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APRIL 2003 ARCHIVE: 
Glitter Years - With Elvis Costello
Over the past few months we’ve been sitting down with Susanna, getting all the insider scoop on what’s going on behind the scenes in some classic photos from the Bangles’ “Glitter Years”…  This month we come full circle, as Susanna tells us about the Bangles’ mutual musical love affair with Elvis Costello.  

This was taken backstage at Elvis Costello’s 1986 concert here in Los Angeles .  Micki’s not with us ‘cause she was in Australia at the time visiting a boyfriend….we were all a little jealous, actually… There was some sort of professional photographer there, and he had us posing as a doo-wop girl group.  Yeah, it IS a little silly, now that I look at it.  
Elvis was doing this great tour (called “The Spectacular Spinning Songbook Tour” ) where the audience would pick the songs – he’d have them come up and spin a wheel with all the song titles printed on it, and it would land on one of the songs, and he’d just play them as they came.  He also had special guests coming on stage every night, and when the tour came to L.A. he called and asked us to play.  It was a huge compliment!   One of my strongest memories from this time was rehearsing with him at the Mondrian Hotel where he was staying.  In fact, I still have a cassette tape of that rehearsal; it’s a prized possession…  He’s just so amazing.
 And it’s so funny, ‘cause it just seems like all roads keep leading back to Elvis Costello… We’d been out of touch for awhile, and then I was at this film festival in Palm Springs - and it was a very odd place to suddenly have your cell phone ring and find yourself talking to T-Bone Burnett, you know?!  He said Elvis was working on a project, and wanted me to sing a demo of a song called “Tear Off Your Own Head It’s A Doll Revolution”  and I thought “…Well, that’s a cool title …but …tear off your own HEAD?  What is THAT about?!” But of course I said yes! When I finally got the song, I really liked it! It’s very reminiscent of the stuff he was putting out when his career was just starting, and when I’d first gotten into the idea of being in a band, during my Years as a Berkeley Girl…  It had that great punk-pop sound, and it was just so fun and a little edgy, and well, yeah, kinda Bangly, come to think of it! There’s an aggressiveness in the song that really appealed to the little bit of punk in the Bangles, and kind of tapped into our roots, musically.
And later in the recording process, we had this posterboard up at Bangle Manor and we were kind of horsing around writing down possible album titles on it (see photo below), and most of them were for fun, but it occurred to me that “Doll Revolution” was a really cool title, so I wrote that on the board.  And we all felt that it kind of just fit, you know?  I mean, not to make too much of it, but we’re having our own kind of Doll Revolution with this album.  I mean, there’s a cheekiness about the song that’s fun and humorous, and it’s spirited and even silly in places - but it taps into themes that are really meaningful to us. It is something of a girl anthem, with an empowering spirit to it.  It really makes you think about what it is to be a girl in this world and about girl power, and turning things around in your own small way, you know?  Which is definitely something the Bangles are all about.