Sandie Shaw

by Bob Stanley

Sandie, more than any other sixties girl, was very much the girl next door...

The story goes that if you meet someone 'off the telly' they are inevitably a lot smaller than you were expecting, with a normal sized head to compensate. I remember meeting Louise Redknapp (nee Nurding) at a Radio 1 Roadshow and wondering why this small child was sat on her own, looking unhappy and unaccompanied.

That wouldn't be the case with Sandie Shaw who is just as tall and impressive in real life as she comes across in pictures. The one-time Sandra Goodrich got her showbiz break in classic style when she tagged along with a local Dagenham group, harmony masters Tony Rivers & the Castaways, who were on the bill supporting Adam Faith at a show in Hammersmith. This gave Sandra the opportunity to pop backstage, where Adam was treated to her impromptu version of Doris Day's Everybody Loves A Lover. He was highly impressed and told his manager Eve Taylor about this new discovery. Taylor rechristened the teenager Sandie Shaw and a deal with Pye was quickly in the bag. Her first single, Chris Andrews' terrific As Long As You're Happy Baby sold nothing, but her second was a version of Burt Bacharach's (There's) Always Something There To Remind Me which went to number one in October '64, the first of eight top ten hits.

Sandie, more than any other sixties girl, was very much the girl next door. She had been working in the offices of the Ford car plant in Dagenham when she took that fateful trip to Hammersmith. Girls could aspire to be her (Dusty was too glam, Marianne too perfect, Petula too cosmopolitan, Cilla too gawky) and boys thought she was a realistic crush (maybe they'd bump into her at the bus stop and take her to a Golden Egg). She had a long bob and horn-rimmed glasses and a fabulously bored look. There's a terrific clip of her rehearsing for Top Of The Pops, standing in position as the cameras work out how they are going to shoot her. Sandie half-heartedly mimes to Girl Don't Come - she might even be chewing gum - and looks bored out of her skull, as if she's done it a thousand times before. Girl Don't Come, let's remember, was only her second hit.

Pop correspondent for Queen magazine in the sixties, Nik Cohn told a story about meeting her around the time of Girl Don't Come, when she had just broken through. Sandie didn't have much to say for herself, looking at her nails or out of the window and answering most questions with a 'dunno'. A year later he met her again, now several hits into her career; no longer Sandra Goodrich from Dagenham, she had evolved into international pop star Sandie Shaw, more confident and more worldly. She still looked at her nails, but now she replied 'ca va' and 'comme ci come ca'.