If She POLLED What She Wants: The Bangles "Greatest Hits" Poll

I'm still fond of "My Side of the Bed," which has those kittenish qualities that Hoffs could project so effortlessly.

xp Susanna Hoffs' solo version (on When You're A Boy). (and yeah, haha)

She's still O Susanna, yet doesn't seem *too* kiddie on Sweethearts..., nor does she get all autumn leaves broody or blearly like so many rockers past 40.

'blearly" yeah and bleary, beery

I never saw this video for "The Real World" until just a few minutes ago. I'd guess it's from 1982 or so, and Susuanna looks like a kid (she was 23-ish).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7uSyTZN0xk

And here she is 30 years later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCVz-Kn3xEs

Posted this in the Paisley Underground thread

The Bangles played a stunningly gorgeous cover of "I'm Waiting For The Man" that merged seamlessly into "Manic Monday." After that Vicki announced "tonight we're playing as The Bangs - nothing later than 1984!" Time travel ensued. They were the best band back then. Certainly the best now.

Noted that during the big finale with everyone + Rodney on stage that no one sang with Wynn.

― Elvis Telecom, Saturday, December 7, 2013 3:59 AM

Never heard of the top four results.

are you having a bubble?

"Walking Down Your Street"	0

;_;

Their biggest hit still sucks.

Totally spot-on, Al, especially Everything is All Over the Place recorded by a parody band.

I remember my copy of Daydream Nation had “Star-strangled Bangles” written in the runout groove.

yeah i've never liked this song either

I liked it, and to some degree still like it, because it came out when I was 8.

I thought Alfred was ragging on 'Manic Monday' or 'Eternal Flame', which wouldn't have been acceptable. However WLAE is fair game.

ditto crypto. i liked the song cos i heard it when it came out and i was six. "oh-way-oh" is still pretty cool but kind of amazing the main hook is that all the instruments drop out and the title is just spoken.

that write-up was otm on the video's impact tho. i recently re-watched it cos i saw the thumbnail of Hoffs rolling her eyes on youtube. babe appeal. lot of comments said the same. the video came during peak era MTV.

Free show last night in downtown LA. Annette is back full-time, so it's 1982 all over again - the first EP, some spot-on covers ("Pushing Too Hard" being the best), and played the hits as if they were a killer garage rock band. Which they always were.

pic.twitter.com/x3FTKdE9lB

— Chris Barrus (@quartzcity) July 15, 2018

cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFaVFcPPHdM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jeZtxB_pGI

Nice, James Redd! The real deal.

Thanks, Tim. Was actually a bit afraid I had already posted those.

Seven years now since Sweetheart of the Sun, but that's one of those albums that is so good that it persists with the air of something masterful until they venture to try it again. Hoffs' solo album from the following year is also top drawer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPjxgRf7PHo

People dont talk about BBC by Ming Tea enough.

So, um, don't recall ever seeing this video before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAbYsxd3ADg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_otzlonv1o
Thread of missing Tim E.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMdvPYw0hA4
1984 Hero Takes A Fall/Going Down to Liverpool on Letterman. Don't worry, no ringers. Great live sound.

Although beware of mysterious appearance of Sting in the middle.

Don't remember seeing this either, at least the first part in the car with the mysterious driver.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj7OJeyhq2Q

Chris O'Leary just completed a Bangles entry for his 64 Quartets project that will have you rethinking the band entirely, in a great way. It's subscribers-only right now but will go live in the near future. In the meantime he linked this equally striking and sadly necessary read from November:

https://rachel-macari.medium.com/you-cant-always-get-what-you-want-being-a-bangles-fan-2c3886497e1e

And Chris's aforementioned piece is now live:

https://64quartets.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/6-the-bangles/

Just saw that, wonder when I will have time to read it, looks amazing.

It is.

