The Times - UK (2021-11-11)

the times | Thursday November 11 2021 9

arts

PAUL NATKIN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

is an interesting way to deal with

my predicament. I form a band with

other girls.”

When Hoffs first posted flyers across

LA for like-minded young women,

listing among her influences the

Sixties psychedelic band Love, the

only person to respond was 16-year-

old Maria McKee of the country rock

band Lone Justice, and that was only

because her half-brother Bryan

MacLean had been Love’s guitarist.

Then Hoffs put out a notice in the

classified ads paper The Recycler, met

the sisters Debbi and Vicki Peterson

and Annette Zilinskas, and the

Bangles were born. “I was actually

living in my parents’ garage at the

time. We realised that, beyond our

shared fixation on the Beatles, we all

liked the one-hit garage bands we

heard on the radio as kids. We were

scrappy, rehearsing in garages,

hanging out with other people who

liked obscure psychedelic music from

the Sixties, and to our surprise it got a

following. That’s where it all started.”

Things took off with Manic Monday,

written by Prince. “It was a kismet

moment. I didn’t really know much

about Prince because I was so

enmeshed in my weird Sixties world,

but after we put out a song called

Hero Takes a Fall he started turning up

at our gigs, playing these incredible

guitar solos and I had never been

as being incredibly creative, had
interesting stories.”
They certainly did. Barrett never
recovered from early experiments
with LSD and became a recluse at his
mother’s house in Cambridge. Drake
died aged 26 from an overdose of
antidepressants in 1974. Chris Bell,
formerly of the Memphis power-pop
band Big Star whose solo song You
and Your Sister features on Bright
Lights, was dead at 27 after smashing
his sports car into a wooden pole in
December 1978.
“These are the people whose music
I love, not the ones who influenced
me as such,” Hoffs says. “I grew up
listening to Joni Mitchell, Linda
Ronstadt and the Beatles, and singing
along to their records. The songs on
Bright Lights are the ones I discovered
in the pre-internet, early Eighties,
when you couldn’t just root around
and click on to, say, Femme Fatale by
the Velvet Underground. You had to
seek this stuff out. And there was
a community of people in Los Angeles
who would share it with you.”
The Bangles emerged from that
community. “It’s that old thing: we
found each other,” Hoffs says. As
a college student in 1978 she witnessed
the final Sex Pistols show, at the
Winterland Ballroom in San
Francisco, where she had waited in
the pouring rain for six hours to get
into a concert that she recalls as life-
changing. She became determined to
get her own band together. “I tried it
out with my former boyfriend David
Roback [of Paisley Underground
mainstays Rain Parade and later the
cult indie band Mazzy Star], but being
formerly romantically involved made
things a little fraught. I went round
the LA clubs, saw the [all-female punk
band] the Go-Go’s and thought, ‘Here

witness to that supernatural brilliance.

Cut to a few years later and I was told

one day, ‘Drive over to the studio

where Prince is working because he’s

got a song for you.’ We hovered

around a little cassette player and

listened to Manic Monday. I still have

that cassette.”

By the time Walk Like an Egyptian

went to No 1 around the world — the

song’s accompanying dance moves

and the Bangles’ big-haired fashion

sense making it perfect for the

video-led MTV era — Hoffs was a

household name. “But I like to think

that our scrappiness never left us. We

never had stylists giving us designer

clothes, so we had to cobble together

outfits that didn’t match whatever the

others were wearing. And suddenly

we’re going on no sleep, travelling

continuously, you have no autonomy

in your life because your job becomes

everything, and you never have

a moment to yourself. I’m glad I was

young when it happened because the

pace was intense.”

The pace only intensified with the

ubiquity of Eternal Flame, which ended

up being the band’s final hit before

they split in 1989. “Initially it was

rejected. All of us wrote songs and

there were only so many that could fit

on the album,” Hoffs says of the song,

which ended up on the Bangles’ third

album, Everything. “I was heartbroken,

frankly, but then it took off and that

created extra pressure.”

The Bangles called it a day after

becoming, by Hoff’s description, like

a marriage between four people that

got exponentially more complicated

as time went on. “We hit a wall

emotionally. I know I did. I needed to

stop, wake up in the morning and hear

the birdsong. It was extremely difficult

to make that decision [to end the

band], but I knew that if I spent the

rest of my life on the road with the

Bangles, I would never be satisfied.”

