Drama
Bananarama
new album!, out now
It’s
tempting to say that Bananarama rewrote the pop rulebook.
The truth is that they never even read it in the first
place, but for over twenty years their name has been
synonymous with bright, sophisticated and authentically
brilliant pop music.
The achievements speak for themselves: more hits than the
Spice Girls, more albums sold than Atomic Kitten, more Band
Aid appearances than the Sugababes, an entry in the
Guinness Book of Records as the biggest girlgroup since The
Supremes. But it’s not just what Bananarama have done
– it’s the way that they’ve done it.
In 2006 Bananarama are still creating thrilling pop moments
- this has already been a fabulous year for Keren and Sara,
in the build up to the release of their forthcoming album
‘Drama’ the girls have achieved two no 1 Dance
smashes and their return to the Top Twenty with their hit
“Move In My Direction”. Continuing to sell out
massive clubs like G.A.Y, headlining Rome Pride in Italy
and performing as the special guests with the Scissor
Sisters at one of the most exciting secret gigs of the
year, Bananarama are well and truly back. But more of 2006
Bananarama later.
From the moment their debut single charted at a modest
Number 93, through the triple-platinum albums and a
million-selling Greatest Hits compilation, right up to date
with new material set to knock the spots off any other pop
group on the block, Bananarama’s story is one of a
self-created, anarchic, and decidedly modern pop group with
a fuck-you attitude that makes Courtney Love look like
Karen Carpenter.
Most jarringly, at least in the context of today’s
pop personalities generally existing as crass multimedia
‘entertainment’ brands, there was no Bananarama
franchise. Endorsement deals were routinely dismissed - in
the late 1980s they turned down a $1m hair curler
endorsement deal with Clairol because, according to Sara,
“we just didn’t use Clairol hair
curlers”. There were no TV shows, no dolls, no
scooters and no lollipops. Bananarama didn’t need
those deals to pay the rent, because Bananarama made music
for a living. They still do, and it sounds fresh,
contemporary and irresistibly danceable. New tracks like
‘Move In My Direction’ and ‘Don’t
Step On My Groove’ represent Banarama’s best
work in over fifteen years, but they still fit in perfectly
with the rest of the band’s oeuvre, and there’s
plenty more where those new songs came from.
Most of the new material is the result of Sara and Keren
once again identifying their perfect collaborators. In the
early 1980s they approached producers Jolley & Swain on
the strength of their work on Imagination’s
‘Bodytalk’; a few years later they heard Dead
Or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A
Record)’ and decided to work with Stock Aitken &
Waterman on ‘Venus’. (Waterman, with typical
understatement, later recalled that "it was almost like
being asked by the Supremes to produce their
records”.) Now, in 2005, Sara and Keren’s
eagle-eared appreciation of the current pop/dance sound has
led them to Sweden, to the contemporary hit making team
Murlyn, who recently worked with the likes of Brittney and
J-Lo and, in particular, to the team’s electro
hotshots Korpi & Blackcell.
The results are astonishing - close your eyes and
Bananarama sound like singers half their age. Open your
eyes and they don’t look far off it either, but
theirs is a career which, from humble beginnings, spans
over two decades. Having both moved to London in 1981,
childhood friends Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward soon made
the city their own. They became regulars at Taboo and the
Wag Club (“Blitz was over”), partying their way
through the capital and working evenings at the Marquee
club to make ends meet. (At that time U2 were a permanent
fixture down at the Marquee, but Sara never heard them
because she was “in the cloakroom, going through
people’s pockets”.) One night, having been
thrown out of the YWCA “for keeping late
hours”, Sara and Keren bumped into Sex Pistols
drummer Paul Cook, who invited them to live in the dingy
old rooms above the Pistols’ rehearsal room. It was
inevitable that with Johnny Rotten’s drawings on the
walls and Sid’s old bondage trousers in the cupboards
it didn’t take long for Sara, Keren and new friend
Siobhan Fahey to form a band.
