Tag: 60s

Banglemania!

Travel back with me in time, to Sheffield in 1986 (I mean, how can you refuse an offer like that? Where else have you got to be on a Monday night in lockdown?). I was nine years old and about to discover my first-ever favourite pop band, courtesy of the cultural behemoth (ahem) that is Walk Like An Egyptian (I repeat, ahem). I remember watching the video and just being absolutely smitten by the tune. So, that was the first single I ever ‘bought’ (my parents bought it for me, for 99p, I believe, from Our Price), followed by the accompanying album, Different Light, and the band’s previous, debut album, All Over The Place, both on cassette. And that was that. My obsession with Susanna, Vicki, Michael and Debbi had begun.

At the time, I loved them for their catchy, brilliant tunes, but also for their image. As a little girl teased for her unruly curls, I adored their long, straight, 60s-style hair. I was fascinated by the little plaits they wore at the sides. I loved their outfits and their make-up. I had a complete crush on the bassist, Michael, and have nurtured a desire for poster-paint-red hair ever since. I listened to my cassettes over and over again, panicking when they got chewed up in my tape player and carefully looping them back in with a biro. I dreamed of being in the band. I drew pictures of them. I spent hours cutting photos out of Smash Hits and arranging them on my wardrobe doors with Blu Tack. It was a real love affair. I SO wanted to be a Bangle.

Inevitably, I drifted away from listening to the Bangles in my teenage years, but I came back to them about 14 years ago, when I met my now husband. It was immediately, painfully (hahahaha) apparent when we met that we had very few musical interests in common. By that time, I was mostly interested in synth pop. The Bangles had been elbowed out of my No1 spot in 1987 by my beloved Pet Shop Boys, and I’d followed up in the 90s with completely out-of-time obsessions with the Human League, Gary Numan and Heaven 17 (this was when my contemporaries were arguing over Blur and Oasis, by the way – can you imagine? LOLS). In 2006, my new boyfriend, by contrast, whilst having a pretty eclectic taste and an extremely varied CD collection, was mostly all about the jingly-jangly indie and classic 60s tunes. So, as a way to find common ground one night when he was in my studio flat, I dug out my Bangles CDs. Because, as much as they might be synonymous with the 80s, the Bangles took their inspiration and their sound very much from the 60s. They adored the Beatles, Fairport Convention and Love. They were steeped in that sound. And so, having fallen in love with their catchy melodies and beautiful harmonising, I’d found myself with a SLIVER of my music collection that I could reasonably hope my new man would like. And he did. (I can’t tell you how handy those CDs have been on our car journeys over the past decade and a half.) So, that’s how I came to revisit the Bangles, and listening to them as an adult has only made me love and respect them even more.

You see, I feel very strongly that the Bangles are a cruelly underrated band. Sure, by the time I discovered them, they’d already had one monster hit, Manic Monday (written by Prince), and a few years later they would have another one, Eternal Flame. So, yes, on one level, it’s hard to describe the Bangles as ‘under the radar’ or ‘ignored’. But what they are is criminally undervalued as musicians and songwriters. I suspect that most people who know Manic Monday or Eternal Flame don’t know that the Bangles started as a rough-and-ready garage band. That they all play their own instruments. That they are all songwriters. That Different Light, the exceedingly polished and glossy and sanitised album that made them superstars in 1986, isn’t actually representative of who and what they are as a band. It’s interesting to me that lead guitarist Vicki Peterson once said that their cover version of Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade of Winter was the song that came closest to showing what they are like as a live band. It’s a ballsy, take-no-prisoners recording and one of my favourites. I also love the fact that drummer Debbi Peterson was so horrified by Walk Like An Egyptian (which they didn’t have a hand in writing) that she refused to play or sing on it (hence her miming the whistling part in the video). Yet despite the fact that they are clearly Women Who Rock, I fear that the Bangles (in their 80s prime, at least) were often seen as ‘just’ a fluffy pop group. And that is deeply unfair (by the way, I don’t think it’s necessarily for sexist reasons; I have the same theory about A-ha, who are three men. Maybe that’s a subject for another blog entry?). They are a proper, banging, all-female rock band, which, along with the Wilson sisters of Heart, makes them pioneers, and anyone doubting their credentials should listen to their last album before their (thankfully not terminal) split in 1989, Everything.

Oh, Everything really is (everything). It’s a sublime tapestry of sumptuous, velvety rock and pop with effortlessly beautiful harmonies, heartbreakingly gorgeous melodies and some seriously hard-edged rock. It swerves from dark to light, sweet to aggressive, and every note, every bassline, every harmony is perfect. It’s my favourite of the three Bangles albums from the 80s (probably one of my favourite albums of all time, in fact), and every song deserves to be there; there is no weak link. Whilst Eternal Flame is ‘the famous one’, it’s not my favourite. That honour would go to In Your Room, Be With You or Something To Believe In. But all in all, it’s an absolute triumph. Which makes it all the more bittersweet that the production of this utterly perfect album led to the band splitting up. There is a track on their Greatest Hits album, called Everything I Wanted, which apparently didn’t make the cut for Everything. It’s one of my favourite songs in the world. It’s brilliant. Which tells you how great the rest of the album is, and maybe why it all fell apart.  

Thankfully, the Bangles reformed in the early 2000s, and released a comeback album, Doll Revolution (standout moment for me, Something That You Said). Then my favourite Bangle, Michael With The Flaming Hair, left the band again, and they carried on as a threesome. I bought their next album, and whilst it’s not entirely to my taste (I am, after all, only an accidental visitor to the 60s, and they can occasionally lean a bit too folky for me), I will always be in thrall to the way the Bangles write, sing and harmonise. It’s pure magic. And that’s why, 34 years after I first heard them, I still listen to these amazingly talented rock goddesses all the time, and I can’t imagine the soundtrack to my life (or our marital car journeys, to be honest) without them. 

