Shakespears Sister
‘Songs From The Red Room’
(SF)

Post-punk pop goddess, neo-glam eccentric, nu-electro siren… Siobhan Fahey’s been many things in her time, but never all of them on the same album before. At last, however, she’s revived her Smithsinspired soubriquet (if not the creative collaborations that went with it) in audaciously ambitious style, with the icy industrialism of ‘Was It Worth It?’, reuniting her with an almost-unrecognisable Terry Hall, nuzzling up against some vivacious dirty disco courtesy of ‘It’s A Trip’, and the baggy lollop of ‘You’re Alone’ bleeding into the Byrdsian bubblegum of ‘Bitter Pill’, with only a languorous sensuality and mischievous menace as common factors. Its success rate is no less variable, to be honest, but ‘Songs From The Red Room’ deserves saluting as the bananas drama that it is nonetheless.

Iain Moffat