Why Shania Twain ?

 

The author with Shania Twain in January 1998

It's always hard to say what makes a writer choose a particular subject for a book. Tom Jones: The Biography was easy. Tom - or rather the idea of Tom Jones - chose me. There hadn't been a decent biography on him in a decade, maybe ever. I then got lucky because the book was published soon after the incredible European success of Reload and the boyo made a comeback.

Shania Twain was an altogether different proposition. Her success was recent, seemingly overnight and phenomenal. There were plenty of books about her but they all seemed a bit thin, skimming the surface. I was drawn to write about her in the same way that I was drawn to Tom.

In a nutshell she has a wonderful heart warming, neo tragic tale to tell. The story's the thing.

I had first heard intriguing rumours about this Canadian hick who was upsetting the Country apple cart back in 1995. She wrote all her own songs, not on the Nashville production line, but with an English bloke who had made a mint producing Def Leppard and was so taken with her he had spent half a million dollars proving it. This Shania Twain was a video honey, all bare midriff and attitude, the best breasts since Susan Sarandon, lots of hair but not that big stand alone country hair. She was breaking all the rules and breaking records. When her album outsold Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits to become the biggest selling album by a female country singer, it was as if the barbarians had arrived at the gate.

Not being from Tennessee I thought The Woman In Me was a very good record. But then I've loved country music ever since the pedal steel guitar gave me goosebumps listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers Gilded Palace of Sin. Amid the rhinestones and the schmaltz were these great songs (which is why Guy Clark's Old Number One is one of the greatest albums ever made) and voices where whisky and purity held equal sway.

I can proudly boast that I was the first British journalist to meet Shania in January 1998, interviewing her for a magazine article. Shania was already a big star in the States. 13 million albums big. But she was a country star and record companies know country doesn't sell in Europe. You have to sell it as something, anything else. Tom Jones ( yes, him again) discovered that years ago with Green Green Grass of Home.

What struck me at that first meeting was how poised, how pretty and - when she stood up - how petite Shania was. She wore a beige sleeveless high necked ribbed sweater that accentuated her figure but everything focused on her face, with its perfect cheekbones and flawed nose. Gorgeous. This was a woman of 32 with a real Angela's Ashes life behind her, not some teenager mouthing Spice Girls soundbites. The hunger that blazed in her belonged to an aspirant not a woman who had no need to work again. She had control, power and money... and yet it was not enough.

Our second interview took place in the same discreet Kensington hotel. 22 months and 22 million album sales later. By Halloween 1999 Come On Over had sold two million in Britain alone. Shania Twain was a bona fide pop star, the c word forgotten, mixed out of her CV as adroitly as the fiddles out of the European mixes. She had earned £100 million in royalties, pocketed $3 million from cosmetics company Revlon and her world tour had been a sold out triumph.

I expected her to be different and, because I did, she was. There was extra management who had all gone shopping while couriers buzzed around frantically with backing tracks for the next Top of the Pops special. The interview now took place, not alone in her room, but in the small snug bar with bodies hovering - the bar man, a tall laid back bodyguard and the PR. Not listening in but still present. Not for protection, not for spin, simply necessary accessories.