Sharleen Spiteri has revealed she and her Texas bandmates regretted giving the group its name.
And in a podcast interview with supervet Noel Fitzpatrick, Scot Sharleen also claims she wanted to pursue a different career as a vet.
The singer, who was born in Finnieston, Glasgow, said that when she and her original band mates Ally McErlaine, and Johnny McElhone first thought of of the name Texas, they hoped it reflected wide open spaces and freedom.
Sharleen who later visited the US state, said: “Texas is big, is warm and sunny and at that point, you had Dallas on TV and everything it said was about wide open spaces, big stetsons, openness and riding horses, and freedom, and dust and dirt, and naw…You went and I thought, ‘Oh my God why did we call ourselves Texas?’
“I’m not joking. The first time we went to Texas, we went to Dallas first and I’ve never regretted calling ourselves a name as much.
“When we were approaching Dallas, we thought, ‘Wow, it’s like the Emerald City’ – you see it coming out the desert. We got there and everything it stood for in 1990 was very brash and very hard and money, money, money.
“Everything we were completely against and didn’t want to be, it was. It was like, ‘Mary Mother of God, what have we called ourselves here?”
But the band stuck with the name and produced hit after hit, selling more than 40million records.
Sharleen also revealed she was bullied at school and found the company of dogs comforting.
She said: “I wanted to be a vet my whole life because I used to go into kennels when my grandad was breeding wire fox terriers. I was always in helping and feeding them.
“Animals don’t have any of the rubbish we have round about us and their love is true and the attention in the moment you have is so important.”
