Long before there was
American Idol and when Simon Cowell was still in puberty, the BBC was airing
The Big Time. The 1980 crops of contenders included a singer named
Sheena Easton. Sheena was followed around as she tried to become a professional singer -- including performing "I Can See Clearly Now" at a dentists' dinner in Glasgow. As her part on the show wrapped up, the Scottish singer was seen recording "Modern Girl."
It was a travesty. Team Sheena gave her a
Pat Benatar haircut and put her in one of Pat's jumpsuits from that era. Worse than trying to give her someone else's look, the production of the song buries Sheena's vocals under a choir of backup singers to the point that you might wonder if she can even carry a tune. (
Here for the video.)
Fortunately, post-
The Big Time, she had "9 to 5" which became a hit in England and, as "Morning Train (9 to 5)," a big hit in the US. The song would reach number one in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. The pluses for this single? The catchy tune saved the choir of singers for the chorus. So, during the verses, if you listened carefully to the poorly mixed single, you could hear a talented singer. Also, the hair was now curled. It wasn't really a look but it distanced her from the Pat Benatar knock-off allegations. The minuses? Team Sheena still seemed afraid of the voice of their singer. They also had no idea who she was. "Modern Girl" found Sheena boasting, "I don't build my world round no single man but I'm getting by doing what I can." Yet in the very next single, she's heard singing, "He works from nine to five again to find me waiting for him."
This confusion would lead to
Sheena Easton (US) and
Take My Time (UK). Not since the Beatles had a British artist released albums so different as it crossed the Atlantic. (And like the Beatles, she was on EMI.) For example, "When He Shines." That single made it to number 12 in the UK, number 30 on the US Hot 100 and number 13 on the US Adult Contemporary charts. Brits who bought Sheena's first album (
Take My Time) heard it on the collection. Americans would have to wait for Sheena's second album
You Could Have Been With Me, to get the song. They'd also have to wait until that album to really hear Sheena's vocals up front in the mix.
By the time the title track of her second album was becoming her fifth American top forty hit, she'd already gone top ten with the James Bond them "For Your Eyes Only" -- which
Lindell Kay (Jacksonville Daily News) picked as the best Bond theme last month.
And, by that time, she was already known around the world.
She'd discuss attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with Dick Clark on American Bandstand. She'd toured the world but was just getting started with her career that would find her working with
Prince,
Kenny Rogers,
Bruce Hornsby (he played keyboards on her 1985 tour) and Joan Baez among others.
Up to
Madness, Money and Music you can easily hear her working with Kenny Rogers. Their 1983 duet, "We've Got Tonight," hit number one on the US Country charts and on Canada's country chart and Canada's adult contemporary chart. (It also made it to number 6 on the US Hot 100 and number two on the US adult contemporary chart.) Following that hit, she recorded Best Kept Secret -- her first album without Christopher Neil producing, and showed a whole other side. "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)" would not just be a top ten hit but it and "Devil in a Fast Car" would point the way to more dance oriented songs in the future. She didn't forget the ballads, scoring a hit with "Almost Over You" (number 25 on the US Hot 100).
She'd follow that up with an ambitious Spanish album (
Todo Me Recuerda a Ti) which reworked her best known hits into Spanish and with
A Private Heaven which managed to shock a lot of Americans including Tipper Gore. The wife of then-Senator Al Gore was outraged by the song Prince had written for Sheena, "Sugar Walls," as was televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Tipper founded the Parents' Music Resource Council to 'combat' music like what Sheena was making.
As
Don Keko (Examiner) noted last year:
After joining forces with her three partners, Gore and the PMRC released
the “filthy fifteen.” This list contained 15 songs the group found
objectionable. The list targeted sex in Prince’s “Darling Nikki”, Sheena
Easton’s “Sugar Walls”, Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive”, Vanity’s “Strap
on Robbie Baby”, AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love Into You”, Madonna’s “Dress
You Up”, W.A.S.P.’s classic “Animal (F**k Like a Beast)”, The Mary Jane
Girl’s “In My House”, and Cyndi Lauper’s ode to masturbation “She Bop.”
The group also targeted violent songs such as Motley Crue’s “Bastard”
and Twisted Sister’s
“We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Black Sabbath’s “Trashed” and Def Leppard’s
“High and Dry” were cited for encouraging drug and alcohol abuse.
