Q Magazine, May 1999

Behind the heavenly pipes and pneumatic kisser of Texas's Sharleen Spiteri there's a pop conquistatrix with three nasal fractures and the brass balls to demand her dues. Now-she's only gone and made the sexiest music of her life. "I'll give you a run for your money," she twinkles to Phil Sutcliffe.

Sharleen Spiteri is foaming. "I don't like lies, -I don't like bullshit," she boils, her fist leaving an impression on the arm of her chair. "Either have the balls to tell me the truth or get out of my face. I can't stand men who won't do that:"

Snuggled in the back room of her southside Glasgow. home, Spiteri has been provoked by the recollection of her 1997 encounter. with Danny Goldberg, former head of Texas's American record label, Mercury. It occurred after the US release of the otherwise four- million-selling and career-refurbishing White On Blonde had been botched (only 100,000 sold).

With Texas co-manager Rab Andrews, Spiteri flew to New York hoping for a salvage operation. Before they entered the executive sanctum she glanced at her watch.

"Eight minutes: that's how long our entire relationship lasted:" She laughs acidly. "He must have known Mercury had completely fucked up White On Blonde - the promotion was shit, the distribution was shit. But he got straight into a fussy-fussy bad mood, full of stroppiness. I sat there laughing in absolute disbelief."

She could see Andrews growing edgy, but gestured for him shut it: "I thought, Leave it; -lie's giving me a ticket to get of the label:"

Presently, they walked out. In a diner down the street, they joined Texas founder Johnny MeElhone. "Sharleen's face was red with rage when she told me what happened," he recalls.

Two years on, she still rails: "I hated the sight of Danny Goldberg. 10 sec him again I'll swipe him, believe you me: He did me wrong. Back home I went straight in to see Alain Levy (then head of Polygram music division). I told him; Look, you've got to let us go in America. If' you don't I won't make another record!"

With Spiteri ballistic and White On Blonde a smash, Levy said he was sure he could come up with something.

But why was her long-time songwriting partner McElhone - a 20-year hitmaking veteran of Altered Images and Hipsway before Texas - drinking coffee a couple of blocks away? Outsiders might imagine he'd take a leading role in head-to-head negotiations.

"The people in America were not represent- ing us properly, so why should I be signed to them?" counters Spiteri. "It was me that decided we had to face Goldberg, so I was going to sort it out. It's not that I walk into meetings with my power suit and a briefcase. It's a matter of having pride in what you do."

With that she has to leave us temporarily, so that the singer and guitarist Ally McErlaine can catch the last few minutes of afternoon visiting at Glasgow's Victoria Infirmary, where McElhone lies prostrated by the crutch-clutching torment of kidney stones.

Even while the two are away, the house buzzes. In the front room, new "additional" guitarist Tony McGovern picks out Paul McCartney's Blackbird. Spiteri's sister Corinne and her young daughter Lauren have dropped by and are snacking in the small conservatory. Keyboardist Eddie Campbell can be heard tinkering with live arrangements for The Hush, the album lately completed on the array of computers, samplers and consoles which line the walls of Texas's box-room-size studio.

With its dark decor, candlesticks and coal-effect gas fires, Spiteri's Northern redoubt could hardly be more friendly-familial comfy-cosy.

And yet it seems that Spiteri's whole life prepared her to be the woman to take on the world and Danny Goldberg.

GROWING UP IN the city, she was always a tough kid, though generally too well raised for scrapping- except for the day when she got herself suspended from school. "I walked into class and this girl said, Spiteri, you fancy my boyfriend. I said, No, I don't. 'Cos I didn't have any boyfriends at school. But she grabbed my hair and... (very quietly) I lost it. It took two teachers to pull me off" Nails or fists?

"Fists. I'd never scratch anyone." She still seems bemused, even awed, by the memory.

With her robust ways what she did constantly was break bits of herself. She fell down steps and broke her wrist, twisted a leg so vigorously the kneecap ended up facing backwards, tried to evade a smack from her mother and the backswing accidentally snapped a finger. Then there was her nose: ran into a tree at nine; hit by a brick when playing commandos on a building site at 11; dived headfirst into the tots' end of a swimming pool at 13. In school photos she was always the girl with two black eyes.

