Sinitta

Sinitta Renay Malone was born in Washington, USA in 1966, the daughter of soul singer Miquel Brown, but was brought up in England. In 1980 she appeared in top musical film "The Wiz" with Michael Jackson and top musical film "Mutiny" with David Essex, before soaring to the dizzy heights of a pop career.

Sinitta offered an especially eighties brand of high energy pop which flew to the top of the charts (she barely recorded a single slow song in the whole of the successful part of her career) catapulting her to fame within the pages of Look In and Smash Hits. Sinitta would later describe herself as "the first Spice Girl", forgetting about all those other pesky women singers that came before her.

"So Macho" was an unashamedly politically incorrect slice of energetic pop, basically expressing the sentiment that she liked her men beefy. The theme of sex is in fact a running topic in the songbook of Malone, with "Cross My Broken Heart" being a schoolgirl tale of finding out her man is seeing her best friend, "Toy Boy" jauntily confessing Sinitta's remarkably younger male shag (which, judging from her own age, must make him barely legal, if that) and you work out what "Cruising" is about.

And yet the records had that special something - Sinitta's honeyed vocals (Pete Waterman called her "the best voice PWL ever worked with" which must have gutted Lonnie Gordon) work perfectly over disposable, pounding disco tunes. All was well, so long as Dame Tune kept calling round every summer.

Dame Tune scarpered. You can pin the key Sinitta hits down to each successive summer - "So Macho" in '86, "Toy Boy" in '87 and "Right Back Where We Started From" in '89. Unfortunately later singles simply wern't up to scratch - "Love on a Mountain Top" and "Hitchin' a Ride" were poor choices of covers in subsequent years.

In 1992 she struck her last major label deal but the ironically titled "Shame Shame Shame" single crept to number 28 and the dusty vaults can only have grasped an unfinished third album in their warm embrace.

In 2003, someone put Sinitta's second album "Wicked!" on Ebay for a penny, with the promise that "this is one of the worst albums ever made". With that in mind, it's not too scarce. However, her debut album "Sinitta" reguarly goes for around the £15 mark on Ebay, and because no-one's ever been bothered to do a legitimate Greatest Hits, it's actually quite difficult to own everything. Except, of course, for the false "Best of Sinitta" (see below) of which there are perpetually at least 20 copies on Ebay.

When the hits dried up, Sinitta packed her bags and moved to Hazelldeanville. She resorted to the old covers EP trick, but the world wasn't ready for her stab at four Supremes numbers. In 1997 she appeared in a musical with Sonia and Luke Goss, and two years later joined Hazel at the bottom of the barrel by releasing "The Best of Sinitta" on the Pegasus label, a horrid album on which she re-recorded all her old hits in cheap versions when she couldn't get the rights. In 1999 a self-produced single "Use Me Up" sold two copies.

Sinitta is nevertheless clawing her way back. She's a semi-regular singer of live and off-key gospel numbers on "Songs of Praise" and currently threatening the world with her autobiography "Who Put The Sin in Sinitta" in which she spills the beans on the juicy secrets of her bedroom antics with pop mogul Simon Cowell and Brad Pitt.

She is currently due to appear on depressing new ITV show "Hit Me Baby One More Time", although hopefully not behoofed like in the video to "Cross My Broken Heart".