Take the girl out of Texas

But when Spiteri opens her mouth, out pours a near monologue delivered in a broad Glaswegian accent, punctuated by her cackle of a laugh and a liberal amount of swearing. In fact, an hour with Sharleen Spiteri is like being dropped into the middle of the best kind of girls' night out. There are hilarious, self-deprecating anecdotes, tales of heartache, jokes about eating too many pies, tips on motherhood and talk of the perils of the sleeveless dress.

For someone with such a big personality, it's perhaps surprising that in all her time as the lead singer of Texas, Spiteri has remained something of an enigma. It is 20 years this month since Texas released their first single, I Don't Want a Lover and, despite the numerous bestselling albums, the sellout concerts, the famous friends (Madonna, Stella McCartney, etc), Spiteri has managed to maintain a relatively low profile. She rarely pops up in the tabloids or gossip magazines (apart, that is, from the time she threatened to kill Paris Hilton during a spat at the Vanity Fair party in 2006) and, although she is someone people recognise, she is not a singer who people feel they know that much about.

As Spiteri later explains, this is deliberate. She has never chased publicity, and for many years was happier to be seen as part of the band, rather than a star in her own right. But this summer she released her first solo album, Melody, which she wrote and produced. Later this month, she will begin her first solo tour. Why, after so long and at the age of 41, did she decide the time was right to launch her solo career?

"I didn't sit down and go, 'I'm going to make a solo record'," she says, tucking into a bowl of French onion soup. "I started writing and thought I was making the next Texas record. But then I realised it wasn't a Texas record at all."

The inspiration, if that's the right word, for Melody was the break-up in 2004 of Spiteri's 10-year relationship with Ashley Heath, a magazine editor and the father of her six-year-old daughter, Misty. "I did try when I was writing it to veer off and write in the third person, but it just wasn't working. Then I thought, 'f**ing hell, Shar, you're 41, you're a grown-up, you're a parent, and this is the record that you've always wanted to make'. Not that I ever wished I would have that amount of heartache, but these are songs that are written from deep, deep down and it's an album I've always wanted to write."

The album, which entered the charts at number three and has since sold more than 200,000 copies, is a homage to the kind of music Spiteri listened to growing up -- Tamla Motown, Nancy Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Johnny Cash -- but it is also a searingly honest account of what it feels like to lose the man you thought was the love of your life. Almost every track on the album expresses similar sentiments; namely hurt, anger, disappointment and the kind of fighting spirit that would make Nancy Sinatra proud.

For someone who has guarded her private life so carefully, making such a personal event public must have been difficult. "At first, I did have the doubts, thinking, 'Am I selling myself here? Am I giving something precious of mine away?'" she says. "And then I thought, 'No, I'm not. It's not precious to me'. This is something that caused me a lot of turmoil, but I haven't been negative about it. It's not a bitchy record. It's just saying, 'Look, this is the way it was'."

Far worse, she says, was when tabloid newspapers reported that Heath had been seeing another woman, and the split became the subject of gossip columns. "That was something I found horrific. I felt like I couldn't handle it at all. I've never wanted that invasion into my life. I'm the kind of person who sometimes wants to smash my mobile phone against a wall because people can contact me. I like being on my own and I like my own space, so I didn't like that one bit." Spiteri has understandably tried to keep a low profile with Bryn Williams, the 31-year-old Welsh chef she has been dating since last year.

But despite the allegations of Heath's infidelity, and the fact that the songs are a thinly veiled two-finger gesture at her ex, the overall tone of the album is anything but bitter. In the end, Spiteri found the strength to cope by reverting to what she says is her default setting of "nobody died, so get a grip". "It's like being hit with a little mallet over my head, which reminds me, 'God, you know how lucky you are?'" she says. "I had a great childhood. There has never been any major tragedy in my life.

"Yeah, I've lost people in my life whom I've loved very much -- friends and family who I wish were still here -- and I miss them greatly. But that's not a major tragedy compared with the way some people have to live their lives."

This steeliness and lack of self-pity seem to have been forged in Spiteri's childhood in Glasgow. The eldest of two girls, she says her parents taught her the value of things from an early age. Her father, who was a merchant seaman, would never lend his daughters money until they promised to repay every penny, and would hold them to their agreement. They are still a close family and, until recently, her father would join Texas on tour as part of the lighting crew.

It was at the age of 17, working as a hairdresser, that Spiteri auditioned for Johnny McElhone, a bass guitarist, who was looking for a singer for his new band, Texas. Spiteri sang an unaccompanied version of Culture Club's Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? and impressed McElhone so much that he asked her to join on the spot. She says that from the beginning, she was adamant about making the kind of music she wanted to and about what the band should look like. "People would ask me to do things and I'd say, 'Nah'," she says. "I refused to be photographed on my own. I refused to wear anything other than a biker jacket and a pair of jeans. My attitude was, 'You want to photograph me, photograph me. If you don't, don't'."

Spiteri says she felt very conscious of the fact that she wasn't conventionally pretty when she was younger, "not in the way that people fancied me anyway". This made her more determined to make an impression with her music rather than her looks. But over the years, she has cornered a certain kind of androgynous sexiness, and lately seems to have become more comfortable showing her softer side. The recent change of direction in her music has obviously had an effect on her sense of style, too.

"I don't really do the Madonna thing: I'm a cowgirl, I'm a geisha. But this look is quite a departure for me because I'm wearing dresses. Normally, I'd be in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and biker boots. But, musically, this had to move to a different place, so my brain had to be thinking in a different way when I was making the record. I'd go to the studio in a dress and high heels, because you stand differently in a pair of high heels and you deliver the song very differently.

"With Texas I jumped around a lot on stage, whereas this is a more reserved performance," she says. "I guess, because I'm giving a part of me away that I've never given away before, it's a slightly different side to me."

And while she may be wearing high heels more often, don't expect to see her frolicking in a bikini on the pages of Heat any time soon. "Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, 'God, I'm getting old', or, 'God, I wished I looked a bit thinner in this dress. I must stop eating five loaves a day'. At the end of the day, we all know when we've been eating too many pies and we need to cut down a wee bit. But whereas before we might catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror, nowadays we catch a glimpse of ourselves in these stupid magazines. It's just part of the way things are now. I'm fine with it because I'm a grown-up and I don't get it that much anyway, but I don't know how I'd feel if I was at the very beginning of my career and I had to put up with that."

Spiteri has said in previous interviews that she worries about the pressures on young women these days to look perfect, and has pointed the finger at programmes such as The X Factor, which she thinks encourage a hunger for fame that doesn't take into account the reality of living life in the public eye.

"It's not the case that I don't like The X Factor. I really like it and I find it unbelievably entertaining. But now that's the way to get seen. The thing that worries me is that when they go on to The X Factor, it's the level they instantly go to; the viewing figures, the amount of people who know who they are. It wasn't like that when I started out, that level of scrutiny. I've been really lucky that I've managed to do it my own way."

Does she think that she'll make another solo album? "I imagine there will be another solo record, but then I'll also do a Texas record after that. I don't have a master plan," she says. "Perhaps that's because of being in the kind of position I'm in and being the kind of musician I am. I'm not classically trained, I can't read music; I'm completely self-taught.

"Sometimes, not knowing the rules is what makes what I do good, because there are no boundaries for me. And that's how I've run the best part of my life."

Irish Independent