Lone star

SHARLEEN SPITERI's father, Eddie, was a captain in the Merchant Navy, working away from home for months at a time.

He would arrive back in Glasgow in the middle of the night, and the little girl always knew her dad was home because she would be woken up by his LPs blasting out. It might be Fleetwood Mac's Rumours or something by his beloved Bob Dylan. Whatever the song, for his daughter music signified family, togetherness, the return of a man she loved.

Then, when she was around nine years old, her parents gave her a great gift – their old record player and a bunch of 45s. Among these was Nancy Sinatra's 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin' '. She put the needle on that record and suddenly music meant something else – sex, aggression, female strength in the face of male infidelity. Not that she understood any of that at the time, at least not on any conscious or articulate level.

"I didn't know what I was feeling, but I knew that song was making me feel a wee bit strange," Spiteri recalls, having just treated me to a fragmentary acapella cover version. "Now I realise it's such a filthy record – just the way she sang things, and the sass and the strength. What she was saying is amazing."

More than 30 years on, 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'' serves as a sonic and attitudinal blueprint for Spiteri's debut solo album, Melody, a record that deals directly with loneliness, the break-up of family and the departure of the man she loved; it's all about her split from Ashley Heath, her partner of ten years, and combines the best of two Sinatras – the nocturnal melancholy of Frank with the heel-stomping defiance of Nancy.

"From the moment Texas put out 'I Don't Want a Lover', I've had the record company asking me to do a solo record," she says. "It wasn't
something I ever considered. It was always about being in my band. But a lot of things changed. I split up with the father of my daughter." In the course of this interview, she doesn't once use his name; nor does she refer by name to her new partner, the chef Bryn Williams.

"Maybe I changed at that point as well," she continues. "I was in a situation I hadn't foreseen. I was alone, just me and my daughter.

All of a sudden, I had lived through the thing that was going to enable me to make a solo record. So I needed to do this myself. I needed to do this for me. It was almost as if I had to get it out to be able to move on."

We are in a small, windowless room in the offices of Spiteri's public-relations company.

It's more interesting than this sort of space usually is. There are scented candles and chocolate cup-cakes on the table; on one wall, there's a huge black-and-white photograph of Sid Vicious with his shirt off. The last time I interviewed Spiteri was in 2003, shortly before the release of Texas's Careful What You Wish For. She was wearing tight black jeans and red Converse shoes, her roughly chopped fringe falling into her eyes. New York punk meets peely-wally Weegie, it was a look that might well have been described as Chrissie Hyndland.

Today, she's rather more Dusty Springburn in a black dress and matching make-up; her jet-black hair is and piled high, falling forwards over her left eye in a sort of elegantly collapsing beehive. Although she has lived in London for many years, Spiteri's accent is still pure, unvarnished Glaswegian; she says 'thegither' for 'together', as in 'a bunch of old hippies in some room rollin' around thegither' – her scornful description of yummy-mummy yoga classes. Texas are on hold for the moment.

Everyone is busy doing other things. The group hasn't split up, but Spiteri has no idea whether they will make another album together. Her focus, for the moment, is Melody and her five-year-old daughter Misty. "Oh, she's great – cheeky as hell but funny and nuts. She's obsessed with Amy Winehouse. Half my life's spent singing that bloody record with my daughter with eyeliner on."

It is almost four years since Spiteri split from Heath, a journalist and magazine publisher. Though they never married, in Spiteri's head and heart they were already there. Always guarded about her personal life, she won't talk about the way the relationship ended, but is fascinating on the subject of how she got over it. Apparently she told herself: "You know what? No matter what's happened, no matter how upset or sad you are, nobody died and it's not that big a deal. It's difficult, but you'll get through it.

It won't kill you. Let's move on."

She makes what must have been a painful process sound simple. "Sometimes you've got to think of things very straightforwardly," she insists. "I'm quite black and white.

When I make a decision, I make a decision."

The album tells its own story, however, about how hard things must have been.

You need only read the song titles – 'Stop, I Don't Love You Anymore', 'You Let Me Down', 'Where Did It Go Wrong?' This is the first album Spiteri has made which is so direct about a specific event in her life, and though she is your archetypal strong woman – brassy, sassy and kick-your-assy – she felt able, with Texas absent, to express a more
vulnerable side of her personality. Sometimes she worried about giving too much of herself away, but realised that she had to have the guts to do so.

She has deliberately avoided such frankness in the past, and got quite narked a few years ago, soon after Misty was born, when journalists kept asking her whether we could now expect songs about motherhood.

