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Critic's Review
Chris Nickson, All Music Guide
Sandie Shaw's hits have been repackaged so many times that there are far more compilations of her work than there ever were original albums. She formed a formidable pop partnership with writer Chris Andrews in the mid-'60s, taking songs like the breathy "Girl Don't Come," "Long Live Love," and the annoyingly bouncy Eurovision Song Contest winner, "Puppet on a String," to the top of the British charts. This collection, however, goes well beyond the surface to offer a slightly stripped-down version of 64-67 Complete Sandie Shaw, which covers every track she released on Pye during those three years. So if you want more than the recycled hits but you're not willing to dive in and get everything, this offers some good middle ground. And make no mistake, Shaw was the princess of Brit-pop at the time (even if the term hadn't been coined then). She was hip, dressed in the best Mary Quant with the fashionable straight hair and trademark bare feet on-stage. The fact that she didn't have much of a voice (certainly when compared to a contemporary like Dusty Springfield) was irrelevant. She could turn on the emotion in "Ask Any Woman," a 1967 track which illustrates just how far she'd come from the naïveté of her debut, "As Long as You're Happy, Baby." And while most of the material from Andrews' pen is straight out of the Denmark Street/Brill Building pop school, aiming toward neo-girl group pop, the pair does take some chances, tweaking the formula interestingly on "I've Heard About Him" and "Long Walk Home," while going folky with "Nothing Comes Easy." Shaw may never have been one of the great singers -- even later in the '60s, when she became far more eclectic and experimental in her approach -- but she was part of a Zeitgeist with some great songs, the mistress of a moment.
