The 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, 62. 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 the voice 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 well as being incredibly creative, had interesting stories.”
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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 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 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.”
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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.”
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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