Thinking About Bananarama

Why? Because it's a Wednesday night.







So...is "Robert De Niro is Waiting" about rape? Yes. And "Hot Line to Heaven" is about heroin abuse. Of course. Most people only know the band through the pop hits they had through the production of Stock Aiken and Waterman, but their career, like many British bands with roots in new wave, is stranger and more interesting than their big hit . Their amazing first single was noticed by Terry Hall, of the great band The Specials, and Hall invited the girls to sing backup on his next band, the genuinely very strange Fun Boy Three. Much like,say, Simple Minds or OMD, Bananarama lost a lot of what made them special after they started to hit it big; where they once made perfectly composed pop with strange, unsettling undercurrents they now made perfectly composed pop for its own sake. Not a crime, of course, but one has to wonder what could have been, even just a little bit.

But this post is leaving out a whole lot. I'm sure there are a lot of Bananarama obsessives out there in the audience, what do you guys think of as the band's high point?