Anybody who knows us knows that. Yes, we accepted outside material--big deal. They were good songs, we wanted to do them. Though the Bangles do co-write all their songs now, they need help from famous professional hit songwriters. It does seem to get very complicated as you go on. I do miss playing in the clubs. I mean, we kinda wanted to put an acoustic guitar and some harmonies on it. The band took turns to sing each verse of their novelty hit Walk Like An Egyptian "The god of irony was laughing down upon us," Steele said in During their five years on a major label the Bangles made some of the smartest and most likeable pop music of the '80s, including the Prince-penned classic Manic Monday , but the out-of-character ballad Eternal Flame gave them their greatest success, and proved to be their undoing.
Hoffs, however, sees the Bangles' break-up as being less about the unbalanced focus on her, and more a case of too much too soon. It is undeniable, though, that the huge success of Eternal Flame upset the already delicate Bangles equilibrium, and the band never recovered. Management began pressuring Hoffs to go solo, and she admits she was vulnerable to the voices whispering in her ear. Being a Bangle is an incredibly special thing for me, but at the same time I felt like I needed opportunities to express myself in other ways.
But the solo years, when they came, were not everything Hoffs had hoped for. Her first album, 's When You're A Boy , was a commercial failure, and since then the singer has only made one other record, a self-titled effort from So for a time, Hoffs basically opted out of public life.
She married film director Jay Roach in and settled down to become a Hollywood wife, having sons Jackson and Sam and putting aside her own ambitions as Roach's career took off. It was the sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me , as much as anything else, that led to the reformation of the Bangles. During the movie's editing phase there was a temporary song on the soundtrack that Roach was looking to replace for the final cut.
Prince had contacted us, I think that that might have set the idea that I was the lead singer of the band, even though I wasn't. My husband [filmmaker Jay Roach] had directed ["Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery"], and he was working on the second [movie, "The Spy Who Shagged Me"], and they were down to needing a song for a particular scene. And it was a day I had gotten together with Vickie [Peterson] and Debbie [Peterson] as an attempt to sort of get The Bangles back together.
And we were working on writing a little bit of music and kind of feeling it out. And Jay walks in and says, "I need a song for this scene. Will you be willing to look at this scene and consider writing something custom-made for this party scene at the end of the movie?
We sat down, and he showed us the scene. And we looked at each other and said, "Let's try it! And I think that writing process, feeling like we were actually doing a Bangles song together, Want to hear Susanna talk about partying with The Go-Go's in Vegas and what her favorite songs to perform are?
Check out the interview audio above. The Bangles funded Doll Revolution from live performances and were able to record new and unfinished work that had been ticking over since their split. Recording in a house in Los Angeles, the girls found the reunification enabled them to reclaim the joy of music, something their runaway success of the early days eroded.
Everything [was] going great on paper, but we all became miserable because we were so caught up in the machinery of how you make that happen, it took away the sheer joy. Now a rock mum who shares canteen duties with pride, Hoffs claims she's living a normal life. Mellow and reflective, she reiterates again and again how grateful she is to be a working musician.
While the Bangles reformation is a high priority, she's also working with Matthew Sweet and continues to pursue her own music. The Bangles play the Enmore Theatre on November 3 and 4.
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