Bananarama's drama queen Siobhan Fahey peels back the years (2024)

By Adrian Thrills for MailOnline
Updated: 09:01 BST, 11 June 2010

Siobhan Fahey will take a significant step back into the limelight tonight when she appears on the same bill as Paul McCartney and Jay-Z at the Isle of Wight Festival. A founding member of girl-group Bananarama and a global star with Shakespears Sister, Fahey is tentatively shaking off her unwanted tag as one of pop's forgotten women.

Her return is timely: her new album of dark, seductive synth-pop is self-financed, but it sits comfortably alongside releases by Lady Gaga and the new generation of electronic divas.

But it wasn't always this way. Towards the end of the Nineties, a comeback looked unlikely. Without a record deal, Siobhan was licking her wounds after a bitter split with Marcella Detroit, her collaborator in Shakespears Sister.

To make matters worse, her nine-year marriage to Dave Stewart, of the Eurythmics, had hit the rocks, leaving her as a single mother with two young sons.

'I was depressed for a few years, trying to make sense of what had happened,' says Siobhan, 51. 'I'd been dropped by my record label, despite creating two successful bands for them, and was a single mum. I had a lot to deal with.

'Any separation is painful when there are children involved. Dave and I shared the custody of our two boys, but that was the only overlap in our lives. I expected us to remain close, but Dave didn't really want that. I was pretty devastated for a long time.'

But as we chat in her East London base, Fahey, now 51, doesn't have the air of a woman in turmoil. A night earlier, she had played a triumphant show at London's Bloomsbury Ballroom. She is still buzzing from the exhilaration, even though the eye-catching silver catsuit she sported on stage has given way to more practical jeans and a T-shirt.

Her high spirits shouldn't come as a surprise. The new Shakespears Sister album, Songs From The Red Room, is essentially a solo release made with the help of guests including Specials frontman Terry Hall, bassist Clare Kenny and former Adam & The Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni.

A real labour of love, it has taken six years to produce, but the hard work is paying off.

'It has been a slow build,' Siobhan says.

'My confidence had gone. I didn't want to make music if nobody wanted to hear it.

'After things began to go wrong, I went to study literature and did some life drawing classes. I was looking for something to excite me, but nothing moved me like writing songs. So I started to make an album in fits and starts.

'I did it purely for the joy of making music.'

It was that same love of music that led Dublin-born, Hertfordshire-raised Siobhan to form Bananarama with Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward in 1981. Still listed by Guinness World Records as the most successful female group ever, Bananarama were a far cry from the pouting pop babes of today.

Their tomboy image helped them to chart their own, idiosyncratic course through the choppy waters of eighties pop and they enjoyed huge hits with singles such as Robert De Niro's Waiting and the U.S. chart-topper Venus. 'We were fans of punk groups like The Clash, but we were reacting against what punk had become - a load of blokes playing whitebread rock. It seemed more radical to start a band with three girls who couldn't play an instrument.'

After becoming disillusioned with Bananarama's 'bright, shiny pop', Fahey joined vocalist Detroit to launch Shakespears Sister.

A more self-consciously arty proposition than Bananarama, the new band allowed husky-voiced Siobhan more creative freedom. But despite the fact that the duo's second album, Hormonally Yours, was a worldwide smash on the back of the melodramatic ballad Stay, tensions between Fahey and Detroit led to a split.

'After madonna set the tone, female singers in the eighties were forced into being sexy,' says Siobhan. 'I resented that, so I dyed my hair black and turned myself into a gothic freak-show.' In 1987, Fahey married Stewart, a partnership that opened up new horizons in LA, where Siobhan still keeps a house to stay close to her sons, who live there.

'Life with Dave was interesting,' she says. 'He can be inspirational. And, because of that, he attracts talented people like Mick Jagger and Lou Reed. That was daunting for me, because I'm pretty shy.

'I've tended to avoid meeting my heroes. They aren't necessarily the nicest people anyway. The exception was George Harrison, one of the loveliest men I've ever met. He lent me his home studio to make Hormonally Yours.'

Siobhan is nervous about the prospect of appearing at the Isle of Wight festival but confident of holding her own against bright young things such as Marina Diamandis and Florence Welch.

'There's been a mood-shift in the past two years. We're moving away from boys with guitars. Pop isn't just for teenagers any more. Things are changing and I'd love to stay on the road for the next few years. It feels like a good time to be coming back.'

SongS From The Red Room is out now. Shakespears Sister play the Isle of Wight Festival today. TV coverage starts at 7pm on ITV2.