One play from John Peel was all it took to catch the
attention of The Specials’ Terry Hall, who tracked
the girls down and asked them to perform on Fun Boy
3’s ‘It Ain't What You Do It's The Way That You
Do It’, which eventually stormed into the Top 5 in
1982. Keren remembers the band’s shock at
Terry’s initial interest: “We thought,
‘My God, he thinks we’re proper
singers’.” They went on to support everyone
from Iggy Pop and Paul Weller (with the latter writing a
song on the band’s first album), but those early days
were strange times. The girls were on Saturday morning
telly, but still using the baths and the local swimming
pool for 10p a throw. “We just didn’t get
paid,” Sara laughs. “We signed for no advance,
because we didn’t realise you were supposed to get an
advance, and we were still signing on when we were in the
Top 5. We had to get a bank loan to pay ourselves £45 a
week.” Adds Sara: “We didn’t think it
would get past one single, and we didn’t really
care.”
The girls’ nonchalance clearly hit a nerve, with fans
of all ages. Their faces beamed out from a huge variety of
front covers, from NME to Look In, The Face to Smash Hits.
For the next ten years the girls were everywhere, and so
were their hits, whether it was ‘Rough Justice’
tackling the political tensions in Northern Ireland or
‘Love In The First Degree’ pioneering the
relationship-as-courtroom-drama extended metaphor more than
a decade before ‘All Rise’ was even a twinkle
in Lee Ryan’s eye. Bananarama soon became
internationally hot property, with ‘Venus’
scoring a US Number One and ‘Robert DeNiro’s
Waiting’ paving the way for the now legendary meeting
between the girls and that Hollywood superstar -
“I’ve no idea what we talked about,
though,” Sara chortles. “We’d had a
few…”
Along the way Bananarama defined their times, also turning
in curiously timeless pop music – which is why
artists from Steps to Ace Of Base have delved through the
Bananarama back catalogue for hits, and why a bootleg of
‘Really Saying Something’ was recently Number
One in Europe. Even when Siobhan moved on for great success
with Shakespears Sister and through the arrival and
departure of Jacquie, Sara and Keren have kept the band as
alive and exciting as it’s always been. They have
never turned Bananarama into a nostalgia-fest. You
won’t have seen them on a Never Mind The Buzzcocks
identity parade, or on Reborn In The USA, or Hit Me Baby
One More Time, or on any of the Here & Now tours. The
simple reason for this is that while it may be fascinating
to look back over the last twenty delicious years of pop,
the present and the future are even more exciting.
Now signed to independent label A&G Productions –
allowing the girls the autonomy necessary for their ideas
to thrive – Sara and Keren feel at their most
invigorated for over a decade. “Writing songs now is
giving me the same buzz I got when I was a teenager,”
Keren beams. “We’re having fun making music all
over again.” Recording with the Murlyn crew in Sweden
– in a massive house in the middle of a snow-lined
forest – has clearly proved an agreeable backdrop for
Sara and Keren’s songwriting talents. The quality of
the songs is astonishing – from blending the
Moroderized synth stylings of the late 1970s with the
cutting edge electro sound of 2005 in
‘Lovebite’, to the undulating, minimalist
grooves of ‘Look On The Floor’.
Bananarama have never played the game. Sometimes they
haven’t even known what game they were playing. But
after almost 25 years, here they are with some of the
strongest material of their career: everything you’d
have hoped but nothing you’d have expected, totally
modern, totally pop, totally Bananarama.
Tracklisting
Move In My
Direction
Look On The Floor (Hypnotic Tango)
Waterfall
Frequency
Feel For You
Don’t Step On My Groove
Middle Of Nowhere
I Love The Way
Lovebite
Rules Of Attraction.
Your Love Is Like A Drug
Venus (Marc Almonds Hi Nrg Showgirls Mix)
Really Saying Something (Solasso Mix)
