The Bananarama are the most successful girl group produced by the UK: the Spice Girls have defended themselves but their career, excluding a couple of reunion, it lasted seven years yes and no. That of the Bananarama has been going on, uninterrupted, for more than forty years.
Sara Dallin, Siobhan Fahey and Keren Woodward formed, almost as a joke, their trio in 1980. Sara and Keren were classmates in Bristol and in London they know Siobhan who, like Sara, studies fashion journalism. Keren, on the other hand, already works at the BBC. The three girls go out every night together and are well known in the post punk and new romantic scene. Their name, Bananarama, is meant to be a kind of tropical and slightly cheeky homage to the song Pajamas by Roxy Music. When they find themselves, out of course, broke and without a roof over their heads, they end up squatting in the Denmark street apartment above the former Sex Pistols rehearsal room. A friend from the club scene invited them there: Paul Cook, former drummer of the Pistols themselves.
The Bananarama at the beginning do not seem to be serious: they are more of party girl that singers and indeed throughout their careers, even today when they are elegant sixty-year-olds, have always maintained that kind of messy going out with friends. Even at the height of success they retain something blatantly amateur: questionable ballets, bungled costumes and the constant risk of clashing with each other or with dancers even more scarce than them. Yet the secret of their duration seems to be precisely this: despite the money, despite the tours in Japan, despite the singles at number one (ten in the United Kingdom, when the records were sold), there have always remained three examples of that immortal known genìa like “my friends are too crazy”.
When, in 1986, the trio of producers Stock Aitken and Waterman arranged for them a cover of Venus, a 1969 hit by the Dutch Shocking Blue, the Bananarama change gears: the single goes to number one in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland and, above all, the United States. An international career begins for the trio of friends and a relationship of dependence, not always rosy, with the trio of producers who, in the meantime, also churn out numbers one for Rick Astley, Mel and Kim and for a very young Kylie Minogue.
After a successful album (Wow!) and a world tour that made the Pet Shop Boys say “if the Bananarama can go on tour then we can too”, things begin to crack. The first to show signs of abating is Siobhan Fahey: she is tired of the too rigid formula of Stock Aitken and Waterman and in 1987 she marries Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who encourages her to try new paths. In the middle of the album promotion Wow! Fahey leaves Bananarama and, with the American singer and guitarist Marcella Detroit, founds a hugely successful pop duo: the Shakespears Sister.
The Bananarama feel the blow but hold on: after trying to include Jacquie O’Sullivan (also ex punk and old friend) in the trio and after a new unfortunate album with Stock Aitken and Waterman (Pop life), they decide to continue as a duo. The nineties are very different from the eighties and the Bananarama go into survival mode. Their formula looks more and more to Eurodance and Europop, at a time when the scene in their home is dominated by Britpop and rave culture.
In 1991 also the trio of producers Stock Aitken and Waterman found themselves reduced to a duo: Matt Aitken, due to excessive stress, leaves. Decimated, exhausted and musically outdated Stock and Waterman and the Bananarama decide to resist and change direction. Just try to follow trends; the answer can only be one: the Abba.
The revival of the Swedish pop band began in 1991 with Abba-esque, an ep of the British synthpop band Erasure who filmed, complete with video en travesti, four cornerstones of Abba. Then, from Australia came Björn Again, a bit of a tribute band and a bit of a straggler Eurotrash and after them the flood: “Agnetha’s poop” and Mamma Mia in the movie Priscilla – The queen of the desert, Muriel’s wedding and the triumphal release of the anthology Abba gold, still today one of the best-selling records of all time. At Bananarama, in 1993, all that remains is to get on the bandwagon.
Sessions for Please yourself they started with the idea of making a classic disco album. During the production Pete Waterman comes up with the concept of “Abba Banana” and Sara and Keren begin their metamorphosis into a nineties dance clone of Frida and Agnetha: melancholy choruses, some vocal harmonization and enthralling piano arpeggios. Movin’ on e Last thing on my mind are two typical examples of this hybridization between Eurodance and Swedish melody. Unfortunately, however, the two singles are not successful. And the cover of More more more by Andrea True Connection, which sees them move from the celestial pop of Abba to the Eurodance of Baccara. Too bad because the original pieces are worth and only re-listened today reveal all their ambition and their scope: Give it all up for love is one of the most enthralling disco pieces ever made by Bananarama and You’ll never know what it means moves in a direction similar to that that Take That were heading, with much more success, in those years.
Please yourself it is a work made by people who are very familiar with genres and nuances, perhaps too much for the public of that era. This unfortunate album anticipates the sounds not disco that would bring Kylie Minogue back to success with Spinning around and above all he rides the Abba mania with taste and originality without falling into the obvious and caricatured tribute.
The definitive proof that the material of Please yourself it is more than solid is that Waterman, years later, makes re-sing Last thing on my mind e Movin’ on to the Steps, a British ultra-pop group that brings these two forgotten songs to the commercial success they deserve, with the somewhat grotesque outcome of making two melancholy songs about the end of a relationship sound like two baby dance hits. Please yourself it was simply too sophisticated for the early nineties and sounded too nostalgic and swooning to the ears of an audience crazed by the pumped-up Eurodance of 2 Unlimited, Culture Beat and Snap!
In the end though Please yourself it was also a testing ground for the Bananarama as a duo: if they came out alive from the “Abba Banana” formula they can withstand any era and any fashion. And so it was: their twelfth album of unreleased, Masquerade it came out on July 22nd and Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward have no intention of quitting going out and being in their sixties.
Bananarama
Please yourself
London, 1993