Sandie Shaw

British singer Sandie Shaw issued a series of girl group-styled singles during the mid-'60s and stepped away from music in the early '70s. Pop vocalist Adam Faith discovered her in 1963 and directed her toward manager Eve Taylor, resulting in the 1964 release of her first single, "As Long as You're Happy." Though it failed to register on the charts, her follow-up, "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me," reached number one in the U.K. and number 52 in the U.S., where she never matched her domestic stature. Over the subsequent three years most of her successful releases, penned by producer Chris Andrews, sustained her chart prominence. In 1967 Taylor steered Shaw toward cabaret material, an approach that paid off when the Bill Martin/Phil Coulter composition "Puppet on a String" topped the charts. She cut one further Coulter track, "Tonight in Tokyo," before reverting to Andrews, yet none of those later collaborations yielded hits. Her English adaptation of the French song "Monsieur Dupont," issued in early 1969, reached the Top 20 and proved her final charting single.

In 1970 Shaw attempted a shift into family entertainment, but a broken marriage and tabloid rumors derailed the effort and prompted her withdrawal for the remainder of the decade. She resumed recording in the early '80s after BEF, a Heaven 17 offshoot, recruited her for a cover of the Cilla Black hit "Anyone Who Had a Heart." Smiths frontman Morrissey also praised her publicly, which led to her version of the band's "Hand in Glove," backed by the group itself and briefly entering the U.K. charts. In 1986 she recorded Lloyd Cole's "Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?," which, like the earlier single, lingered at the lower reaches of the pop listings. The 1988 album Hello Angel, featuring material from the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain, made little impression on the charts.