"People have said I should get it fixed now because it looks so bad-there's a build-up of gristle," she says. "I'm like, Naaah, what if I came out sounding like Bonnie Langford. Imagine: Oh God, did you keep that gristle? Can you put it back exactly where it was before?"

Despite all this, she grew up practically fearless, a person who always wanted to climb and never considered falling. "When anyone looked for me I was always up high. When I was about 14 and we'd moved out near Loch Lomond, there was this wicked tree we called the monkey puzzle tree although it wasn't really. The branches were matted over each other and on top it was so flat you could stand on it like a platform. Me and my friends used to take a radio up there on a Sunday, he on the tree and listen to the chart show. It was cool:"

Then her school introduced her to mountaineering and she discovered her outdoor, Land Rover-driving alter ego.

"At weekends we'd go up to Gare Loch climbing and abseiling. Heeeeeey, jumping down a mountain was nothing to be afraid of." She graduated to free climbing - no ropes. "I do it for the can-we-climb-this? To get away from popstar-bubbleland. You reach the top of a mountain absolutely knackered and there's your reward, my God, the silence, the air, the freedom. You look down and, Jesus, the colour, the purity. You look up at the sky and you think, How does that work?" She giggles at the pleasing silliness of it. Aren't you ever frightened?

"Yeah. After we finished White On Blonde, in the Cuillans up on Skye. I go with my boyfriend Ashley (Heath, editor of fashion mag Arena Homme Plus, Spiteri's squeeze since 1995 and co-habitee of her second home, near Regent's Park). We took slightly different routes and as I was coming up to a ledge I did this stupid thing (she reaches up high and away to her left). I overstretched and my body flew out so my whole weight hung on one hand with a sheer drop below me. No ropes. I absolutely thought, I am not strong enough to hold on here, I am gonnae die. And then, -I don't wannae die, please God don't take me!"

What happened next, after an eternity of seconds, was all Hollywood and utterly real. Not knowing that his life was about to take a Clint Eastwood turn, Heath looked back and thought, Where's Sharleen got to? He peered over the edge expecting to mock her sloth, saw her hanging by a fingernail or two, reached down with one hand, grabbed her wrist, and hauled her up like a rather wriggly and squealing sack of King Edwards.

"My knees buckled and I knelt there on the ledge shaking. Facing death is no thrill for me at all, I can assure you."

But she went back on the mountain the next day to make sure she hadn't lost anything of herself. And, cripes, her boyfriend had saved her life.

"Yeah, but I'd expect him to save my life," she insists, seeming anxious that the weight of gratitude should not be seen as unbalancing the relationship. "If the situation came along I would do exactly the same thing for him:"

As it happens, The Hush is an album of the most beautiful love songs ...

HER GREAT ESCAPE is not the only reason why Spiteri peppers her discourse with acknowledgments that "I've had a really lucky life". The open-armed embrace of large vistas, cultural as well as topographic, is written in her cosmopolitan DNA: Italian-French on her father Eddie's side, German-Irish on her mother Vilma's.

Everything about her led to travelling the world. Eddie Spiteri was a seaman: "When I was little he studied for his ticket as a ship's captain. There were charts all over the floor. I learnt what all the different coloured buoys mean, and if someone asks me to spell a word I still go, Sierra, Tango, Echo, the alphabet code. When he qualified, he took the whole family for holidays on his ship: Rio, America, all over Europe. I lived like a princess. Hundreds of ice creams. The crew taught me how to gamble-poker, blackjack. It comes in handy on the tour bus: OK, let's play cards, and let's play for money. Growing up with men had an important effect on the way I am now; IT give you a complete run for your money."

But if the maritime connection tended to tow her further away from the feminine side of her nature, her short yet glamorous and, again, globetrotting first career gave her a crash course in women. Taking a Saturday junior job with international hairdressing chain Irvine Rusk at 16, Spiteri learnt the value of talk and touch.

