Desperate Housewives
TAKEN FROM WORD MAGAZINE

Is it Possible that Bananarama now have kids old enough to vote? And why are the thirsty hellcats of '80s pop giving it one more circuit on this viciously competitive merry-go-round?
Silvia Patterson Brings the Vladivar and lipgloss

Bananarama are laughing, smoking fags and swooning over some preposterously handsome man. No change there, then.

We're in Covent Garden, in a sun-dappled management office, the two founding members guffawing over some pictures on a digital camera. Perched on a sofa, side by side, they're recently back from Las Vegas where they filmed the video - all caberet frocks and corrugated male torsos - for the forthcoming single, the return-to-form discotronic spangler Move In My Direction. The photos feature Bananarama and their crew drinking for seven hours after the 18-hour shoot in a club-sized Vegas bar. "Well hello," faints Sara Dallin, 43, mooning over a shirtless individual in a white cowboy hat. "Geoff, absolutely gorgeous."

There's Keren Woodward, 44, doing the splits. "I had hair extensions which were getting a bit itchy," announces Sara, "so I took them out and put them in everyone's hair." There's the choreographer, throwing Sara in the air. "I'd just fag-burnt his chest."

"You're not allowed to smoke in here," Keren whispers, "but we always do." They make their own ashtray from the lid of a packet of Marlboros.

Incorrigible, defiant, glorious Bananarama, the three vodka-slinging Calamity Janes who became the most-charted girl-group in British history. Today, they're womanly sophisticates, dressed in drainpipe jeans, sleeveless silken summer tops and bare feet with bejewelled stillettos. Since 1990, they've been an occasionally employed duo (Bananarama never split up, through the depature of Siobhan Fahey in 1988 and Jacqui O'Sullivan, the Spook Who Never Spoke, in 1990), re-emerging in 2005 in the favourable conditions of our '80s-besotted culture where they find, says Sara. "a lot of affection for Bananarama. Even those miserable indie boys who hated us were closet fans."

In 1981, pre-MTV, Bananarama "didn't have a clue what they were doing," inadvertently inventing the contemporary British girl-group template (and the still-ubiquitous camp-pop caper of male dancers in their underwear), the primary-coloured harmony-based pure-pop blueprint which spans Pepsi & Shirlie and Mel & Kim in the '80s through the Spice Girls, All Saints and Atomic Kitten in the '90s, to the best of the career-pop-troupes of today, Sugababes and Girls Aloud. Bananarama are finding it hard to recognise the pop world of today, based as it is on precise demographic targeting and carpet-bomb marketing warfare.
"Everything is just visuals now," laments Sara, "which usually means filming a woman's arse. It's all stylists and polish and they're all 'media-trained' at pop school. We were mates and were so shambolic it's embarrassing, but it worked because it had charm."

These days you barely need to sell 10,000 records to chalk up a Top Ten hit, but back then Bananarama sold a minimum of a quarter of a million copies per single in Britain alone, none of which made it to Number One. "I'm glad we had the chance to do it our way," Keren believes, "bumbling along, being individuals, on our own terms."

There's no similarity between them and their assumed American forebears, the Motown-controlled Supremes, Vandellas or Marvelettes. "Because there were never any plans," muses Keren, "and we never let anyone tell us what to do." "I knew very little '60s music," adds Sara, "we grew up through punk. I can never get over the fact we were born not that long after the war, in 1961. We could've been The Andrew Sisters."

It began, in 1977, with a Persil packet. Collect three tokens and you got "a free coach trip worth £10!" Keren and Sara, 16, could travel into London, from their homes in Bristol, to "punk shows, Roxy Music and Top Shop". By 1980, they were London club regulars (Taboo and The Wag Club), living at the YWCA near Oxford Street, Sara at the London College Of Fashion, Keren securing a job at the BBC in the pensions department, shortly before she died her hair purple. At college, Sara spotted Siobhan Fahey, impressed by her "Patti Smith look", and the three became inseperable, clubbing persistently and substained by the subsidised cafe at the BBC. Every day, Sara and Siobhan would rollerskate down Oxford Street to meet Keren for lunch. "We didn't take our skates off, did we?" remembers Sara, "We just skated into the cafe for fry-ups for 30p."

