat. I’ve lost six pounds in a couple of weeks.”
“Sandie”, I said, “One last thing. If you could have your greatest wish right now, what would it be?”
“To make me fall i in love with someone who loved me”, she said.
My telephone started to shrill demandingly. A van boy appeared with a batch of new releases. More work, more scripts, more dates.
Somehow, I didn’t see much chance of going back to the forest just at the moment!
Till next month, pop-pickers. All right? Stay bright.
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GEAR! 