"What do hairdressers have to be good at? This..." Her fingers make a yapping mouth. "Cutting someone's hair is very intimate. You touch a stranger and it's, I'm gonnae change the way you look. Except what you really say is, My name's Sharleen, how are you? You instil confidence and their guard comes down. They tell you all their stories. A woman has an appointment at three and her husband was in the salon two hours earlier with another client of mine who he's sleeping with, which the first woman's daughter had told me about in confidence at ten that morning. Hairdressers know everything:"

But she had far more to offer than a confessor's ear. She was such a sharp student that within a year, at 17, Rusk's promoted her from work experience to international rep and tonsorial tutor. She was despatched to France, Italy and America to refine the skills of the local coiffeuses. In sum, it was one of the greatest jobs a girl could wish for.

Yet somehow it turned out that her exotic blood, the broken bones, the big fight, the monkey puzzle tree, the mountains, the master mariner, the ocean, the sailors, the cards and the black and white Telecaster she had just bought after seeing Joe Strummer cut his hand and bleed all over his guitar on the television opened up such boundless possibilities to her that when she was introduced to Johnny McElhone she was prepared to jack it all in and run with the raggle-taggle rock'n'roll gypsies.

"THE DOCTOR TOLD me, You'll be pissing glass," the bassist gallows-laughs down the phone from his home. The best medical advice re those kidney stones is wait and see; in due course they'll all ping the porcelain. "Tell the nurses on Ward 2 thank you, though. There was me really scared worrying about what this horrible pain might be and they made me feel almost relaxed:"

Fortunate, in the circumstances, that he too comes from a background of unusual character. His father, Frank, was Labour MP for Glasgow Gorbals, the legendary slum later rebranded as Queens Park. McElhone grew up there, the streets a maelstrom, his home a roadhouse to visiting political luminaries such as Tony Bern, whom his father served as Parliamentary Private Secretary. Johnny last saw his old man in 1982 when he drove him downtown for the start of a protest march.

Frank had a heart attack and died on the route. "I was always glad I wasn't away with the band at the time. After that my mother, Helen, took over the constituency for a few years. I'm proud of them both. They were sincere and they spent all their time working for people."

Beyond an enduring fascination with John E Kennedy memorabilia, McElhone never looked likely to follow in his parents' political footsteps. More inspired by The Clash than any party manifesto, in 1979, at 15, with school pal Clare Grogan he formed Altered Images (his older brother Gerry managed them, as he did Hipsway and now, with Rab Andrews, Texas).

It was the start of a remarkable, though unheralded, pop career with three quite different Top 20 bands. McElhone likes to see it all as a matter of what-happened-next without plot or theme. "You can't plan a creative process," he avers, though his musical life is testament to the idea of progress, an idea that finally found its full expression in Texas.

For most of Altered Images' four-year life they were sweetly naive new wavers. Then in 1983, despite continued success, McElhone and Grogan conceived a revamp: she took to off-the-shoulder ball gowns and elbow-length gloves while, on their final hit Don't Talk To Me About Love, McElhone thumbed funk bass, reflecting the influence of Chic and Marvin Gaye.

Later that year Gregory's Girl star Grogan was offered a leading role in Local Hero and told the band she was leaving. McElhone put a move on local hopefuls White Savages, joining them and effecting their transformation into soul-inflected Hipsway.

They had a UK and US hit with The Honeythief, but McElhone's position as the interloping outsider soon proved untenable: "By 1986 when we were on a European tour supporting Eurythmics all I could see was an uphill struggle and a lot of infighting. Then Annie Lennox got ill and, rather than stay in Amsterdam for a week, I flew home. That's when I met Sharleen. I'd told my brother I was interested in playing with a girl singer again - I just like their voices, you know. It was fate:'

So two people took life decisions. Typically, in their first hour together she babbled and he said two words. But when she sang Do You Really Want To Hurt Me the phlegmatic McElhone thought her voice was "unreal, effortless, as soon as I heard it I knew I couldn't go back to Hipsway" Their first attempt to write produced I Don't Want A Lover- Texas's debut hit three years later- and the salon star began to think, "I've grown up watching him on Top Of The Pops. But he doesn't seem jaded at all, he's really patient with me, really appreciative of what I'm doing..."

McElhone put together a band of novices McErlaine, then 17, is the other survivor from the original Texas line-up - because "I wanted people who are fresh, who didn't know any rules". Just like the Altered Images school pals when they set out. Quietly, of course, he became the leader. "Every band needs one. I had the drive and push," he says, slipping the veil of reticence for just a moment. H had the band he would never let go of.

