She Kicks a Beat: The Funk Soul Smithster (Kelly Smith interview)

Everything about Kelly Smith has been said, so She Kicks asks about the records instead. She is not, she says, a standard dance-music person: it is disco, seventies and eighties, Womack & Womack, Chic, Inner City, chosen for the beat and the pump-me-up factor rather than the words. In the England changing room Alex Scott always ran the music while Smith sat in her own zone; at Boston there was a dance crew she watched with amusement and never joined, having bad moves. Her first tape was the Spice Girls. Her team mates, she reports without rancour, never once let her choose the changing-room music because they thought it was awful. She would record with Jill Scott, who takes herself lightly.