Sheena Easton - Early Life

Early Life

Easton was born Sheena Shirley Orr in the Scottish town of Bellshill, the youngest of six children to steel mill labourer Alex Orr and his wife Annie. She had two brothers (Robert and Alex) and three sisters (Marilyn, Annessa and Morag). Her earliest known public performance as a singer was at the age of five (in 1964), when she sang "Early One Morning" for her uncle and aunt and various relatives at the couple's 25th wedding anniversary celebration.

Easton's father died in 1969 and her mother had to support the family. Easton's website states that despite her mother's heavy workload she was always available for her children: "Sheena always speaks very highly of her mum and the wonderful job she did in bringing up her and her siblings, including teaching each of them all to read at home before they were even enrolled in school."

Easton did not consider a singing career until viewing the movie The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand. Streisand's singing over the opening credits "overtook" the young girl and convinced her that what she wanted most was to be a singer and to have the same effect on others. Her top grades in school earned her a scholarship to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where she trained from 1975 to 1979 as a speech and drama teacher by day, while singing with a band called "Something Else" by night at local clubs. She chose to study teaching rather than performing, because it was a course of study that would let her perfect her craft as a singer.

In 1979, she married Sandi Easton, the first of her four husbands. They divorced after eight months, and Sheena decided to keep the surname Easton. That year, one of her Academy tutors coaxed her into auditioning for Esther Rantzen, producer of the BBC programme The Big Time. Rantzen was planning a documentary film to chronicle a relative unknown's rise to pop-music stardom. Easton was selected as the subject for the programme, where she met Lulu (another Scottish singer), who told her that she was unlikely to make the "big time". Within a year of the programme airing, Sheena Easton proved Lulu wrong as EMI executives awarded her a contract, and Christopher Neil was assigned as her recording producer. Deke Arlon became her first manager, and Easton spent much of 1980 being followed by camera crews, who filmed her throughout the process of making her first EMI single, "Modern Girl".