JUST AS WELL. Texas took a long time to reach full flower and McElhone's steady commitment and calm nurturing proved crucial to their survival, especially the singer's.

For all her teenaged spunk, her spirit was nearly extinguished before they even made a record. When Chic's Bernard Edwards signed to produce them she was ecstatic. When he stalked off, tangled in divorce and drugs, before a note had been taped, she was in despair. "I felt tricked," she says, furiously recalling her week in a plush Los Angeles studio without once opening her mouth to sing. "I was a fan. You love music, you think he must love music, but BANG!, no he doesn't care at all. That was horrible. It ages you." So overwhelming was her disappointment that back in Glasgow she actually told people, "I want to die".

Diverted from the danceable route which might have brought them to White On Blonde sooner, they struck gold with the Ry Cooder-ish Southside album and I Don't Want A Lover. But soon Spiteri's soul was in tatters again, this time because of the backlash against their success.

For a few months they had been cosseted. Then suddenly the second album, Mothers Heaven, was going "horribly wrong". Around them- though not in the band, Spiteri stresses - friends were wrecking themselves on drugs. All the media and the record company could do was carp. "It was ripping us to bits," she sighs. She felt rejected, scorned, flattened. "My world crashed down."

McElhone's didn't. "Sharleen couldn't understand the let-downs and the backlashes, but I was used to it," he shrugs. "I'd been through all the ups and downs with Altered Images:"

He had no immediate solution to their woes himself, but he supported her - "He's great at egging me on, winding me up" - and Texas pressed on. However, in 1993, when their third album Ricks Road saw a further decline - "We were sinking," says Spiteri, "Toes, ankles, knees..." - for once he laid down the law. It wasn't the record company to blame, it wasn't their producers, i wasn't the media. It was the band. In particular, it was Johnny McElhone and Sharleen Spiteri. He remembers announcing, with typically thunderous absence of flourish, "We haven't written song as good as I Don't Want A Lover. Until we do we won't have any greater success:"

Coincidentally or not, about this time something extraordinary happened to Spiteri that washed all the grief away.

"I was 26. We were still promoting Ricks Road but I was here at home. One night I went to my as usual. The next morning, TING!, I wok up a different person. Calmer. A lot more at ease with myself. I wasn't angry any more. I actually looked in the mirror and my face had changed. From a girl to a woman. The stress and tightness was gone, all that anger, like oooowa! (She lets her face slump slack, brightens, snaps her fingers.) Gone! It wasn't my birthday, I wasn't in love, I wasn't in my relationship with Ashley then, nothing. After that it was, Right, I'm ready to take over the reins, I'm coming through:"

New Sharleen, New Texas: one of British pop's more notable transformations. With a striking degree of mutual trust and generosity they focused utterly on the collective aim. While Spiteri gathered herself via a year in Paris - exchanging song ideas with Glasgow by answerphone-McElhone, McErlaine, Campbell and drummer Richard Hynd (last year replaced by Mancunian Mikey Wilson for "not-working-out" reasons) slogged from noon to midnight daily, installing the studio at her house, then absorbing the '90s post-hip hop approach to recording (with tutorials along the way from Rae & Christian in Manchester and Wu Tang Clan's Method Man and RZA in New York).

It was very difficult. Campbell: "The manuals! It was like starting over." McErlaine: "I had to change my whole way of playing, forget slide guitar. I knew I was fighting for my place in the band. But we all gave White On Blonde every ounce of everything we had."

And it worked. After a three-year interlude, Texas were suddenly up there with the great unfashionable UK triumphs of Simply Red (Stars era), The Beautiful South (Carry On Up The Charts) and, currently, The Corrs.

In Our Lifetime, the new single out on April 19 and on our radios now, opens with a snatch of scratchy stylus in vinyl groove, then a dislocated swirl of classical strings, then swallow dives into the real business of the next four minutes via a cod Chinese xylophone effect which introduces a languorous Sharleen Spiteri - possibly reclining beneath a beach umbrella on the golden sands of, say, Phuket - enjoying some swooning reflections on her love and, indeed, her loverman. Very Sharleen with its sea scene, "You'll always swim for shore", and its tactile teasing, "Now reach out, you can touch me". The song is an apt taster for The Hush, due on May 10, an album which takes the White On Blonde makeover to a natural conclusion, the Texas of Southside the faintest shadow, all muso considerations re chords and solos joyfully drowned in the sensual sound and infinitely flexible flow of the machines.