"That's not something I'll ever write about," she says now. "Misty is just far too precious and too much mine ever to share that with anybody. My daughter inspires me every day to make music but I couldn't even begin to put what I feel for her into a song. I can't even work it out myself. I feel being a mum has been a very big part of me and a very big part of this record. My respect and love for her is so big that I had to make decisions with where I was going with my life now."

What decisions? "Because of Misty I made a decision to have an amicable relationship with her father, and to take away the safety net of Texas and produce the album on my own."

What will it be like, though, to perform these very personal new songs live, some of them addressed directly to Heath, to a room full of strangers? Singing her new single, 'All the Times I Cried', on Later with Jools Holland, Spiteri had a brief wobble when she realised she was engaged in a weird kind of public confession, but the moment soon passed. It is an odd thing, though, she admits. "I remember when my mum heard the record she looked at me and just gave me a nod, and that felt a little bit tough," she says. "It was a recognition of all the things that I hadn't said to her about what had happened. Songwriters write for a reason.

We can be quite emotional people but we're not really very good at communicating our emotions outside of music. We have an arse-over-elbow way of saying stuff. So writing songs is about all the things inside your head and all the emotions and feelings inside you that you can't explain to anyone."

I ask Spiteri whether Heath has heard the songs. I'm interested to find out how he responded to a lyric like 'If there was nothing then you should have said it when I asked if there was someone new/And it's so strange to see that you would lie to me/But then again I don't know you/Should have known you'd be the one to let me down'. She surprises me with her answer: "No, he won't have heard them because the album's not out yet." I'd have thought, though, she would have given him a copy; is she concerned about how he will react? "I think the album's very positive," she replies. "There's no hate in that record. There's nothing done with bad intent. It's not an attack. So, if he hears it, he hears it. Anyway, I've made it now."

It's true that Melody is very upbeat musically, its Swinging Sixties pop sound obscuring the lyrical bleakness. It's Blood on the Tracks disguised as A Girl Called Dusty.

Through making the album, Spiteri found "a kind of salvation"; she was finally able to articulate what she had been going through.

"I hadn't managed to say it out loud before. I didn't sit and go over it with my mates – I'm not that kind of person. I like to get my head round things on my own."

Clearly, though, it has been cathartic to get those feelings out and on to CD. "I feel there's quite a weight off my shoulders," she says. "I do feel that a very tight band has been taken off my chest and I can breathe easier. You know that thing where you can only take really shallow breaths?" She puts a hand beneath her throat and mimes what appears to be a panic attack. "Well, making this record was like taking a deep breath at last."

Spiteri feels gratified that she has taken a negative event in her life and, through songwriting alchemy, transmuted it into a positive artefact – the album. I'm always fascinated when creative people use pain as material. Often, they end up making their best work, and that's certainly the case here. What's interesting is that they must sometimes feel cause to be grateful for the personal problems that proved so inspirational.

"Yeah, it's funny," says Spiteri. "You think, 'Great! As hard as it was, I'm hopefully going to have a really successful record off the back of all that heartache.' "

She likes the idea that other heartbroken people will relate directly to her music and seek solace in it. "That would be good.

That's what music does. I find comfort in songs. I called the album Melody because, as dark as times get, singing is a great thing and lifts a lot of weight off me. Some people probably go to the gym or run things off; I sing very loud. It's like having a right good scream. When you let out that primal scream it can be painful, but you feel so much better after it."

What did she listen to following her split from Heath? "Marvin Gaye. Marvin's always there for me. I listened to 'This Love-Starved Heart' and just ended up jumping around my kitchen. It's a strong lyric but the song's so up, you just want to dance. That's me. I want to shake off that anger and energy.

That's what I love about music – it takes you away to another place. Real life stops for a minute and you can find comfort in someone else's worries that tie in with yours, and suddenly you don't feel quite so alone."

Spiteri's mobile beeps and she checks the message. Good news – she can get the babysitter to watch Misty while she's at a photo-shoot that's likely to run late. The visual side of pop, the photos and fashions and video shoots that many stars regard as a chore, is important to Spiteri and she likes to micro-manage presentation. Think of those sophisticated Juergen Teller photographs that accompanied Texas's 1997 comeback album White on Blonde. Think, too, of the video for 'Inner Smile' in which Spiteri, bequiffed and black-leathered, paid homage to Elvis Presley circa 1968. She has always been stimulated by the iconography of pop.

"From the moment I saw Audrey Hepburn sitting on the fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany's playing 'Moon River' on her little mandolin, that was it for me," she says. "That look was why I played the guitar.