Booted out of the YWCA for keeping late hours, their clubmate, ex-Sex Pistol Paul Cook, suggested they move into the room above the Pistol's old office in Denmark Street, already a mythological time-capsule strewn with Sid's old bondage trousers and the Bambi headboard from The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle. There was cold water and no toilet. "We'd use the loo at Tottenham Court Road station," Sara remembers cheerfully. Siobhan had friends in "studenty bands" and the three were approached "for backing vocals and maracas" by Cook and Steve Jones's post-Pistols band, The Professionals. Impressed, Paul suggested they form their own group, which they did - The Adventures - with Sara's Irish boyfreind. They'd rehearse a favourite song: Venus by Shocking Blue, but there were distractions. "We all had Irish boyfriends," says Sara, "so Shane MacGowan would come and crash at ours. They'd all sit there singing Irish rebel songs. We had a keyboard you plugged the music in for and it would play all the chords. I'd do Greensleeves with Shane and the songs from Saturday Night Fever. He'd fall asleep and we'd black his nose up, draw whiskers on his face and he'd stagger out the next day. No change there, then."

The Adventures ventured no further and, after a spell "singing Frank Sinatra numbers with Subway Sect", the girls formed Bananarama in '81 via a one-off single produced by Paul Cook, a cover of Swahili Black Blood's Aie A Mwana. John Peel, naturally, was the first to play it. Now a riotous explosion of chandelier earrings and crimped hair, the trio appeared in style gazette The Face where Terry Hall was impressed by the fact that they were wearing moccasins which he considered "completely un-showbiz". Post-Specials, Terry had newly formed the Fun Boy Three and called for a meeting. Sara: "We were terrified. He must have thought we were proper singers! He was really shy. He had a cup of tea and the saucer was shaking. 'D'you wanna s-s-sing on my album?"

The result, It Ain't What You Do It's The Way That You Do It sailed it's way to Number 4 in the UK charts in Februray 1982, the follow up, Really Saying Something (backed, to return the favour, by the Fun Boy Three) shoo-be-dooed to Number 5 two months later. And overnight the visual identity of the '80s had arrived - frizzy hair, charity-shop chic, avant-garde pop experimentation and the rise of the bewildered amateur.

"Our first Top Of The Pops was horrifying," Sara blanches, "The light came on and we were 'What does that mean? Do I sing now?'" Keren: "The ridiculous thing is we used to go to Top Of The Pops because I worked at the BBC. We used to see who was in the bar, go down, say, 'Oh, we're with U2' and just go in. So we were always on Top Of The Pops, in the audience, like that (arms aloft, manic grin). The minute we were on for real... (hides behind hair)." Sara: "Suddenly we were travelling. Hotels, Europe, free drink, everything paid for. My God, it was fabulous."

"Punk had a lot to do with it. It was a combination of 'get up and do it' and no jobs. Might as well have a go at this first, nothing to lose." Bananarama signed to London Records (through Decca, where Siobhan was once a receptionist) for a one-off single Shy Boy, co-written by Imagination producers Jolley & Swain, who they approached after hearing Body Talk. It reached Number 4 in July '82, while the girls were still on the dole.

From 1982 to 1988, Bananarama had 16 UK top 40 hits including their peppermint cool Top 5 classics Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye, Cruel Summer and Robert De Niro's Waiting ('83/'84) and the Stock Aitken & Waterman-produced, disco-bedlam opus Venus, Number 1 in America in the summer of '86. Their world erupted in a supernova of vodka, fags, dancing and travelling across Europe with their party pals from The Wag Club, who'd become Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Wham! and Boy George.

There were chartered planes flying to European TV pop festivals which, had they fallen from the sky, would have obliterated a generation of popstars. Sara always remembers being sitting next to Marilyn. In Italy, they witnessed the pale transvestite swish his skirts theatrically "all over the pistol-packing Italian police". They travelled from one show to the next, miming their singles for a new and insatiable television audience. "Relentless," Sara remembers. "Being in the middle of a field with a load of cows and popping out of spaceships. In the early days with Fun Boy Three there'd be bra-less dancers with crotcheted ponchos flying up. Then us six would come on, with no shoes."

