Susanna Hoffs is zooming from her sunlit house in California, all glass, golden wood and high ceilings. “We’ve got great acoustics in here,” says the one everybody remembers from the Bangles. She hosted a home concert just before lockdown featuring Neil Finn of Crowded House, Colin Hay of Men at Work and Billy Steinberg, who co-wrote Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Steinberg sang I Touch Myself, the song he penned for Divinyls. That’s a lot of Eighties pop power in one room. “It was a very festive night!” she says.
Hoffs seems like a very festive person, as well she might after a career with the Bangles stuffed with mega-hits: Manic Monday, their breakthrough of 1986, given to them by Prince; Walk Like an Egyptian; Hazy Shade of Winter and Eternal Flame, which she wrote with Steinberg and Tom Kelly.
Hoffs knows a good tune when she hears one, and wraps her husky purr around a few on The Deep End, her new solo covers album. Her takes on the Rolling Stones’ Under My Thumb and Yazoo’s Only You work particularly well.
An obscenely youthful 64, she has seen the glories and ignominies of the music industry up close and This Bird Has Flown, her debut novel, has plenty of both. Although more ignominies, from having to wear revealing stage outfits to playing “privates” — private gigs — to pay the bills. It’s a romantic comedy with a hot-mess heroine, Jane Start, an American musician in her early thirties whose breakthrough hit was written by an enigmatic megastar called Jonesy. Sound familiar?
Although Start is younger and less successful than Hoffs, like her she is a Jewish brunette from Los Angeles who sings, plays guitar and loves the British pop of the Sixties. And while Jonesy is tall and blond he otherwise bears a suspicious resemblance to Prince.
Advertisement
Jane then falls for an emotionally constipated but ravishingly hunky Oxford professor called Tom Hardy, who Hoffs insists was inspired more by Thomas Hardy the writer than Tom Hardy the actor. He also has more than a touch of her real-life husband, Jay Roach, a former professor who went on to direct the Austin Powers films.
The book is a lot of fun, sometimes purple in its prose (“I miss you with every heartbeat,” coos Tom, who is meant to be a literature don) but pacy, witty and engaging. It has already been declared a “total knockout” by The New York Times, whose critic summarised it as “the smart, ferocious rock-chick redemption romance you didn’t know you needed’’.
“My husband was so proud [of the article] that he sent it to everybody,” Hoffs says. You can see the book becoming a film, possibly directed by Roach. To add to the fact/fiction jiggery-pokery, Jane meets Tom on a plane, which is where Hoffs met Prince. There is also a charismatic young pop star who she says was partly modelled on Harry Styles and an ageing rocker nicknamed “Leopard Pants”, whom she saw as “a cross between Keith Richards, who I adore, and Bill Nighy in Love Actually.”
Hoffs loved writing the book. “I’d never written anything by myself,” she says. “I’ve always collaborated — I love the fun of bouncing ideas back and forth. Although I was never lonely because I had my characters. It’s like going through a portal in a sci-fi movie and you’re in this other world, but it’s all in here.”
She taps her head. “I’d be giggling to myself and my husband goes, ‘Who sits there at a computer for six hours and has a good time?’ Well I do! The characters start to take on a life of their own — Jane and Tom do more than just talking in my mind”.
Advertisement
They certainly do, from fumbling under the table at an Oxford pub to Jane channelling Gwyneth Paltrow as she takes “a moment of gratitude” for her vagina, and a scene in which her nipples stand “at attention like mighty soldiers of Eros”. There’s also a deliberately hilarious attempt at Victorian erotica.
Back to Prince. It’s long been suspected that Hoffs had a romance of some kind with him. So, erm, did she? “I’m gonna keep my own counsel,” she says with a smile. “Let me put it this way: it was incredibly flattering. On all levels. The kind of friendship that I had never experienced before.”
Meeting him on that plane and being given Manic Monday was “life-changing”, she says. “If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know what the journey of the Bangles would have been.” She doesn’t admit it directly but the character of Jonesy allows her to write about Prince without writing about him, from his impassive genius to his childish neediness. Jonesy asks Jane, “Who do you like better — your boyfriend or me?” and when she rebuffs him he goes into a sulk. “His talent was so immense, it was quite simply isolating.” Hoffs writes.
There’s adoration too. “Only he could make a guitar sound starry that way,” Jane says of Jonesy. “I had the great fortune of actually standing on a stage and witnessing a level of frickin’ genius and supernatural capabilities,” Hoffs says, “I mean, we’ve all seen the solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
She is talking about one of the coolest moments in music history, when Prince’s guitar blew Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne off the stage at the 2004 Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. The Bangles played Manic Monday live with him once in Los Angeles and saw a more petulant side.