That was really good, thanks. Things I never knew include:

Its foundation was an Alesis drum machine, a garbage can lid, a Peruvian shaker, a gong, and an Emulator-generated bongo sample, the latter via Mitchell Froom, who was recording at the Sunset Sound Factory at the same time (the “Egyptian” rhythm tracks are a kooky ancestor of the Latin Playboys album that Froom and Different Light‘s engineer Tchad Blake did a decade later).

I'm partway through and it is very excellent indeed

Missed this - would have chosen "If She Knew What She Wants".

Didn't know Bangles had covered Grass Roots' "Where Were You" - first heard it from the Adult Net version.

"Manic Monday" or "If She Knew What She Wants"...I actually never heard the original for the latter until now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAHKJy2LlHU

Sounds like the same exact arrangement, but changing vocalists (especially a she rather than a he - could be singing about herself now) makes a huge difference, and much better for it.

I'm not a fan of their third album and I have a real soft spot for their early recordings so I made my own Bangles compilation awhile back:

1. Bitchen Summer/Speedway
2. Getting Out of Hand
3. Call on Me
4. The Real World
5. I'm in Line
6. Want You
7. Mary Street
8. How Is the Air Up There?
9. Outside Chance (demo)
10. Steppin' Out (demo)
11. Tell Me (live, 1984)
12. 7 & 7 Is (live, 1984)
13. Hero Takes a Fall (single mix)
14. Live
15. James
16. Dover Beach
17. Tell Me
18. Going Down to Liverpool
19. Where Were You When I Needed You?
20. I Got Nothing
21. Manic Monday
22. If She Knew What She Wants
23. Walk Like an Egyptian
24. Walking Down Your Street (single mix)
25. September Gurls
26. Following
27. Hazy Shade of Winter
28. In Your Room
29. "No Mag" commercial

"Return Post" on Different Light is a nice, well-crafted song that isn't mentioned here or in the 64 Quartets piece.
Of the songs on this compilation, "Hero Takes a Fall". The videos from the first album were on MuchMusic all the time, it made them seem more successful than perhaps they were at the time.

It's also interesting how demure a band of women could be in the 80s, yet still be accused of selling sex appeal by critics.

probably would've voted for "liverpool" or "hazy"

I love Different Light's title track.

They had such a good instinct for picking covers, never going for the low-hanging fruit and always putting their own stamp on them. Now, teaming with tried and true hitmakers for "Eternal Flame," that seems more like going for the low-hanging fruit, but like Cheap Trick and "The Flame" - same year! - the ostensible sell-out move suits their strengths pretty well.

"The Flame" was '88, but, yeah, I agree, though "Eternal Flame" has more of an identity, i.e. those harmonies in the last third

Wasn't "Eternal Flame" also '88? Or just the album?

Just the album (late '88). "Eternal Flame" hit the top in spring '89.

Great thread still, will have to read that new epic piece, thanks.
Oh, just remembered this, from my P&J comments re 2016 releases:
Speaking of Bangles, their Omnivore round-up, Ladies and Gentlemen----The Bangles! is good from first listen, after first thin Bangs tracks, and a clunky cover of "7 & 7 Is." Earns its exclamation point, as gurl rockers had to do.

Eternal Flame is fantastic.

At the time, I saw it as a throwback to something like "Dedicated to the One I Love" by the Mamas and the Papas, not so much a power ballad.

At the time I *hated* Eternal Flame. It was around the peak glossy DX7-preset ballad era, opening the door for all those subsequent schlocky Disney ballads to dominate the airwaves. It was ubiquitous, and I'm sure part of the reason I more or less turned off the radio for a couple of years. Iirc I definitely liked the Bangles stuff I'd heard on the radio, but did not like this one, which, tbh, is not all that different from a Disney song, even if I've sort of come to terms with it (and particularly its bridge).

This was interesting:

In 2004, Billy spoke with us about many of his hit songs. The stories reveal a depth and authenticity that might explain their enduring popularity. Below is the transcript from that interview.

Songfacts: "Eternal Flame," that you wrote for The Bangles, can you tell me about that song?

