Worried Soviets kept an eye on Sandie Shaw

Along with Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton she was an icon of the Swinging Sixties.

Now, as fans can relive her music again with album reissues, Sandie Shaw has revealed how there was also a flavour of another icon of the times 007.

Sandie, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967, was a Western music pioneer in the Soviet bloc.

“Eurovision was in Austria which bordered many Iron Curtain states and Russia and all the eastern European countries saw it,” recalls Sandie.

“It opened up this huge thing for me in Russia. I always had to go with a government agent at all times it was very James Bond actually.

“If we wanted a conversation we had to go into the bathroom and put the shower on.

“Everything you did and saw was prescribed. It was very grey and bleak and people were happy to see me because I represented freedom and democracy they didn’t have.

“As far as the Russians were concerned I represented danger.”

Sandie became a star at just 17 and her barefoot singing style made her a national favourite.

Puppet on a String was the Eurovision winner and There’s Always Something There To Remind Me and Long Live Love provided her with a couple of No 1s.

The Very Best Of album is out now and the final reissue of her original back catalogue albums is released on Union Square Music’s Salvo label next week.

Listening to the music again took Sandie back in time.

“I wasn’t grown up and I still sound young but trying to sing these grown up songs,” she confides.

“It was very spontaneous and there was no thought that someone would be listening to this 50 years later.

“Recording as a living really didn’t exist in this country. You were making up something as you went along.

“I thought when I hit 24 my life would be over anyway. I never thought any further than that.”

Married three times, Sandie, who is now a psychotherapist, recently announced that she won’t be performing any more.

And she reckons there’s a big difference with today’s artists.

“All that promotion and branding, you spend very little time nowadays that’s anything to do with music,” she adds.

“It was much better then.”