Advertisement
There is a snippet on YouTube in which her bandmate Vicki Peterson stands next to him at the mike. “She was wanting to do the harmonies and Prince got really frustrated. He hops away in a bit of a grumpy moment and then she finally gets the message.”
The Bangles had their share of clashing egos, some of which stemmed from the assumption that Hoffs was the frontwoman despite sharing lead vocals with her bandmates, Michael Steele and the sisters Vicki and Debbie Peterson.
“Tours, with siblings. That had to be fraught,” Jane says in the book. She’s talking about a fictional Australian fraternal duo but is she really? Hoffs was devastated when Eternal Flame was initially rejected by the other members. “This is part of why being in a band is amazing but complicated,” she says. “It didn’t get the votes and, honestly, I was kind of bereft over it.”
● Susanna Hoffs: ‘Part of me thinks, how did I survive this?’
● How Harry Styles reinvented the playboy
The others finally saw sense and agreed to record the song but the problems weren’t over. “The Bangles had been living together for about eight years, touring, in each other’s faces,” she says. “Davitt [Sigerson, the producer] could see there were certain tensions in the band. He saw that each girl needed to have a special time alone when they were doing their vocals, not having a committee of the rest of us listening.”
Advertisement
What happened next would have made the 14-year-old me pass out: Hoffs recorded her part in the nude. “That was just a funny kind of dare,” she says, adding — in case you thought it sounded a bit #MeToo — that “nobody could see me: it was in a darkened room.
“Davitt pranked me by telling me that he had just finished an Olivia Newton John record and she did her best vocals in the nude. I was always wanting tips from other singers. ‘Wait, Joni drinks honey in her tea?’ I’m making that one up! Being gullible, I believed him. I thought, ‘What if that adds a little extra vulnerability?’ And weirdly, I got a really good vocal.”
Hoffs was born and bred in Los Angeles, the daughter of Joshua Hoffs, a psychoanalyst, and Tamar Hoffs, a film-maker. “My dad moved here from Brooklyn to start his practice as a shrink,” she says. “The Sixties was a perfect time to be a psychoanalyst in LA.”
A city full of loaded neurotics. She went to school with Leonard Nimoy’s children and her best friend was Liz Gazzara, daughter of Ben Gazzara, a collaborator of John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. “We would be mixing them martinis, like a scene out of Mad Men.”
From the Beatles onwards she was an anglophile. “Well, I love the accent. You’ve got a really good one too,” she says. Hopefully she can’t see me blush on Zoom. In the early Eighties the Bangles toured the UK in support of the Beat, the British ska band. “We were young musicians on the road together, watching each other’s shows but also flirting with each other.
Advertisement
And it was really, really fun.” One of the singers with the Beat was Ranking Roger. “Not someone that I, quote unquote, dated but we had a lot of chemistry. I was so sad when he passed away.” The crowds on the tour were less friendly. “People were throwing stuff at us, treating us terribly and I think that’s why the band rallied around us. We really earned our stripes.”
In the early Nineties her anglophilia went up a gear. With the Bangles on hiatus for much of that decade she formed a British Sixties pop pastiche band called Ming Tea with some guy called Mike Myers. They adopted pseudonyms — she was Gillian Shagwell, Myers was Austin Powers.
“It was a way to workshop the Austin character,” she says. In 1997 came Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the first of three films, with Hoffs on the soundtrack and Roach directing. Now the heroine of her novel is a lover of all things British, from Jane Eyre to the Zombies.
Helen Fielding, the creator of Bridget Jones, advised Hoffs on local minutiae and Jane’s harassed British manager does have a hint of Bridget and Four Weddings about her (“F***ity-f***”). The scene in which Jane struggles to make builder’s tea was a nice touch, although I’m not sure about everyone ordering “ale” in pubs.
So what next? “I’m almost a senior citizen,” Hoffs says, sounding genuinely delighted. “We are empty-nesters, which is really, really fun.” Her and Roach’s older son Jackson, 28, makes podcasts and Sam, 24, is a budding screenwriter and actor.
A biography and a documentary about the Bangles are in the works, and “I think you will see us on a stage at some point”, she says. And will she write more books? “Oh yeah. It’s like when I was a little girl I had a guitar for the first time and learnt to play an old folk song called Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley. Once you get the bug . . .”
This Bird Has Flown is published by Little, Brown
