News in from the official site is that the new single Love Don’t Live Here will be officially released April 12. Still no firm news as to what tracks will back the single, or indeed who has remixed the single, but the wait is short as the official site promises more news within the week.
The video for the single will debut next week at www.bananarama.co.uk. Exciting stuff indeed!!
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Apologies 
Bananarama will release the second single from their latest album VIVA very soon. The single will be a revamped version of Love Don’t Live Here. The video has already been shot by director Tim Walker and as if that’s not exciting enough, the single will also feature a brand new version of “The Runner” by Buzz Junkies.
Fabulous news – and news I hadn’t thought I’d hear after the unfortunate chart placing of VIVA back in ’09. Fingers crossed etc. More info as it comes in, but in the meantime, what do you guys think of Love Don’t Live Here as choice for 2nd single?
BUK is raising a glass (or 3) to Sara Dallin as he types this. Happy 48th Birthday Sara! Have a wonderful day!
The second part of the epic Bananarama interview, originally in Gay Times, then more in Pink Paper, finally concludes with part II. More interesting stuff from the girls…
Pink Paper: Love Bites: Best Bananarama single that never was?
Keren: (smiling) Do you like that one? Was that the first track we did on the album? When we went over to Sweden?
Sara: Yeah. How does it go again? (Keren howls with laughter)
PP: I’m not going to sing it!
K: We really enjoyed doing that album, we did a whole load of it over in Sweden, it was different for us. But we really enjoyed doing the whole of this album with one person because I actually think it makes a better album, because you haven’t got different sounding things, the whole album is better consistently.
PP: The sound is very now because pop is back. Well, acceptably back.
K: In the 90s it was impossible to put out a pop album I think. It was an eye-opener for us because suddenly there wasn’t anything in the charts where we can fit in. It was all sort of baggy indie stuff. But everything comes around again. Fashion again is quite 80s, but with a modern twist, contemporary 80s, so it suits us quite well.
PP: How will older fans feel?
S: I still think it has really strong melodies, and they’re really poppy melodies.
K: Yeah.
S: Well you take that into consideration when you’re writing music . We just do what we feel like doing at the time, it’s the way it’s always been, there’s never been a masterplan to make a certain type of abum, it;s just what happens when you’re in the studio isn’t it. Maybe you’re influenced by other songs you hear.
PP: And what are your influences?
S: Well everything’s really really produced now, with all the mod cons and the voice things. It makes me laugh when I hear some of the stuff coming back from America, I just think ‘we’ve had that sound in Europe for so long’.
K: Some of the black artists that are out there are putting out stuff that almost sounds like euro pop from five or six years ago, then it all comes full circle and comes back from over there. I think if you listen to Lady GaGa it’s out and out pop songs, for me, with that really hard electronica edge on it. I think that’s great, that’s the sort of stuff we would make in our time.
PP: Love Comes is very much of that. Do you feel positive about the whole project?
K: Positive in the way that I think it’s a great track and I think the album’s great, anything else is a bonus for us I think. I don’t sort of think ‘oh wow, that’ll be a number one’, it’s not something that would cross our minds, but I think it’s a great album. I think it’s the best thing we’ve done in years and I’m really very happy with it.
PP: Do you get tagged with the ‘nostalgia band’ label?
S: Well we steered away from all those 80s shows for a long time, we never did any of them until the last couple of years. We thought, you know, why not do it. Why we did it is because they paid for a band and we thought ‘we’ll see how it sounds with a live band without having to have any costs ourselves’ and it went down really well.
K: It was just really fun to be out there playing in front of 10,000 people. We haven’t had the opportunity to do that for a while and it’s worked really well, it’s given us our stage confidence back.
S: Now we just wanna do our own stuff.
PP: Does that mean you finally learned the dance routine to I Heard A Rumour properly?
K: (looks at Sara) Did we?
S: Yeah, that’s about the only one I can do.
K: Yeah exactly.
S: And Venus (pulls a face and does lack lustre move from the routine, both start laughing)
Check out Sara & Keren’s personal playlists at iTunes UK. You can even buy their lists to be ever closer to S&K in a completely non-creepy kind of way. Shudder.
The girls appeared on the Alan Titchmash show – a lovely interview and an even more lovely performance of “Love Don’t Live Here” from their new album Viva! The next single?…
Thanks to Gavin for the Video.
Bananarama get a good review of Viva from website teentoday.co.uk. Although they did make up a track “come into the night” which they say they loved. Attention to detail. Tut Tut.
Read it here or HERE
What with new girl bands on the block the Dolly Rockers, Paradiso Girls and Girls Can’t Catch plus the return of the Sugababes and Saturdays, we forgot to mention the comeback of one of the biggest girl groups with one of the best band names ever, the grandmothers of them all – Bananarama. (Well, they probably won’t like being called grandmothers and they certainly don’t look like them, so let’s settle for naughty big sisters or slightly shambolic aunts instead.) But can their latest album, Viva, compete with all these young upstarts?
The answer is a resounding yes. Viva sees Keren Woodward and Sara Dallin tackle electro-dancepop with accomplished results – and before naysayers cry about La Roux bandwagon-jumping, 2005’s Drama album saw them in similar territory, so there. First single Love Comes is as good, if not better, than anything the Saturdays have chucked out – an exhilarating electro romp with a chorus that leaves you panting for more. Tracks like The Runner, Dum Dum Boy (both like, totally massive), Love Don’t Live Here and Come Into The Night prove that when the Nanas are on form with this blissful breathless disco, they’re a formidable force.
Elsewhere, the very reason why so many loved Bananarama in the first place is lost – a sense of artless fun, from their shambolic style and public appearances back in their 80s beginnings through the later Stock Aitken Waterman frivolity to their even-now hilarious interviews. Autotuned to the n-th and falling victim to the froideur that often besets electro, the likes of Seventeen and Tell Me Tomorrow glide by leaving little impression whilst a cover of iiO dance classic Rapture is rendered utterly unnecessary by being no better than the original and bringing nothing new to the table.
However, other covers take well to being electro-ed up. Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence is gorgeously lush and possibly the only track that has a slight heartfelt quality to it, Bryan Adams’ rock standard Run To You is gloriously reinvented as a dizzy dancefloor dream and Fox’s S-S-S-Single Bed, though initially banal, soon slinks by seductively with a touch of the Nanas trademark cheek too. And let’s mention The Runner, originally by The Three Degrees, again as it really is magnificent.
They might be past their best, but Viva proves the Nanas are nowhere near their sell-by date either.
Sadly Bananarama’s album failed to make a massive impression on the first week of release. The album only made #87 in the UK Album Charts. It’s an improvement on 2005′s Drama but obviously all of us were hoping for a better result.
It doesn’t diminish the fact that the album is really rather good, and is full of belting pop tunes. I think it’s a case of the single not receiving the support it needed from radio – the girls worked their arses off with promo, but sadly wasn’t enough to inspire people’s imaginations.
What say you? Read More >>
Bananarama appeared with three very excited interviewers on Live From Studio 5. Check it out!