Billy: Tom Kelly and I met Susanna Hoffs and we set out to write several songs for the Bangles’ next recording. When we got together with Susanna, she admired a song that Tom and I had written for Cyndi Lauper called "Unconditional Love." I think she liked the song because it was highly melodic and resembled a ballad that would not have been out of place on The Beatles' Revolver album. She was sort of envious of that song, she said she wished we could come up with something as good as that song. And I remember confidently I told her, "Susanna, we're going to write something better than that song."

She was talking about The Bangles having visited Graceland, and she said there was some type of shrine to Elvis that included some kind of eternal flame. As soon as those words were mentioned, I immediately thought of the synagogue in the town of Palm Springs, California where I grew up. I remember during our Sunday school class they would walk us through the sanctuary and there was one little red light and they told us it was called the eternal flame. When I was a child I remembered thinking it never burned out, that it was something like the sun or something beyond our capacity to even contemplate. It seemed like a very profound thought when I was a child. I thought, "Well that's a great title for a song," so very quickly I wrote the rest of the lyrics for the song based on that title.

Tom and I and Susanna were at my house in Los Angeles. I believe Tom started to write the chords and the melodies on an acoustic guitar at my house. The bridge to the song, or the middle eight as the British would say, the part that starts, "Say my name, sun shines through the rain," that part in particular is very Beatlesque and Tom, who's a great lover of harmonies, worked with Susanna to create almost a tribute to The Beatles and Beach Boys background harmonies in our demo and The Bangles recreated them on their record.

One of the main differences between our demo and what was to become The Bangles record was, we based our demo on the acoustic guitar while The Bangles record, which was produced by Davitt Sigerson, was based on a simple piano. I think we based our demo on the acoustic guitar because there was no keyboard player in The Bangles. When you're a songwriter and you're trying to write something for a particular project, you very self-consciously do whatever you can do to see that it gets on the record and to ensure getting it on the record you want to make it sound like something the band could play. For that reason we tried to leave keyboards off our demo, but then we were very pleased with Davitt Sigerson's production and the way it featured the piano. I know Tom and I both loved Davitt's production, we both loved Susanna's lead vocal and all The Bangles harmonies and were very pleased with the way the song turned out.

One of the unusual things about that song, which is also attributable to its Beatlesque roots, is the fact that it really doesn't have a chorus. The part that starts, "Close your eyes, give me your hand, do you feel my heart beating, do you understand," that part sets out to be the verse of the song and then the title is incorporated in the last line of the verse when it says, "Am I only dreaming, or is this burning an eternal flame." By the end of the song when all The Bangles chime in and re-sing the first verse at the end of the song, the whole verse feels like a chorus. The Beatles used to write in that way, for example, "We Can Work It Out." The line, "We can work it out," is sort of a tag in the verse. The verse ends with, "We can work it out, we can work it out." It isn't a chorus, it doesn't begin with the line, "We can work it out," which would be more traditional pop hit structure. The whole song 'Eternal Flame' is so melodic that it doesn't really miss a traditional chorus, it just works the way it is. In one more Beatle type arrangement decision we do the bridge after two verses and then there's a guitar solo and then we do the bridge again. Again, The Beatles would often do that. In the song "We Can Work Out," the bit that begins, "Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend" - I think that happens twice in the song. Sometimes if you have a bridge that's really good, it's nice to repeat it, and also if a song doesn't have a traditional pop chorus you almost need to repeat the bridge so that the song is long enough and that's what we did in "Eternal Flame." And that's what occurred in a lot of Beatles songs.

Songfacts: I think I read somewhere that they used studio musicians for this, that The Bangles with the exception of Susanna, did not actually play on that record.

Billy: I wouldn't be surprised if they used studio musicians to play the keyboards. I was definitely under the impression that the other girls played on it. They may have used some studio musicians, but all The Bangles, to their credit, are fine musicians, and I can't see any reason why they wouldn't have played.