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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.
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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. |
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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.
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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.
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