Sandie Shaw
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2010
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer Sandie Shaw.
With her melodic, velvety voice, bare feet and Sassoon bob she was the epitome of everything that was swinging about the '60s.
She was just 17 when she first topped the charts with Always Something There to Remind Me and went on to become Britain's first Eurovision winner with Puppet on a String. She loathed the song at the time, but has recently come to terms with it after recording a new version which is, she says, rather forlorn.
Along with the highs have been terrible lows - years that she calls her dark ages, when, without money or creative freedom, she felt hopeless. It was Buddhism that turned her fortunes around and became central to her life. Now, she says, she cannot believe the journey life has taken her on and she is preparing for a final flourish as a performer.
Record: None of them! Book: Lecture on The Heritage of the Ultimate Law of Life by Daisaku Ikeda Luxury: Omamori Gohonzon
Producer: Leanne Buckle.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My cast away this week is Sandy Shaw. With her melodic velvety voice, bare feet and |
| 0:39.3 | Sassoon Bob, she was the epitome of everything that was swinging about the 60s, just |
| 0:44.2 | 17 when she went from Dagenham to Platinum with the number one hit always something |
| 0:49.3 | there to remind me. Highs yes but some terrible lows too. For a time she was broke and depressed. |
| 0:56.3 | For the past 30 years, Buddhism, a busy family life, an entirely new profession, and a couple |
| 1:01.8 | of hit singles along the way have turned her life around. |
| 1:05.0 | I don't want to escape from the moment. I love it, she says. |
| 1:09.0 | It's how I feel about life in general and I'm happy to dip in and out of the past. You seem to have pulled off |
| 1:15.8 | quite a neat trick to me which is that you are happy to enjoy the past and yet you're |
| 1:21.0 | happy to live in the moment you're not trying to cut yourself free from the |
| 1:23.7 | image that people had of you back in the 60s. No, that's part of who I am. I have recently |
| 1:29.6 | started working again to Sandy Shaw and trying on that hat for size. I did the Goodwood Festival, |
| 1:36.6 | the vintage festival and performed live there for the first time in 25 years and loved doing that. I love producing the whole show really enjoyed that and then I did the theme tune for Made in Dagenham. |
| 1:48.6 | And so you take time out to dip in and out now and again of the life you used to live of working in the music business. |
| 1:57.7 | This entirely new profession then, you're a psychotherapist, you run something called |
| 2:01.6 | the Arts Clinic, that's counseling people in the entertainment |
| 2:04.5 | business particularly you're known as Mrs Powell when you practice there I'm |
| 2:08.6 | wondering if the younger performers particularly know who you are as it were. Do they know you've got this great history of performing yourself? |
| 2:17.0 | I don't see people when they're together. I see people when they're falling apart and they're so interested in themselves that they don't see me |
... |
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