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Shakespears Sister (originally Shakespear's Sister) was a band formed by Irish-born former Bananarama singer/songwriter Siobhan Fahey and American musician Marcella Detroit. The band formed in 1988, the same year that Fahey left Bananarama. The name is taken from the title of the song "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths, which in turn refers to a section of Virginia Woolf's feminist essay A Room of One's Own, in which Woolf argues that if William Shakespeare had had a sister of equal genius, as a woman in those days she would not have had the opportunity to make use of it.
The band's name lost its final "e" when a friend making a woodcut logo for Fahey misspelt the most common modern spelling of Shakespeare. The cover of the first album, Sacred Heart, clearly includes an apostrophe (i.e. Shakespear's Sister), but this too was subsequently lost through simple carelessness and apathy.
Shakespears Sister released two albums as a duo, Sacred Heart and Hormonally Yours.
The band's single "Stay" is their best known work, achieving number one in both the UK (for eight weeks, one of the longest in chart history) and Ireland singles charts. It was their highest entry in the UK charts, being the only time they entered the top five. The single also became their biggest U.S. hit, reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992. The campy, futuristic accompanying music video was also a hit, if somewhat controversial. In it, Fahey portrays Death and fights with Detroit over the fate of her dying lover in an allegory of life and death that mirrored her own internal struggles. Though clearly science fiction in style, the imagery in the video was seen as a depiction of witchcraft/raising the dead and so was banned in Germany, heightening the track's profile.
After a year-long worldwide tour throughout 1992, Fahey cancelled further European touring due to physical and emotional exhaustion and subsequently admitted herself into a psychiatric unit with severe depression.
When the nominations for the 1993 Brit Awards were announced in late 1992, it was clear that Shakespears Sister had had a significant impact on British popular music. Nominations included: Best group, best album, best video, best single and best female (for Siobhan, although she is Irish born). However, out of these they only won Best Video for Stay, which was, more importantly voted for by the British public.
In 1993 one of Fahey's favourite songs "My 16th Apology" was released as a single, but failed to make the UK top 40. Soon after that, at the 1993 Ivor Novello Awards, Fahey announced the split with Marcella Detroit. The pair allegedly haven't spoken since.
Shakespears Sister carried on as Fahey by herself, and in 1994 the project recorded "Prehistoric Daze" for the soundtrack to the film The Flintstones, and "Waiting" for the Sadie Frost/Jude Law film Shopping.
In 1996, Fahey resurfaced again as a reinvented, more glam, Shakespears Sister with the single "I Can Drive", a single picked by the record company instead of Fahey's choice of the arguably superior "Do I Scare You". After the single charted at No 30, London Records refused to release the full album. Fahey later parted company with the label, leaving the album unreleased. This year also marked Fahey's divorce from Dave Stewart - the pair had been married since 1987.
In 2003, Fahey regained the master tapes from those sessions. The album #3, recorded in 1995-1997, was finally given an independent release in 2004 on Fahey's own record label, SF Records.
A greatest hits CD/DVD retrospective (The Best of Shakespears Sister) was also released in late 2004, containing all of the group's singles and music videos, as well as tracks intended for the #3 album. An additional compilation album, Long Live the Queens!, featuring a tracklisting of remixes and b-sides, was released in late 2005.
A recurrent theme of many of the early Shakespears Sister songs involve departure and blame ("You're History", "Goodbye Cruel World", "You Made Me Come to This", "I Don't Care"). In interviews, Bananarama members Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward have alluded to these songs being about them
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