Then the next thing I saw after that was Joe Strummer spitting his words out and playing his guitar with blood running down his arm. For me, a sound and a look go hand in hand. I see pictures when I'm making music. I see the way someone would stand to sing something. When I was doing 'Say What You Want', I would lie down and sing because I had seen Marvin Gaye do it. It's a bit like acting. I do get into character. I sing differently in a pair of high heels to how I sing in baseball boots."

David Bowie gets acclaim for exactly this method approach to songwriting, and the likes of Franz Ferdinand are praised for the arty way they present their music. Yet Spiteri's interest in style and influence is often seized upon by critics as evidence that she is superficial and unoriginal.

Although she has 15 platinum discs, and has sold over 20 million albums, there are still an awful lot of people in Britain who hate Texas. She believes the hostility is a result of sexism and racism – bias against her as a woman and as a Scot. Does the criticism bother her, though? "God, not at all. I've never lied about being influenced. The difference between me and everybody else is I'm behind my own vision. I don't have a management team sitting in an office going, 'Okay, this is what we are going to create.' I have my own ideas so I am able to talk about them freely. There are quite a lot of artists out there who don't have a friggin' clue what the source was of their last hit record, but I absolutely do."

I wonder whether Melody, a record that clearly comes from the heart, will change the way people perceive Spiteri. "I'm not cool,"
she shrugs. "I've never been cool. But people respect the fact that I'm a proper songwriter and musician. There is talent behind what I have achieved. Imagery is very important to me, but I'm not selling myself on my tits and my arse and being seen in the right places. I've never done that. So I can hold my head up high because I've never tried to fool anyone.

"You know what, though? Twenty-two years of doing this can't be wrong. There aren't many people in the music industry, man or woman, who can say they've had that career. So I've never really cared what anybody said. The only time I care is when journalists are just friggin' nasty – then I want to go round their houses and punch their faces in. But apart from that it doesn't really bother me. I was badly bullied at school so that's why it's not a big deal now.

When you know what a bully is, it's easy to spot them."

The bullying began during her early teens when the family moved from Glasgow to Balloch. At school, Spiteri was obsessed with music and art, and it was known that she took ballet lessons, all of which set her on a collision course with the other girls, whose interests didn't extend far beyond getting sloshed and snogged. She was also gothy and androgynous, forever being mistaken for a boy.

Unhappy, she left at 16 to study at Glasgow School of Art but dropped out to work as a full-time stylist with the city's iconic hairdresser Irvine Rusk. She became immersed in Glasgow's 1980s nightlife, and has especially fond memories of Saturdays at the gay club Bennett's, glammed-up and dancing till the sweat poured off. The flamboyant, anything-goes atmosphere of the club seems to have been quite an influence, and it's possible to trace a line through it to the goodtime soul and disco of her biggest hits.

At 17, Spiteri auditioned for a new band, Texas, which was being formed by Johnny McElhone from Altered Images. Success came quickly, with the single 'I Don't Want a Lover' and album Southside among the biggest records of 1989. Spiteri developed an interesting musical philosophy – the greater commercial success she enjoyed, the more artistically successful her work became. She believes that pop music needs to be popular in order to have any meaning or worth.

This theory has been sorely tested from time to time. After Southside, Texas spent years in relative obscurity before White on Blonde made them bigger than ever. Then, five years ago, just when they seemed invincible, Careful What You Wish For flopped. These knocks are tough on Spiteri as her self-esteem is very tied up with her success.

"You go through a period where you put on a bit of bravado and go, 'The public haven't got a clue!' " she says, "and you go,

'Yeah, well, you know, it was big in Germany.'

You do that bullshit. Still, even though Careful What You Wish For didn't do commercially what I normally do, it still sold more than most bands. I think it is a good record, but it just wasn't the right record at the right time. I want every record I put out to be successful, but you have to deal with knocks like that and move on."

It's fascinating that she uses the same sort of no-nonsense language to talk about recovering from commercial failure as she does for the failure of a relationship. She's quite tough, I think, quite stiff-upper-lippish.

Yet there is a sentimental side to Spiteri, too, and it reveals itself when I ask whether she thinks that, many years from now, she will be able to play Melody and be reminded, as if reading an old diary, of a specific moment in her life.

"All my songs are like that," she says.

"When I was 18 I wrote 'I Don't Want a Lover' with Johnny. I'm 40 years old now and the sentiment of that song is still exactly what I believe in to this day. What I was saying in that song was I want a lover, I want a friend, I want everything. I want someone that is my best mate and my soul mate, and that is how I see my partner, that is how I want things to go. That is still what I want in life, maybe more now than ever. But I didn't realise it so strongly before, and I didn't quite realise that it would be so hard to find."

'All the Times I Cried' is released tomorrow. Melody is out on July 14