Shakespears Sister

Shakespears Sister was a synth-pop-rock band formed by former Bananarama singer-songwriter Siobhan Fahey in 1988. It was Fahey's first musical project since leaving Bananarama. Later in 1989, American backing vocalist and guitarist Marcella Detroit was featured more as London Records presented the band as a duo. The name is taken from the title of the song "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths, which in turn refers to a section of Virginia Woolf's feminist essay A Room of One's Own, in which Woolf argues that if William Shakespeare had a sister of equal genius, as a woman she would not have had the opportunity to make use of it. There have been minor variations in the spelling of the band's name over the years, which lost its final "e" when a friend made a woodcut logo for Fahey and misspelt the most common modern spelling of Shakespeare. The cover of the first album, Sacred Heart, also clearly includes an apostrophe (i.e. Shakespear's Sister), but this too was subsequently lost.