Kirsty Hawkshaw: Pete Waterman's Spiral Tribe Pop Idol

"I remember walking down the street with a couple of the guys, doing an interview with ID magazine, talking about the track Fine Day, which we'd already recorded with Opus 3. They asked me if I was going to go off and hit the big time and I said 'Yeah, but it's not as though I'm going to sign with Pete Waterman is it-' They printed it and a month later Pete Waterman apparently slammed his fist on the table and said 'I want that record'."

As the shaven headed beauty behind Opus 3's massively successful techno pop anthem Fine Day, Kirsty Hawkshaw was just one of the long list of singers made famous by PWL turned Pop Idols judge Pete Waterman. However, while most of his starlets emerged from stage schools or soap stars, Kirsty's finishing school was early 90s London squatland and Britain's most infamous and influential underground sound system crew, Spiral Tribe.

Though Spiral would eventually face exile following Government attempts to jail them for staging the 90s greatest free rave, Castlemorton, Kirsty first met them in a squatted school house in Willesden in 1991, when the Tribe numbered just nine.

"I met one of the Spiral guys I knew from school and he said 'Why don't you come and live with us in London, we've just opened up a squat, you can have the basement room'," she told Skrufff's Jonty Adderley.

I remember the first time I walked in to their place, I felt immediately welcome. There was no competition in the room, instead something amazing was going on. Every person in that room was a special person and I thought 'These are my people, these are the type of people I've been looking for'."

By the time she was doing interviews with ID magazine about life with the Spirals, she was also recording with Opus 3, and would go on to forge a career that included collaborations with BT, Ian Pooley and DJ Tiesto. However, her haunting ethereal rendition of the song (originally performed by Jane) has remained her best known track, which is no doubt why EMI imprint Mainline have just released it again. With Kirsty giving birth to her first baby just 2 months ago, it's been both a long time in dance music and a long time in her life, since wandering into the squat ten years before.


Skrufff (Jonty Adderley): What happened after you first joined Spiral Tribe-

Kirsty Hawkshaw: "We moved from Willesden to Kensal Rise to a street where there was a whole row of squats and I took the basement. I had a bed made out of boxes and I loved it, I was really happy. We were experimenting and all these amazing events and parties started happening. The first one was called the Tension in the school-house and I made all these mad shapes with day glow paper and spent two days decorating the whole squat. It was really exciting doing all the planning, getting the generator in, for example. Bjork was there, as was Mixmaster Morris and it was just a really cool party; skanky, but brilliant. We kept on doing more and more parties in London then Spiral started taking their sound system to the traveller festivals and hooking up with the travellers, which was quite mad; city people teaming up with real travellers, not the wannabe travellers. It worked for a while but the city vibe didn't really merge. The city people were a little disrespectful, they were breaking a few rules like trashing fields, not burying their shit and that kind of thing.

Spiral Tribe was amazing to start off with, it was my wake up call, it totally changed my life, and I started singing over records because of them, as well as gaining confidence and really opening up. It was the best time of my life, literally, and I don't regret any of it but I also knew when it was time to leave. It all went a little bit weird. I think with group mentalities it's often the way it goes. Groups start to splinter into little segments and I started feeling like I didn't fit in anymore. I couldn't cope with the madness that came along; a friend of mine, for example, threw hersel Tags

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