Would a cocaine habit have helped change that? “Not really, no,” she replies, flicking her hair. “Part of the reason we weren’t taken seriously is that we weren’t pretentious,” Fahey ventures. They became friends with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!, as well as, unexpectedly, goth rockers The Cure (their bassist was a huge Bananarama fan), even Def Leppard – if there was a table, the girls would regularly drink the Sheffield metal band under it. He was halfway down the stairs when I dead-legged him – he went out crying.” She laughs, then stops herself. “He asked whether we’d ever thought about writing our own songs. “But I did dead-leg the man from D:Ream,” she recalls of singer Peter Cunnah from the 90s dance-pop troupe for whom Things most emphatically Did Not Get Better. “I mean,” she says, “for god’s sake…” Were they tempted to get physical? “It was,” Woodward decides, “a lose-lose situation.”ĭallin remembers turning up at interviews, only to be asked, “Have you thought about writing your own material?” It still rankles. “And then,” she moans, “we’d be termed ‘difficult’.” Magazines would, she recalls, typecast them as airheads, handing them balloons and suchlike during photoshoots, only for the poor snapper to be given short shrift. “People thought we were all about ra-ra skirts and we’d get very grumpy,” Dallin frowns. In a way, they were the missing link between The Slits and the Spice Girls. Their sweetly shambolic sassy-pop, aided and abetted by producers Steve Jolley and Tony Swain, belied their slickness and sharpness. Unlike the girl groups of a subsequent generation, Bananarama weren’t stage school brats, they were DIY types who invented their own look and penned their own songs. There’s no nastiness today: Bananarama deserve their place in the 80s pop pantheon. From 2005, their highest chart entry for 16 years. This was co-written by Youth of Killing Joke! Move In My DirectionĪ return to commercial, and some say creative, form. Their biggest-selling single in the UK, and one of their three No.3s, along with Robert De Niro’s Waiting and their 1989 French & Saunders (alias Lananeeneenoonoo) team-up, Help! Preacher Man One of Pete Waterman’s own favourites from the PWL canon, this was a classic dance-pop construction, the video an excuse to strike a pose (some have suggested Madonna wouldn’t have existed without the ‘Nanas: true story). The song that ushered in Phase II of their career and reached No.1 Stateside. That’s because Fahey is here with Keren Woodward and Sara Dallin, making this the first time all three ’Nanas have been spied together in public for 30 years, give or take their brief reunion in 1998 for Channel 4’s Eurotrash and a 2002 performance at London club night G-A-Y. Meanwhile, despite the busy, bustling scene – it’s lunchtime at one of the capital’s chic-est eateries – the diners are feigning interest in their seared salmon and quinoa. “We were best mates before we started… there’s always this bond” – Fahey You can imagine her coolly appending a “dahlink” to her sentence, in the manner of an aristocratic German dowager from a bygone era. It’s partly jet-lag – she has just flown in from Los Angeles, where she lives (she also owns a place in East London) – and partly just the way she speaks. “That’s because we are ,” Siobhan Fahey states the obvious in her husky drawl. In fact, it’s Classic Pop’s opening gambit: to remark on how incredibly like Bananarama they look. That’s the most striking thing about them. And they’re looking fabulous, all three of them, smartly dressed in matching black, sitting in a row on a bench seat in the restaurant of a London hotel. Yes, the girl group with edge – and an entry in the Guinness Book Of Records as the all-female outfit with the most chart entries in the world – are, as Smash Hits would have it, back, back, BACK. Welcome back from suspended animation on Mars – or rather, ‘Venus’ – if you haven’t heard: Bananarama have reformed.
How did that happen? Classic Pop finds out… We heard a rumour…turns out it’s true! Bananarama are back in their original incarnation after 30 years apart.
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