By dressing up country music in skintight leather, Shania Twain has escaped poverty to become the world's best-selling female singer. Brian Boyd visits her on Lake Geneva's Rockstar Riviera.
This is weird: imagine yourself hanging out with the biggest-selling male musical artist of all time, trying to squeeze in beside his small army of bodyguards, being deafened by the frantic screams of his adoring fans and blinded by the cameras clicking away at your every turn - not to mention the improbability of having a one-on-one with Michael Jackson in an utterly majestic setting where no one, as in not one single person, recognises him.
Weirder still is strolling around the banks of Lake Geneva with the biggest-selling female artist of all time - someone you don't even recognise when she approaches you, someone with a subdued dress sense, little or no make-up and not a hanger-on to be seen. "Hi, I'm Shania," she says shyly, "quite a view isn't it?"
She should know. Shania Twain lives just down the road from where we meet in Montreux - a place whose preternatural beauty is (in a twist of poetic justice) balanced out by its severe boredom. "It's amazing, but there's nothing - Not One Single Thing - to do here," I suggest to her. "Don't be like that," she jokingly scolds. "Just look at the mountains, the lake. I love this place, I love living here. So quiet, so beautiful and no one knows me."
When, like Twain, you sell gazillions of records around the world, you can put in a nice request to your record company asking them not to release anything by you in your adopted country. Search through any of the local record shops and you won't find anything by her, flick through the local version of Hello! or OK! and there aren't any "At Home With" stories. As far as the Swiss are concerned, Shania Twain doesn't exist.
"I don't do any Swiss promo or anything and you can't get my records here," she says. "It's just a privacy thing. I didn't want it to be like how it is everywhere else. And the people here are so respectful of that. I never get bothered."
Back in the gilded 100-year-old Montreux Palace hotel, where again, no one stops her or recognises her, she pulls up a chair and explains how growing up listening to "Waylon, Willie, Dolly and Tammy" made the girl raised in poverty in a small town in northern Ontario into the biggest-selling female artist of all time.
Born Eileen Edwards, she changed her name to "Shania", a Native American word meaning "I'm on my way" on account of her Native American stepfather. The small town where she grew up, Timmins, now has a street named after her and a Shania Twain museum.
"I was playing guitar and singing from an early age," she says, "and there was always so much music around me. As well as all the country stuff, we'd listen to the Mamas and Papas, The Carpenters, Stevie Wonder ... all that great stuff. I started off singing at about five or six in local community centres and when I was eight I remember being pulled out of bed to sing with the house band at a local club. Because a child couldn't be in a place where they sold alcohol, I could only go on after midnight when the sales had stopped. But that was only a small part of my life - the main part was working with my stepdad - he worked in the forest and from an early age I was able to use an axe and a chainsaw - and I still can."
Everything changed when she was 21. Her mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident and as the eldest of five children, Shania took responsibility for her younger siblings. "It was just such a huge shock," she says, "and I suddenly found myself responsible for my four younger brothers. I had to provide for them, so I worked a few different jobs. It was tough, very tough. One of the jobs I had was singing in a local resort and I put together a demo tape and got this recording contract. But back then I was a strictly country music artist."
A respected rock music producer, Robert "Mutt" Lange (who has worked with AC/DC, Def Leppard, Foreigner and Bryan Adams), heard an early Twain song and, impressed, rang her up. What was supposed to be a professional relationship ended up in marriage six months later. Coming from two different backgrounds, Twain and Lange forged a new sound, country with a rock beat, that was soon to storm the charts. Their first album together, The Woman In Me, was a commercial juggernaut.
Twain was the first country singer to recognise the impact of MTV, and created a sexy, video-oriented image. While Nashville hardliners - "they always hated me in Nashville, and they probably still do," she says - criticised her for diluting country with rock music, songs such as That Don't Impress Me Much, Man, I Feel Like A Woman, and You're Still The One saw her break all known musical sales records.
"I think I upset Nashville for daring to be different - for daring to embrace rock music and MTV and daring to wear skintight black leather trousers in the videos," she says. "But it was always about the music - which is why I always released two different versions of each album - one a country mix, one a rock mix. I know the critics always use the word "diluted" but really this is how I learnt my music - listening to country and to pop and rock. Maybe I am what they say - the bridge between country and rock - and that's fine by me, because my music reflects who I am and what I listen to."
She continues this dual approach on her new single, Party For Two, which is being issued in two formats - the pop/rock version of the song sees her duetting with funk metal singer Mark McGrath, whereas the country version sees her duetting with rising country star Billy Crawford.
The single is on her 21-track Greatest Hits album - which she says marks the close of one chapter in her career while she considers where to move musically. "It's strange looking back at all these songs and seeing how I've changed all the time," she says. "There's plenty more music to come but there has been acting work coming around as well. I got this letter from Jude Law asking me to appear in a film with him. I only did the film because in it I get to slap Jude Law a few times - and that was great fun. I had never even been on a set before, so it was all new to me."
One film experience she's not looking forward to is the upcoming film about her early life. "It's nothing to do with me; I don't even know who is in it," she says. "To be honest I'm not crazy about the idea. Already there's the museum and now there's going to be this film ... just as well I'm hidden away here in Switzerland."
Shania Twain: Greatest Hits is on the Universal label