| from Naomi |
| Report on "Brit Girls"
- Sandie Shaw and Lulu broadcast on Channel 4 (UK] - Dec. 13, 1997 There were two half-hour programmes shown tonight - first Sandie Shaw, and then Lulu. The Sandie Shaw programme, unsurprisingly, featured Morrissey quite heavily. Morrissey on Sandie Shaw: "She was very off-the-streets, and she was very unpretentious, and she was quite raucous and quite rough, almost." [on "There's Always Something There To Remind Me"] "I liked that because it sounded as if she'd just walked in off the street and begun to sing, and strolled back home and bought some chips. Good old Essex." "I remember Sandie telling me ... maybe privately - I don't know whether this should go out over the air, but so what ... She told me that she wanted to become famous so that she could have boyfriends and have people like her. And as soon as she became famous, she could never have boyfriends and people wouldn't come near her because they thought she was untouchable." [on "Puppet On A String"] "We don't talk about that. Not round here." " 'Puppet On A String' - was it really that bad? The answer is Yes... it was bad. It was worse than we actually think it was." There was a sequence of about five minutes on "Hand In Glove". It began with a present-day shot of Morrissey: "It was a tremendous honour". and then cut to a clip from "Earsay" from 1984, the programme on which Sandie's version of "Hand In Glove" got its first airing (not that you needed me to tell you that, of course). Since I'm here, I'll take the liberty of transcribing this too. For the record, Morrissey appears as per "Heaven Knows..." - emaciated, framed by greenery and looking more than slightly embarrassed. INTERVIEWER: How did you form this professional relationship with Sandie? MORRISSEY: Well, I just had a chance to meet her through people at the record company and... SANDIE: He's a fibber - he used to write me fan letters! [Moz fidgets; shuffles around a bit] M: Well yes... short ones, very short ones. S: The first one was quite long... M: ... but the second one was really short. S: I thought, "What a weirdo". Thankfully, this then cuts into the performance of "Hand In Glove" from the same programme, and further comment from the 1997 Model Morrissey: "It was so great for me, personally, that I don't really remember it happening. It was almost as if I blacked out for a period of time." Sandie on the collaboration: "Nobody had thought about doing anything like that before. It was totally genuine. People have copied it since... but Morrissey thought of it first. He's a real original." [Morrissey is asked "Why did the friendship end?"] "Sandie is a very highly strung person. She had success very quickly in her life and suddenly it was gone." Morrissey's input in the Lulu episode was limited to comments on a few of the songs. ["The Boat That I Row" (?) - I'm no great authority on Lulu, I'm afraid] "It's nothing to do with a boat - I'm sure you've guessed. She's more or less saying to the world, "You're not going to change me. This is me, take me as I am." ... There's always more to these things than meets the eye." "You will giggle but "I'm A Tiger" I thought was an expertly-crafted piece of ... um... genius gibberish. A great record." " 'Boom Bang-A-Bang' - [throws hands in the air] - I mean, these are records which we might not even be bothered to burn. But there's a cleverness... there is a craft."
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