Shania Twain the hairdresser - that did impress her family much

Hairdressers be warned, if your cut dont impress Shania Twain much, she might start snipping away herself. Turns out before becoming a country superstar the Canadian was a nifty hairdresser, and a dab hand when it came to dealing with difficult customers.

Shania laughs: In my family I was the haircutter. I cut my own hair for many, many, many years, and even when I got my first recording contract late in my 20s.

"I was still my own haircutter for videos like Any Man of Mine and Whose Bed Have Your Boot's Been Under? - those were my haircuts, as good or as bad as they were.

Shania writes about it on her beautiful new LP, Little Miss Twain where she sings about family coming over to the house and cut hair at the kitchen table.

She smiles: "So Uncle Sonny would always come over every few weeks for his haircuts - and he was usually pretty drunk - the line is, 'He can't walk anymore, falls into a chair, asks if I mind, do I have the time to cut his hair?' And, of course, I cut his hair. Always after school relatives would come over, and I would cut their hair, and my dad's there, and everybody's there in the family.

Little Miss Twain is a deeply autobiographical collection focusing on her pre-fame years, back in rural Canada when times were extremely tough for the little girl born Eileen.

"I was being introduced on stage as Little Miss Twain from very, very young childhood, up to my late 20s when I got my record deal. So this is all about my reflection, as a pre recording artist.

The album ends up being a love letter to her mother who was the driving force behind her music career from a very young age.

"As child, I didn't know the first thing about being a performer at eight years old, she recalls. "So it was my mother who was my agent, found the stages. She's the one that found the education for me in music. She had to take me to the bars. She was my coach.

"My mother was very energetic, obsessed with my talent. She was also very keen on me breaking the cycle of our family and having a better life. There had been a cycle of poverty, a cycle of hurt. A hard life. My mother had a very hard life. And then subsequently, we were born into that hard life.

Some of the hardships her family went through feel centuries-old, but improbably this was Shanias reality. The basics - food and heating - were not a given and there was "a lot of violence in the home.

She explains: We went through many dysfunctional periods of not having enough food in the house, not having heat in the winter, and when you're from a Northern town, it gets cold.

Shanias mother wanted more for her so went to bars, where working class locals would spend all day drowning their sorrows; it became her performing arts school.

However, being so young Shania had to wait until after last orders when the crowd were often well oiled. She figured out that the only way to get me up on stages was to bring me in after last call recalls Shania. "Last call being at midnight. And then everybody fills up the tablesand they were allowed to sit there and drink it.

"Technically, I'm allowed to go on because the bar is closed, but everybody's still drinking till 2:00 in the morning. So, I would sing for as long as they would have requests, and then I had school the next day.

Despite her obvious talent Shania didnt want to be a singer: "I was not in a comfortable environment. I'm being introduced to a stage that is this very dark, dingy, dense cigarette smoke...this is not where I wanted to be as a child at 8 years old.

"I just want to be a veterinarian, you know? I would tell her that, you know can I just be an architect? Like, can't I just go to university like everybody else?

So I really developed a disdain for it. There was a real conflict between what my mother wanted me to do. She wanted me to do it because she believed that I had a chance. Not because she wanted to go sit in the bar and watch her kid get up there and choke on the cigarette smoke.

Shania lost her parents at a young age and she ended up having to care for her siblings all by herself, but those early years of honing her skills ultimately set her on the path for glory.

When my mother left me I hadn't made it yet, she says. "So she missed all of the success. Never saw it. I needed to join the two worlds (with this album)."

Little Miss Twain is out now.

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