SHEILA shows up on French sleeves the way certain names always do once you start digging seriously: not by accident, and never just once. Annie Chancel was the person, but Sheila was the name that stuck to the paper, the radio, the cheap little record players, and eventually to a whole slice of French pop memory. Once "L'ecole est finie" took off in 1963, she was no longer just another hopeful singer in neat clothes. She was part of the furniture of the era. "Bang Bang", "Les Rois mages", those records did not politely "demonstrate versatility"; they lodged themselves in the public ear and stayed there, bright, efficient, a little manufactured, and much tougher than her early image liked to admit.
The disco turn is where lazy write-ups usually start inventing things. What I could verify is this: in 1977, the first wave of "Love Me Baby" appeared under the credit "S.B. Devotion", and the act later turned up as Sheila B. Devotion, Sheila and B. Devotion, and even Sheila and the Black Devotion. That is more revealing than the usual fan-magazine mythmaking. It tells you that the reinvention was handled carefully, almost like a controlled detonation. Her old audience was not shoved straight into disco under full lighting; the mask went on first. I have always liked that detail. It feels less like publicity copy and more like the record business doing what it always did best: hedging its bets while pretending everything was destiny.
