I was talking to Sharleen Spiteri, lead singer of Texas, the other day. We were both on a radio show. She was on to talk about her life in the music business; I was on to talk about hating picnics.
The first time I clapped eyes on her, I was in my early 20s, stuck at home with a broken leg. A mate of mine was working in HMV in Birmingham and got me a compilation tape of music videos they had been showing in the shop. Everyday Now by Texas was on there. In the three decades that have passed, Spiteri seems to have changed hardly at all.
Three decades a rock star? That’s some innings. You don’t get enough credit for sticking around in her business. She, and Texas, might have been better off imploding à la Oasis, preserving a legacy frozen in time, and perhaps one day reforming in a blaze of glory. Or doing a Rick Astley – be hugely successful, then less so, then all but disappear, then return riding a wave of fond, slightly ironic nostalgia, only for everyone to conclude you had been bloody marvellous all along. Beautiful. But Texas have just kept on keeping on, enjoying huge yet rather unsung success the whole way. “It’s really hard to get any credit for it,” says Spiteri. “Especially bands fronted by women.”
She told me they had just played Glastonbury. “Awesome,” she said. “Fucking amazing.” And this led me to the question that always fascinates me: how do you keep it fresh, keep giving it everything, when you have done those songs a thousand times? Where does the motivation come from?
“Well, you’ve got to respect the songs. I can never quite get over that something we created really means something to people.” And also, she says – and I love this: “When I come onstage I look around for blokes in the audience, possibly not the biggest Texas fans, possibly dragged along by their wives, and I think: ‘Right, I’m going to show you fuckers. I’ll show you how good we are and how many songs of ours you didn’t know were ours and you didn’t know you loved.’”
I’m not sure I am one of those, er, fuckers, as she put it, but having listened to Texas’s The Very Best of 1989-2023, I take her point.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
