Chart entered : 5 April 1980
Chart peak : 56 ( 8 on re-release later in the year )
Number of hits : 15
The proto-Leona Lewis doesn't seem like the nicest person to feature here but you can admire her for a steely determination to forge a durable career beyond the 15 minutes of fame that was expected.
Sheena was born in Belshill in 1959, the youngest in a large family. She was inspired to start singing by Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. She won a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama where she trained as a speech and drama teacher in the late seventies while singing in a supper club band called "Something Else" in the evenings. She picked up the surname Easton from a very brief marriage in 1979.
One of her tutors at the Academy suggested she audition for Esther Rantzen's The Big Time , a series which followed unknowns in various fields as they strove to launch a career. After she was selected, the producers of the show arranged another audition for EMI executives and they awarded her a year's contract. Sheena was paraded in front of Dusty Springfield and Lulu whose manager was somewhat doubtful about her prospects.
"Modern Girl" was the first song selected for her, written by Bugatti and Musker the songwriting duo who'd written hits for The Three Degrees and Paul Nicholas. Christopher Neil who'd produced the early Dollar hits was behind the mixing desk. It's a third person narrative about an eighties Bridget Jones who goes to work and has semi-casual sexual relationships set to a rather bargain basement synth pop arrangement. The naff air is compounded by the line "She eats a tangerine/ Flicks through a magazine". Food rhymes are always a no-no as ABC and Des'ree were later to reinforce.What it does have going for it is an earworm melody and Sheena's pleasantly mellifluous Scots voice.
The single was released before the programme aired and got to be Simon Bates's Record of the Week despite a Tony Hatch-style dismissal by Roundtable producer Mike Hawkes : "That's really quite uninteresting. I'd say that's an extremely tedious record ..There's nothing there to like. You've got a sort of fairly average singer here selling a fairly average sort of song. It's of no interest to me whatsoever". A very modest showing in the charts seemed to prove him right but when the programme actually aired in the summer her follow-up "9 To 5" took off in a big way and "Modern Girl" quickly followed it into the charts making Sheena the first woman since Ruby Murray to have two singles in the Top 10.
It was a vindication and Sheena is the outstanding success story from all the individuals featured on the programme ( whither wrestler Rip Rawlinson ? ) but in the UK at least Sheena was never quite able to escape these "inauthentic" origins.
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