Europe became one enormous Wag Club. "The minute we'd finish doing the TVs," says Sara, "we all went clubbing together. Especially with Duran. Simon and John, those two liked to party. John was a very pretty boy wasn't he?" she adds wistfully. "It was all drinking and dancing, we were first on the dancefloor, last off. We went out with Adam Ant one night, another very pretty boy, and said 'Come on, let's dance!' and he said, 'I don't dance,' and we said, 'you bloody well do now,' dragged him out and made him dance properly. He didn't know how to dance without doing that (fists aloft Prince Charming manoeuvre) 'Uuh. Hoi! Uhhh. Hoi!' We'd be welcomed into clubs as guests of honour. I'd be on men's shoulders and then asked to leave the club. Escorted out. Carried out."

Occasionally they'd be "blacklisted" off the British pop shows like Razzmatazz, Swap Shop, Runaround and Cheggers Plays Pop. "For nothing," insists Sara. "Once, in front of Mike Ried, we wiggled some dolls' bare bottoms at the camera and got all these complaints. Though we did shove Cheggers in a costume basket once, and sat on it. They were calling him to go set, the producer went ballistic and all we could hear was, 'Let me out! Let me out!'"
They befriended Tears for Fears - "hysterical", Nick Heywood - "he liked a drink", the Pet Shop Boys - "bitching for hours", and Paul Weller - "Victor Meldrew". They met Madonna backstage on her '85 tour and she told them she used to dance to Really Saying Something at The Danceteria. And they loved Pete Burns. "Pete Burns would talk us through surgery," blinks Keren. "He'd say 'yeah, I've got cheek implants' - and this was the mid-'80s - 'and woke up one morning and one had slipped' (demonstrates Pete's horrified face, with slippage). We were absolutely staggered." Sara: "Of course now he looks like he hasn't had a thing done!"

The three still lived together - by this time in a council flat in Holborn. One evening in 1984 the phone rang and it was Robert de Niro asking them out for a drink. "He was a complete idol of ours at the time," says Sara. "Obviously, hence the song. So, of course, we went. We always had millions of boys just crashing in the house and they all wanted to meet him, so they positioned themselves at various tables - this is the Zanzibar in Covent Garden - so they could have a look at him. We got drunk together. He was 44 or something and I was thinking, 'God, he's so old.' He said I had a very sexy smile. I was mortified and unable to say anything for most of the evening. He picked me up outside and swung me around in the air. I was wearing big Miss Selfridge earrings and a mac from Oxfam. Very glamorous. He still liked me. He's still very sexy, Robert De Niro. He's got that glint in his eye, hasn't he? Happy days. I only snogged him, though," she adds.

Not everyone liked Bananarama. To those "miserable indie boys", they were frivolous prancers who didn't - the horror! - write songs or play musical instruments (in fact they co-wrote with chosen producers: today, their music is produced by Swedish pop pool Murlyn, the hit-makers behind J-Lo, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin). In other quarters they were increasingly reputed to be an awkward surly tri-headed hydra well-versed in the nagative response. Confrontations erupted at photo shoots where they'd be expected to wear "racks of clothes with giant bows and polka dots on". Keren: "They wouldn't have done that to Duran Duran. Or Paul Weller. 'Can you wear this tight polka dot t-shirt?' F*** off!"