Since then Hoffs has kept busy one

way or another, Bangles reunions

included. The Austin Powers adventure

began after she and Sweet did a set

at the back of a guitar shop in Santa

Monica called McCabe’s. “I knew that

Mike was working on his film about

a swinging spy, so I invited him to

the show. After that we formed an

imaginary band for Austin Powers and

did some shows, wearing wigs and

having fake names. It turned out to be

a workshopping process for the movie.”

Thirty years later Hoffs has the

distance to see the Bangles for what

they were: a once-in-a-lifetime

phenomenon. “It’s the greatest gift of

all, to write a song that people take to

heart,” she says. “People come up to

you to say that they lost a family

member and Eternal Flame helped

them through it. That’s what music is

for me.”

Hoffs has gone back to her original

love with Bright Lights. You wonder,

given that it is unlikely to have the

impact of Eternal Flame, what she

hopes listeners will get from the album.

“I learnt about these artists from my

friends in the Paisley Underground,”

she says. “Maybe, in reinventing the

songs and sharing them with the

world, other people might go back and

discover Syd Barrett, or Nick Drake, or

Chris Bell. I’m just a music lover who

wants to sing the songs that blew my

mind. In that way, nothing has really

changed since the early days with the

Bangles. I guess I never really got out

of the garage.”

Bright Lights by Susanna Hoffs is out

tomorrow on Baroque Folk Records

Light, cameras, actio!

P

oor Marvel. Its superhero

blockbuster Eternals has

been the worst reviewed on

Rotten Tomatoes of any

movie in the Marvel

Cinematic Universe.

And it has underperformed at the

box office. But why? Well, you don’t

want to blame the ancient

Babylonian, but it didn’t help. The

Eternals film-makers bent over

backwards, and recruited their own

language scholar, to include scenes

of Spandex-clad superheroes flirting

in ancient Babylonian (set in 575BC).

It was an attempt to add realism to

the tale of a team of uber beings who

are trying to stop a celestial giant

from destroying Earth. But it was

also symptomatic of a movie that

started from the outside in, with

character traits, looks and languages,

rather than a story.

Eternals isn’t the only movie

that’s turning to dead or rare

languages. The recent Canadian

drama Edge of the Knife was filmed

in the Haida language, an indigenous

dialect spoken in a Pacific

archipelago off the coast of

Canada by roughly 20 people.

The Irish festival hit Arracht, set

during the 19th-century potato

famine, was shot in Gaelic. And the

Italian action movie from 2019 The

First King: Birth of an Empire, about

the legend of Romulus and Remus,

was filmed in Old Latin.

Here Alessandro Borghi

as Remus announces: “This

is Rome!” But he actually

says: “Isa Roma!” It may be

Old Latin, but classicists

were expecting: “Haec

Roma est!”

It raises the problem of

inserting ancient tongues

into modern mouths. It

can seem very camp, and

inevitably recalls the

Cockney centurion

John Cleese, during

Monty Python’s Life

of Brian, barking:

“Romanes eunt Domus?

People called Romanes, they go to

the ’ouse?”

Even the Russell Crowe hit

Gladiator barely used two words of

Latin, but when they did they got it

wrong. Crowe, as Maximus Decimus

Meridius, inspires his troops with a

shout of “Roma victor!” Roma is

feminine, which would have made

the correct chant: “Roma victrix!”

Derek Jarman also filmed his

homoerotic epic Sebastiane (1976) in

Latin, and even there, as Sebastian

(Leonardo Treviglio) endures sword

training while wearing only a natty

thong, the shouts of “Sebastian!

Pugnate!” are titter-inducing.

Mel Gibson’s use of Yucatec Mayan

in the jungle flick Apocalypto was

less distracting, if only because the

film was so violent. Ditto for the

Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic in his

The Passion of the Christ.

Even the nonsense languages in

movies such as Avatar and Quest for

Fire work effortlessly in those films

not because of their formal intricacy,

but because they are subservient to

storytelling. It’s a simple truth (story

first) and one that the makers of

Eternals need to learn. Either in plain

English or ancient Babylonian.

a

is

sa

O

w

R

in

in

ca

in

C

Jo

M

o

“R

PPPeopllecalled

Gladiator

barely

used two

words of

Latin, but

when they

did they

got it

wrong

Richard Madden and

Gemma Chan in

Eternals, which revives

ancient Babylonian

The Bangles

hit a wall

emotionally. I

needed to stop

Babylonian in

Eternals, Latin

in Gladiator:

Hollywood

loves a dead

language, says

Kevin Maher