A love letter to Liz (My female icons: Part 2)

What would Liz do? The short answer to that (Liz being Elizabeth Taylor, of course) is found in this quote, ubiquitously attributed to her on the internet: “Pour yourself a drink, put some lipstick on and pull yourself together.”

I haven’t seen all of Elizabeth’s films, so I don’t actually know whether she ever said this on screen, or indeed in her real life, but if she didn’t, it doesn’t really matter – it’s absolutely the sort of thing she would have said, and that very fact is part of the reason why I love her (she had me at lipstick).

As I said, I haven’t seen all of her films, or even, if I’m honest, many of them (lots of them are on my to-watch list, many are on my avoid-like-the-plague list and the ones I have seen have elicited mixed feelings. I remember sitting through Cleopatra as a teenager, knowing it was meant to be this huge, iconic movie, and that it was the film where Liz and Richard Burton notoriously and explosively fell in love… and yet feeling as if I was watching paint dry (and beige paint at that).

No, my love of Liz, like my love of Marilyn Monroe, isn’t really based on her work as an actress – it’s more about what I’ve read about her as a person (which is quite a lot) and how she inspires me as an enduring style icon. And that’s not to dismiss her achievements as an actor – she won Oscars, she was undoubtedly brilliant and talented… I’m just saying that I fell in love with her from a different angle, one that involved reading about her extensively.

Like Marilyn, Elizabeth had an iconic image that we can now look back on as being quintessential 1950s and 1960s glamour. Unlike poor Marilyn, though, Liz was still going strong in the ’70s and ’80s, looking opulently glamorous in kaftans and flares, then segueing into shoulder-padded power suits and big hair (and always, of course, with her famous jewels glinting from ears, neck, fingers and wrists).

In terms of how her style resonates with me, and at the risk of repeating what I’ve said about MM, I don’t feel particularly inspired by ’50s Liz: all those off-the-shoulder tops, flared skirts and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof slips aren’t really my thing. No, the Liz I love (fashion-wise) is the one captured so gorgeously in the huge black-and-white photo print we have framed in our living room: it was taken in the early ’60s and she’s walking along a rainy London street with Richard Burton, clutching an umbrella. You can see from her eyes just how in love she is, which is pretty thrilling in itself, and she’s wearing a smart cream or white coat and a pill-box hat: the very embodiment of the fashion era I love, when the nipped-in waists and pencil skirts of the ’50s met the sleek lines and modernity of the ’60s, and briefly, sublimely, merged into my dream wardrobe. I often gaze at that photo on our wall and imagine what it must have felt like to be Elizabeth at that point in time: at the height of her powers, her beauty and her career, deliriously in love and laughing through the London drizzle with the world at her fingertips.

Of course, we all know that it didn’t end that way for “Liz and Dick” (they hated that moniker, so I won’t use it again). Their passion burnt itself out in a maelstrom of children, pets, alcohol, jealousy (sexual and professional) and illness. They married, divorced, married and divorced again, and from what I’ve read, I don’t think either of them ever got over the other. And as tragic as that sounds, I think that’s the Cathy and Heathcliffe ending they would both have wanted us to remember them for.

But what Elizabeth looked like, and who she married, is only half the story, and that’s the main thing I find fascinating about her. She was beautiful, she was an A-list studio actress and she’d been a star since she was a child. And yet… she had balls of steel, the mouth of a trucker and the heart of a lion. As much as my love of Marilyn stemmed from the surprise discovery that the quintessential blonde bombshell was a sensitive, vulnerable and shy person, my love of Liz came from the opposite. This chick was balls to the wall. She swore like a sailor, she played Scrabble with dirty words (yes, we all know I love this), she demanded endless shots of booze when she was heartbroken, she refused to give in to the studio, the public or even the Pope when they objected to who she fell in love with, and she had some serious guts when it came to defending her friends. Here’s the story that makes me want to stand up and cheer, raise a glass to her and make her come back from the dead to be my friend: she was incredibly close friends with actor Montgomery Clift, with whom she’d starred in A Place In The Sun (1951). One night in 1956, minutes after leaving a dinner party hosted by Elizabeth and her then-husband, Michael Wilding, “Monty” crashed his car into a telephone pole. Hearing the smash, Liz ran out to help. And how many of us would have the presence of mind and the lack of squeamishness to do this? She put her hand down his throat to retrieve the teeth he was choking on. And when the press photographers inevitably arrived on the scene, she screamed at them that if they didn’t get away from Monty, she would never let them have a picture of her again. And that, I think, is Elizabeth Taylor’s heart and soul in a snapshot.

Knowing that, we shouldn’t be surprised that in the 1980s she combined life as a perfume maven with fundraising for AIDS charities – like Princess Diana, she did it when very few people were daring to.

Elizabeth Taylor had an incredibly cosseted lifestyle from an early age, yet you’d probably never have known it. She was one of the most celebrated beauties of the 20th century, yet she had a down-to-earth decency that made her seem right at home unceremoniously drinking a pint in a Welsh mining-village pub when Richard Burton took her home to meet his family. How can you not love that?

So while I adore Marilyn and I think we would have been friends, I always see Liz as the pal I’d have traded dirty jokes with in the pub whilst drinking shots of Sambucca and asking her for life advice.

They don’t make them like Liz any more, and I think that’s a huge, huge shame.