Slipping on a banana skin?
We’ve had Donald Trump being elected US President, the announcement of a UK General Election on 8th June, Emmanuel Macron (who started his own political party only a year ago) now installed as heavy favourite to become the President of French next month – how could the world get any weirder than this?
Well, the UK media is currently full of the news that 1980s hit group Bananarama – comprising Sarah Dallin, Keren Woodward and Siobhan Fahey – have officially re-formed thirty years after their original split and are going out on the road with a fifteen-date UK tour beginning at Glasgow’s SEC on 12th November.
For Rust readers either under the age of fifteen, who may never have heard of them, or over the age of sixty (who probably knew all about them from a distance in their heyday but who by now, through the effects of dementia or alcohol, may have forgotten all about them long ago), Bananarama were one of the biggest UK groups of the 1980s and – before the advent of the Spice Girls in the 1990s – probably the most-successful-ever UK female pop outfit.
I’ve been googling this morning and found at least one website that claims they’re still statistically the UK’s biggest-ever female group in history in terms of Top Forty hits.
Officially, although they had no UK Number One, 10 of their singles made the UK Top Ten, 25 made the UK Top Forty and 30 the UK Top Seventy-Five.
They also had one Number One hit in the USA – Venus, a cover version of a song first made famous by Shocking Blue in 1970.
That last fact was – for me, who I’m proud to report does remember them from first time around – the ‘killer’ thing above all others that was wrong with Bananarama and why I resented their success.
One moment that I can remember vividly – and here I must admit I’m hazy both about the year I’m referring to but (probably around 1990) and the exact details – was when it was announced that they’d officially become more successful in terms of number of hits than legendary bands of my youth such as The Kinks, The Who, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.
To me they remined little more than a manufactured female pop group – a la Monkees in the USA, a male equivalent – specialising in ‘cover versions’. Granted, they looked decorative and ‘cool’ for their era (if you like that sort of thing, see above right for what I mean) but at the bottom line were simply the lucky public faces and beneficiaries of a bog-standard Tin Pan Alley money-making machine [in their case, for much of their career, the Stock Aitken Waterman partnership].
To end by being beastly – and I’d stress I have no objection to anyone earning a living in any way they can at any stage of their lives – the prospect of the three original Bananarama ladies galivanting around the UK giving a juke-box-like performance of their supposed greatest hits as they individually near their seventh decades totally fails to raise my personal interest from the horizontal.
