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Why Shania Twain ? continued
Sitting in a high backed armchair Shania looked so much more fragile. She was suffering from a muscular syndrome that attacks the jaw and so could not chew anything. Because she was unwell those around her tiptoed extra carefully. Behind her hazel eyes was the bone dead tiredness that stars get when the promotion treadmill has run one single, one video, one interview too far. She wanted to be back home at her Swiss Chateau, riding her horses down the Rhone Valley and writing her songs. Now there was a touch of annoyance as if we should all know her history, that her past was another country that had been invaded too many times. But it was the trappings that had altered to frame her fame. Not her. Now she was a known commodity I was expecting her to be the glossy pin up babe of her photos and videos. Which she never was. Her greeting had not changed. Her handshake was just that. A slight pressure on fingers and palm, then quick release. A nod of her head acknowledged both my presence and recognition. Shania prefers to keep her distance. She is not a toucher - which in a world of fake bonhomie, air hugs and multiple space kisses I found both honest and appealing. "People do find me a little reserved and formal," she said. "Canadians are a little more reserved but with people we know we're comfortable. I have never been a huggy feely person. I'm better now than I was. I didn't even want my mother to hug me , I hated it. You are English, you understand what I mean, but in America that is seen as quite odd." Shania was ambivalent about her sexuality, a boots under the bed subversive. Chicks in country are allowed to be sassy but in the end they should know how to please their men. At the core of her songs is a consistent unwavering message. "If you can't meet my standards, forget it." In her videos she is always unobtainable. She recognised long ago that her body was her USP, an essential tool in her success and has exploited it. Flashing her midriff in a video to promote her first album was what got Mutt Lange to notice her. Without it there would have been no today.
What I also found intriguing was how much of Shania's early life was about concealment. A depressed mother, growing up in poverty in Northern Ontario. So stark was her upbringing that people have doubted it ever happened. It couldn't happen . Not in Canada which everyone knows is regularly voted the best place to live on the planet. Except when Shania talked of walking past "roast beef families" you can smell the meat on the air and feel the emptiness in a little girl's stomach. Music was, still is, her lifeline, a way of forgetting where she was. She talked about the death of her parents - killed when a logging truck totalled their car - and how she dumped everything to raise her three younger siblings, took a job singing show tunes in a resort hotel in a similar matter of fact way. At times it sounded as if duty not love required her to do it but someone had to be strong or the family would be lost. The anger at the unfairness of it all, the raw emotion, were still there just below the calm exterior. At both our meetings I did not like Shania as much as I was fascinated by her. She was professional to the core and that can come across as being cold but there was something else in her I wanted to understand. Her husband Mutt Lange, too, remained an enigma. For all his fame and success he is virtually anonymous to the public. Years ago I managed a young record producer called Steve Lillywhite. I helped get Steve some good projects (U2 , Peter Gabriel) but it used to drive me crazy how all the best commercial projects all ended up with this guy called Mutt. Today I write for a living, Steve continues to be one of the very best... but Mutt Lange is in a league of his own. In August 2000 Headline Books asked me to write a book about Shania Twain. I already had the bare bones of a cracking story - backwoods redneck turned international superstar and sex symbol. The next step was to find out how much of the story was hype, PR flannel and plain exaggeration... The short answer is ... not as much as I expected. The long answer can be found in Shania Twain: The Biography |