The schedule was punishing. "Everything we did in Britain we did in every country in the world"; woken in Japan at 5am, bursting into tears, depressed and exhausted, "taking it in turns," says Keren, "to have breakdowns". In '86, Bananarama experienced their second-ever chart failure (Hotline To Heaven, Number 58, "we'd failed, miserably!") and turned to Malcolm McLaren who had an idea for the nation's No.1 girl-group, a song called Don't Touch Me Down There Daddy. Keren: "I just thought, I couldn't ever sing that in front of my mother and I'm never going to able to work with this man." They turned, wisely, to the emerging Stock-Aitken-Waterman stable, principally because they loved Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like A Record). "We went to them with Venus," says Keren, "and said, 'can you make it like that?' And they said, 'don't be ridiculous.'" Venus was colassal, Number 8 in Britain and Number 1 virtually everywhere else. In New York, they witnessed the Venus video - a cartoon devils/angels classic - explode on to every screen in Prince's club The Avenue "and everyone just dived to the floor".

They also witnessed the now-pregnant Keren "throwing up on every street corner in America". The Bananarama dynamic was changing - a child for Keren, creeping unease in Siobhan, who left to marry Dave Stewart and create Shakespear's Sister, replaced briefly by Jacqui O'Sullivan, a club pal who'd sung in The Shillelagh Sisters, considered by the public to be a little on the ghoulish side. But their last performance as the original bananarama was their greatest - Love In The First Degree at the Brit Awards '88 featuring 40 men in knickers. "We'd had three boys," smiles Sara, "so we just thought 'Let's get 40 boys in pants and stockings, that'll be a laugh'."

The '90s were approaching and Britpop was on it's way. "We couldn't tell in the '80s," Sara reflects, "if we were in the golden era of pop. But I don't think they party quite like we did any more." Keren: "To a lot of people, we made the music for the best times of their lives. There were certainly so many charcters it was unbelievable. Now, it's more like a machine." Sara: "And we were a bit B&Q."

After a quarter century, Bananarama are unscathed by tragedy, bankruptcy, cosmetic surgery or rehab. Keren feels they may have been "the first ladettes", though they avoided the narotic follies of the Boy Georges. "We were good girls," says Keren, "just party girls who liked to drink. Vodka was the constant. Still is." They've had the same lawyer since the early '80s, "so we never got in the mess where sombody else takes all the money". Post-split with Siobhan they didn't speak to for seven years, but today she's "part of the family".

Since Christmas in 1990, Keren's boyfriend has been the mythological '80s skiver Andrew Ridgeley. They live in Cornwall, having raised Keren's son Tom (now 19), a student with dreams of film production. Tom's friends post messages on the Bananarama website: "Sorry for throwing up on your couch." Keren first met Andrew back in the Wag (he moved to Monaco, post-Wham!) "He was really drunk, reckoned he looked like Sylvester Stallone?"

For 20 years, Andrew Ridgeley has lived the life of an '80s winner. Peruse the credits on Careless Whisper and there's his name, whether a life-saving favour by his generous chum George or not. "He co-wrote a couple," insists Keren. "Careless Whisper and Club Tropicana, I think. Good Job. That's your pension."

Andrew Ridgeley is still skiving, devoting his life, says Keren, to "surfing, hiking and real ale". A decade ago, he alligned himself with Surfers Against Sewage as a favour to raise their profile. "He was branded an ecowarrior," cringes Keren, "so he said, 'Right, I'm not doing anymore of that rubbish.'"

Sara had a child, Alice, in 1992 with her partner, one of Bananarama's fabled dancers (so they weren't all gay); they split three years ago but remain "best friends". Today, there's "a new boyfriend, early days". Their greatest, life-long friends from the '80s are George Michael ("so brave and honest") and the Pet Shop Boys ("us, the Pets and Janet Street-Porter go for dinner and we're bitching for hours.")

There has never been a Bananarama autobiography. "If you were going to do it," avers Keren, "you'd have to put literally everything in. About everything. My mother would have a fit. We've got kids. I'd be so embarassed."

"I'm glad I wasn't famous for doing nothing," adds Sara pointedly. "Or sleeping with someones husband."

Before they leave, Bananarama do what girls must do. Keren rummages in her maroon leather bag, locates a beige-pink lipstick and deftly applies it with no mirror. At which point, without looking, Sara shoots a hand towards it, pastes on the lippy of her life-long friend and gives it back.

"Whatever I get out of my bag," sighs Keren, "she puts het hand out."
"It might be something I want," reasons Sara. "Condom?"