8 Thursday November 11 2021 | the timesarts
T
he 1980s must have
been a confusing time
for Susanna Hoffs.
There she was, singing
in the all-female
garage rockers the
Bangles and being part
of a cool Los Angeles-
based early Eighties scene called the
Paisley Underground, which was made
up of people who wore thrift store
clothes and revived the gentle
psychedelic sounds of Sixties bands
such as the Byrds and Buffalo
Springfield. Then Walk Like an
Egyptian and Eternal Flame, the latter
the kind of ballad you could imagine
Sarah Brightman belting out in
a floor-length satin gown, turned
the Bangles into a household name
and Hoffs into a pin-up dream
girl for teenage boys
everywhere.
“When you have pop
songs on the radio, people
don’t imagine that you
might also like Iggy Pop
or the 13th Floor
Elevators,” says Hoffs,‘I couldn’t get off
the escalator. Part
of me thinks, how
did I survive this?’
Susanna Hoffs, co-founder of the Bangles, talks to
Will Hodgkinson about the intensity of the 1980s Los
Angeles rock scene and why the band had to break up
- She’s speaking from her home in
LA, where she lives with her two sons
and the film-maker Jay Roach, whose
Austin Powers movies came out of
Hoffs forming a faux British beat band
called Ming Tea with the comedian
Mike Myers and the fellow Sixties
obsessive Matthew Sweet. “Walk Like
an Egyptian was the No 1 song of 1987.
A year later Eternal Flame was massive
around the world. We had been a little
garage band and then once it started
it was like you couldn’t get off the
escalator. It was a dream you couldn’t
wake up from. Part of me thinks, ‘How
did I survive it?’ ”
Hoffs has always sat in the space
between the
mainstream
and the
underground;
the type of guitar-
playing Velvet
Underground fan who was the
first to audition for the school
play. “Not that I always got the
best parts,” she points out. “But I was
singing my whole life, studying ballet
to a serious level, and by the late
Seventies I started putting all these
pieces together. It was Patti Smith who
inspired me because after seeing her
I thought, ‘Maybe there’s a way to take
all the things you love — singing,
dancing, theatre, music, books — and
put it together in a band.’ I didn’t have
to give up theatre, or dance, or being
a folk singer. I could put it all into
what the band would become.”
Now Hoffs has paid homage to her
first love: obscure music from the
Sixties and Seventies. Her new album,
Bright Lights, is a collection of cover
versions that displays her impeccable
taste, alongside reminding us of thevoice that made Eternal Flame so
affecting. One of These Things First,
Nick Drake’s reflection on all the
things he could have been had he
not chosen life as a sensitive singer-
songwriter of minimal commercial
success, is on there. So is one of my
favourites: No Good Trying by Syd
Barrett, a whimsical dig at the former
Pink Floyd singer’s old bandmates,
which appeared on his twisted 1970
solo masterpiece, The Madcap Laughs.
“It’s rather obscure, so I’m always
delighted when someone knows that
song,” Hoffs says of No Good Trying.
“I wanted to cover artists who, as wellthhfbRight: Susanna Hoffs,
second from right,
with Michael Steele
and Debbi and Vicki
Peterson of the
Bangles in 1986.
Below: Hoffs in 2016