Shakespears Sister are reunited and recording and heading to Sheffield this autumn

In May the pair returned with a new single, All The Queen’s Horses, and this month they follow it with a singles collection that includes another track, C U Next Tuesday, that they wrote last year.

Fahey reveals the rapprochement might have happened sooner had she been willing to talk to her erstwhile musical partner in the years following their split.

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“Marcy reached out to me over the years a couple of times, but I hadn’t done the work to be able to deal with it,” she says. “I kept avoiding what I thought might be a confrontation. But then it got the point where I thought I could have a conversation with her and be able to communicate from the heart without it being difficult.”

The dispute had flared up after the international success of their single Stay and its parent album Hormonally Yours, and reached its apex in a speech by Fahey delivered via her publisher at the Ivor Novello Awards in 1993, in which she announced their partnership was over and wished Detroit “all the best for the future”.

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Detroit says the conflict had been weighing on her for some time. “I hated the fact that there was this whole kind of chasm between us of ill feelings, that bothered me. I did send her a few emails and tried to reach out, not necessarily to get Shakespears Sister back together, this was a personal matter that was affecting my life and our lives, let’s just get in a room and talk it out, maybe we’ll become friends, maybe we won’t, but at least we’ll hear each other’s side of the story – that was my interest and that’s what we were able to do.” “Finally,” they both agree, with a relieved chuckle.

The pair met in May last year but not without a sense of mutual foreboding. “I think there was apprehension on both sides definitely,” says Fahey, “and it was a couple of hours over a few coffees.”

“I had herbal tea, actually,” Detroit says. “During that process we managed to air everything that we’d both been feeling and be able to then counter it and explain what we’d been going through.”

They both came to realise there had been a fundamental miscommunication between them two and a half decades ago. “It really was, misunderstandings, miscommunication,” says Fahey.

“Misconstruing of things that happened and some divisiveness going on within the people around us,” Detroit adds.

At the point where they met, Fahey was in the midst of another reunion, with Keren Woodward and Sara Dallin, her former bandmates in Bananarama. She described that as “a wonderful laying to rest of the past” and believes it was the catalyst for making up with Detroit.

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“One hundred per cent,” she says. “That process began with Bananarama, reclaiming my past, my history and putting ghosts to rest and celebrating everything that had led me to here, everything I’d been through creatively.”

Fahey, now 60, has said she felt a little frustration that the Bananarama reunion didn’t result in the three of them making any new music together. For Shakespears Sister to work, she felt it was important that she and Detroit, 67, start writing together again.

“I remembered how well we’d written together so it seemed like the obvious first step, really. We didn’t know when we marooned ourselves out in the desert at Joshua Tree for four days whether anything would come of it.”

“Or whether we would even get on,” Detroit says. “That’s a long time to be away from somebody and then put yourself in that situation and hope everything works out. Luckily it did.”

“It was magical,” Fahey says. “The first song we wrote was All The Queen’s Horses, which I loved, and the second song was called C U Next Tuesday. We kind of hit a home run in four days with two new songs we both really loved.”

In the longer term, they hope to make another full album. “We’ll be looking at that after the tour,” says Fahey.

“We both really enjoy writing,” adds Detroit. “And there’s so much to write about.”

Singles Party is out now. They play Sheffield City, November 4. shakespearssisterofficial.com