Meanwhile, Venom‘s “Possessed” freaked out the PMRC with references to
the occult.
In her book
Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, Tipper would complain that the song was "about female sexual arousal, [and[ was an even bigger hit on Top 40 radio stations." Sheena's reaction to "Sugar Walls" was much more positive. She explained to
Q in 1991 that she'd been asking Prince to write a song for her and, "It flipped me out! Ohmigod, it's so perfect! I called him up, and he said, 'Would you like to come over and sing it?' So I went in and did the vocals after I'd had a Super Bowl Sunday barbecue at my house. I won 50 bucks on the Super Bowl and got to do a vocal with Prince -- a big day for me!"
Another big day for her was March 2, 1985.
The History Channel explains she set a Billboard record on that date:
The controversial Prince-penned song "Sugar Walls" reaches #9 on Billboard magazine's R and B Singles chart on March 2, 1985, and makes Sheena Easton the first and still only recording artist to score top-10 singles on all five major Billboard singles charts: Pop, Country, Dance, Adult Contemporary and R and B.
To be fair, this same feat might have been achieved by Elvis Presley had the Dance chart existed during his heyday. But that is not to take anything away from Easton, who in her journey from the sweet and innocent "Morning Train (9 to 5)" to the salacious "Sugar Walls" accomplished a degree of crossover success that even such notorious musical shape-shifters as Madonna, Cher and Olivia Newton-John never matched. And it is also fair to point out Elvis Presley never matched Sheena Easton's additional feat of squeezing in a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance (for 1985's "Me Gustas Tal Como Eres"). For the record, the hits that helped Sheena Easton achieve her five-way Billboard record were, in order of release: the aforementioned 1981 Pop and Adult Contemporary hit "Morning Train (9 to 5)"; the 1983 Dance hit "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)"; the 1983 Country hit "We've Got Tonight" (a duet with Kenny Rogers); and the infamous 1985 R and B hit "Sugar Walls."
A Private Heaven was a huge album for her. A million seller in the US, the album spawned the number nine hit "Sugar Walls" (number 1 on the dance chart, number 3 on the R and B chart) and the number 7 "Strut" as well as the number 80 "Swear." The new audience that "Telefone" had hinted at was now present. And then Sheena made a huge mistake: Working with Nile Rogers.
Nile Rogers was a force to be reckoned with in the 70s as part of Chic. Alone? Not really so much. With Bernard Edwards, he'd produced the 1980 classic
diana (which
Diana Ross remixed leading him to demand his name be removed -- until it ended up becoming the most successful music he was ever connected to). And this had been followed by one mistake after another: 1981's
Koo Koo (
Debbie Harry), 1983's
Invitation to Dance (
Kim Carnes), 1984's
Original Sin (INXS), 1985's
She's The Boss (Mick Jagger). While those flopped, he had success with David Bowie (1983's
Let's Dance) and
Madonna (1984's
Like A Virgin). If you examine the pattern, you're left with passionate singers and Niles do not mix. But Bowie trying to butch it up and Madonna going mechanical can translate as hits. Sheena had too much fire and power for Nile so their 1985 collaboration
Do You was a real disappointing follow up to
A Private Heaven.
Just one year before, she'd been singing passionate, cutting edge songs. Now she teams up with Niles and he's got her remaking the 60s Motown hit "Jimmy Mack"? The song made it to number 65 on the US Hot 100 but it was a disappointment and reviewers tended to blame Sheena for the song and not Nile. The song (which she sings beautifully) was considered as dated as the braided tail she was wearing -- at a time when
Aimee Mann had long cut off her thin braid. The other single, "Do It For Love," made it to number 29 on the US Hot 100. Even so, Nile's indifferent production and non-danceable drones (which he would resurrect for Diana Ross'
Workin' Overtime album in 1989) did serious damage.
Sheena was helped out in 1986 by
About Last Night . . . The Demi Moore and Rob Lowe starring film was not a huge hit but it was a hit and a hit with young people. So having two prominently featured songs in the film -- "So Far, So Good" (which went to 43 on the Hot 100) and "Natural Love" -- helped Sheena walk back some of the loss the sixties cover had done.