With barely a pause after the White On Blonde tour, Texas began recording on New Year's Day, 1998. Sole producer for the first time, McElhone came to the task drenched in Prince, 1999 to Sign O' The Times, and dedicated to a new credo: "At the end of the day, Sharleen's voice is the main thing. What we're creating is the best possible background for her."

While they recorded, in case the spirit moved her and she rushed in from buttering bagels or whatever hollering "Let's do it!", vocal mics were always open in the studio and in a cupboard where she discovered "really good reverb". With Marvin Gaye's supervisory presence embodied in the studio's lo-tech talisman, a tatty melamine and plywood Wurlitzer which used to belong to him (£ 800 at auction), Spiteri still took her vocals Gaye-style lying down or at least laid back with her feet up on the console.

Once she was set-and despite denials of emulating Gaye's other pre-warbular ritual, an envig- orating wank-what she sang was simple: sex. "In my flip-flops and my dirty jeans, yeah. It's a very sexy record. A bit of Baccara, Abba, Roxy Music. Loads of sex in them, they were always, Haaaa (a breathy sigh). It's easy to go, Chhhh! (mime and sound effect of ripping her shirt open). But when you become confident you can be naturally sexy. Ooze sex. Imagine. Just imagine...

"I write from experience, the way I feel. I mean, In Our Lifetime is a personally important song, (sings) `Once in a lifetime/You have seen what I've seen'. I'm talking about a relationship where for the first time in my life I've met someone who I'm equal with. (Sings) `I'm standing undressed/But I'm not naked'- I'm opening up completely."

FOR CHRISTMAS, SPITERI, a devil for the DIY, got a Black & Decker drill from her parents. She also got a new US deal for Texas from Doug Morris, global CEO of Universal which now owns the Polygram labels. On this occasion, post-White On Blonde, she was accompanied to New York by John Kennedy, the company's UK boss.

"I said to John (smacks her hands together like a gunshot), Look, I want to sort America out. Let's phone Doug and tell him we're coming over to play him The Hush," she says. "And Doug was fantastic. A true lover of music. He listened from beginning to end! He got it. I went, I love you and I want to be on your label. Let's make records!"

Of course, talking Music Industry Bollocks is all part of her job. Whereas snidey cynicism certainly is not. She really can't be doing with hackneyed jibes about the "familiar" ring of several Texas melodies ("Nobody's suing us and they would if we'd stolen anything") or the blanket coverage they got from Chris Evans on Radio One and TEL Friday when White On Blonde came out ("Naturally we'll play the show again if he likes the record-we've been mates for ten years"). And she doesn't believe the bastards will ever grind her down again as they did during the Bernard Edwards and post-smash backlash episodes.

So she's invulnerable now, even if The Hush proves a complete flop?

"I don't think I've ever been vulnerable at any point in my life, I really don't:" She starts to crank it up, surprisingly fierce. "I hate it when anybody doesn't believe in themselves. I don't like to be in a room with negative people, I feel it the moment I walk in and I cannae stand it, 'cos I'll get into a massive argument with them, I'll be straight there saying, What is your problem?"

Not much cop in a personal crisis then? "Oh no, I wouldn't say that. Being in a crisis needn't mean you're negative. Not if you're trying to find a way out. But if someone's like (she does `weepy'), Oh woe, life's no good, I'll be, For God's sake stop being a bloody greetin'-faced git and do something about it! Some people like to wallow. I don't have time for them. I know I can seem very harsh. When I come out with it they'll say, I .can't believe you just said that. But sometimes, later on it's, I'm really glad you did.

"The thing is, if I'm down it makes me feel physically sick. I don't like it to touch me. It's a domino effect. One day you feel bad the next it's worse and then it goes deeper and deeper until it's eating away at you. It's positive energy you want around you, it makes you feel reassured, secure, happy."

SHE SITS BACK, the ghosts of negativity exor- cised once more, her band at play in the studio, her sister pottering in the kitchen, her niece e-mailing 10th birthday party invitations in the next room, her big solid house dark and warm about her. Reassured. Secure. Happy. Indestructible.