Shelagh McDonald: You can safely call this a comeback

The Herald has a a great story this morning about a singer who vanished from view so completely, people assumed she was dead:

Only in 2005, after a re-release of her work without her knowledge, did [Shelagh] McDonald make herself known to the world again — a "surreal" experience, after reading about herself as if she were dead.

It had been The Independent which killed her off, although she read of her demise when the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail repeated the story.

She wasn't dead; she'd had a bad trip which destroyed her voice and, after stopping singing, she met Gordon Farquhar. Their lives together took a route far away from music; it was only after Gordon's death that she tried to sing again.

It's working for her; she's doing a session on Tuesday for Alive Radio. Although people have preconceptions about her:

"I think people are expecting me to be a miserable old sod, a tragedy, and I'm supposed to be incredibly mysterious.

You cannot be mysterious if you've lived in a tent for six years, it just can't be done."

I think Jabal might argue with that.

It might look like this is a story which is calling for a a description of "a happy ending", but that would imply that 'not being in the public eye' is, of itself, an unhappy state of affairs. McDonald says she has no regrets about the way her life unfolded.