Realizing her audience was interested in the future and not the past, Sheena went to work on
No Sound But A Heart only to see EMI refuse to release it in the US. She went into the studio with Prince and recorded "U Got The Look" for his
Sign Of The Times album.
Susan Rogers, the album's engineer, would tell Rolling Stone, "Sheena just happened to be around. He said, 'How'd you like to do this? Feel like singing?' It was very spontaneous." The single would leap to number 2 on the US Hot 100. She used the momentum to move on to MCA with
The Lover In Me. In the February 25, 1989 edition of
Melody Maker, Steve Sutherland weighed in:
Pronouncing Prince a genius may not strike you as the most original notion ever conceived but I eel the sheer frequency of his creations may have lulled us into complacency regarding his greatness.
Few, if any, can exist at his altitude so, bereft of comparison, we take him for granted, but, when he comes among lesser mortals, as he does on "The Lover In Me," the magnitude of his superiority over his contemporaries is suddenly, startling apparent.
Prince produces two songs on Sheena's LP and I suspect he wrote and played them as well under the pseudonym Joey Coco. "101" is a torture chamber of brooding need. It's reminiscent of Eurthymics at their most cutting and, miraculously, Sheena is pushed to explosions of passion. Compare the brutality of "Nothing on TV/My girlfriends bore me" with the cliched "I wanna be your fire/ I wanna be your rain" from elsewhere on the album and Prince's weird, fresh perspective on the blessed curse of love has never been clearer.
This was a Sheena album to fall in love with and then some. The title track hit number 2 on the US Hot 100 and number 2 on the US dance chart. "101" -- written by Prince under the name Joey Coco -- went to number two on the US dance chart.
Doing TV commercials for a Bally's Total Fitness (which utilized "Love In Me") and appearing as Don Johnson's bride on
Miami Vice certainly helped raise awareness of the album but it may also have been a bit much as the audience appeared to be walking away.
Miami Vice was no longer 'hot' and playing Sonny's bride took away from whatever musical statement she was hoping to make with the album.
To give you an example of just how unhot Don Johnson had become, two years before
The Love In Me was released, Joan Baez was lusting over him in her book
A Voice To Sing With, swearing the sight of him at Live Aid gave her hot flash -- just nine pages before Queen Jane Approximately once again reminds the world what an ass she can be:
[. . .] and Sheena appears to our left. We are barely finishing up our little contribution when Sheena takes the mike with a quiet ferocity, leans away from us, and in a splendid two lines works out all her frustration at not performing, but only speaking as a hostess. Well, not all of her frustration. She hoards the microphone like a newly discovered family heirloom and sings our trio as a solo, leaving me leaning awkwardly toward the unavailable mike and Chrissie completely out of range.
Chrissie is Chrissie Hynde who's never had a problem sticking up for herself and probably doesn't care for Baez painting her as a victim.
The Lover In Me wasn't the last of Sheena's hits. She'd hit the top forty in both England and the US dueting with Prince on "The Arms of Orion" and hit the top 20 solo in 1991 with "What Comes Naturally." But that was the end of the run. (2000's "Giving Up Giving In" hit the British charts making it up to number 54.)
In the middle of her chart running streak,
Sheena told Dick Clark (American Bandstand, 1985), "It's like something in you goes, 'Ah, you mean it's over?' You've got to the highest. You've peaked. And always I think, 'Oh no! Am I going to have another hit?' It always goes through your brain."
It was a glorious and spectacular run. In 11 years of charting, she scored 21 hits on the US Hot 100, 15 of which went top 40. She hit the AC top forty chart 12 times and the top 40 on the dance chart nine times. In England, she had 20 songs make the top 100 and eleven go into the top forty. If Sheena were finishing up her eleven-year-run today or if she'd finished it up in 1979, she'd be seen as what she is, a talented and very successful singer. Sadly for Sheena, her decade was the 80s and Madonna owned that decade the way no other man, woman or group did. As
Ava and C.I. observed in November 2006, "What Sheena Easton calls hits are blips for Madonna." So Sheena's own remarkable accomplishments are frequently overlooked. But they do exist and long after the drama and trauma that were Madonna's theatrics are forgotten, Sheena's best work will still be playing.
