t’s February 1998, and the now-defunct London Arena is about to play host to one of the most unforgettable pairings in the history of the Brit awards. Backstage, Sharleen Spiteri of Glaswegian pop-soul group Texas is getting ready to perform the group’s hit Say What You Want as a duet with an unlikely partner: Wu-Tang Clan rapper Method Man. But the performance – the world debut of this radical rework – almost doesn’t happen. The show’s producers, who originally pitched Spiteri a duet with Smokey Robinson, have exiled Method Man to a remote dressing room far away from the big-name stars. This was, says Spiteri, still seething, “in case ‘anything kicked off’ involving this ‘scary rapper’. We told them, ‘If you don’t move him next door to us now, we’re pulling out.’ Minutes later, he’s been relocated next door to us, and the Spice Girls are in our dressing room begging to meet him.” Crisis averted, then. But, moments before taking the stage, Spiteri notices her co-star gripped by last-minute butterflies. “So I grabbed Meth and told him, ‘You and me, we’re gonna play this like we’re Marvin and Tammi.’” She grins. “We bounded out, the string sample kicked in, and the audience went crazy. It was just amazing.” Only days before, Spiteri and her bandmates had been working on the track in New York’s Quad Studios (where, in 1994, Tupac Shakur was shot by muggers). Texas’s manager had recently crossed paths with some of the Wu and bonded over a shared passion for luxury Mercedes SUVs, inspiring Spiteri to courier Wu supremo Robert “RZA” Diggs a copy of Say What You Want. “We were massive fans,” she says. “We thought the sweet sound of my voice, against the roughness and directness of the Wu Tang Clan’s sound, could really work.” It was a moonshot pitch, but RZA loved the track. “I was always digging for vocals to play with,” he says, on a Zoom shared with Spiteri. “Shar’s vocal was like a sample I didn’t have to dig for, that’d work well with my dark, grainy production.” He invited Texas to New York. “RZA had been to Glasgow when they’d played Barrowlands,” says Spiteri. “And we knew Staten Island, where the Wu are from. There’s a hunger, a determination that comes with being from those places, a drive we shared.” It was a cramped scene at Quad, Texas sharing the studio with nine of the Wu’s 10-man line-up (Ol’ Dirty Bastard, originally slated to rap on the track, was in police custody) and Wu proteges Sunz of Man. The bands spent the night in the studio, the room thick with smoke, RZA hunched over his Ensoniq ASR10 sampler, rifling through a sack of Zip drives containing hours of samples, searching for the perfect element. “The night was never-ending,” he grins. “Back in those days, the sweet spot for me was always between four and seven in the morning. That’s when we finally cracked the code.” It was a string stab from an obscure 70s cut by easy listening balladeer Engelbert Humperdinck that got the ball rolling. “The key sounded ‘off’,” says Spiteri, “but ‘off’ in such a good way. Your ear was going, ‘Huh?’ But your body was going, ‘Woah!’ It was like a physical reaction. Then Meth started rhyming over it, with these lines about pirates and bottles of rum, because that was his perception of the UK back in those days. It just sounded brilliant.” She sighs. “New. Fresh. Though we had to find a different studio to finish the track the next day, as this wee engineer banned us from Quad. Our management called and were like, ‘What the fuck went on last night? Apparently there were people all over the studio and yous were all high.’ And I was like, ‘We were making a record!’” The collaboration, called Say What You Want (All Day Every Day), reached the Top 5 in 1998, 15 months after the original release. RZA didn’t fly over for the Brits performance, however. “Back then, I was more introverted, the studio was my zone – I didn’t shower very often,” he grins. “I was really only into art: create, let the world enjoy it, then create some more. But Meth was like the Wu’s celebrity figure.” The two camps have remained friendly over the intervening two decades, enough so that when RZA was interviewed for an as-yet-unreleased Texas documentary in May 2019 and Spiteri suggested they collaborate again, wheels sped into motion. Says RZA: “I was like, ‘My homegirl? Oh, guaranteed.’” Spiteri passed him a track, Hi, “to twist and reinvent”, but RZA says “it had this vibe already, and I was in a lyrical phase, so instead I added vocal roughness this time. My verse is about the rise and fall of love. Like, Sharl sings, ‘We got high, high, high,’ and it’s about being high on love, not just drugs. But even then, there’s a comedown.” With a video starring Kadeem Ramsay (RZA is a huge Top Boy fan), the track is a worthy second act in their collaboration, though Spiteri won’t be drawn on whether fans will have to wait 22 more years for another. “None of us plan anything,” she laughs. “That’s what’s been really great about our relationship and the records we’ve made. We make them because we wanna make great records – and no other reason.” • Hi is out now.