It ended up being the biggest hit of their career, but one member of hugely successful ‘80s pop-rock band The Bangles has admitted that she had reservations about releasing their 1989 smash, Eternal Flame.
The revelation came in an interview with The Independent, in which three members of the all-female outfit - Susanna Hoffs (guitar and vocals) and sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson (lead guitar/vocals and drums/vocals) - looked back on their hugely successful career and abrupt break-up.
Eternal Flame appeared on The Bangles’ 1988 album, Everything, which would turn out to be their last until they reformed and released 2003's Doll Revolution. Everything was recorded after all four members - Hoffs, the Petersons and bassist/vocalist Michael Steele - had collaborated with different producers on their own songs.
Eternal Flame was brought to the table by Hoffs, who had worked on it with Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, known for both Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors. While the label loved it, Vicki Peterson wasn’t so sure.
“I was a freakin’ rebel,” she says. “I was determined to make The Bangles the rock band that we started out as. And I knew that to do something so blatantly pop … there was a resistance [on my part].”
While Peterson can now look back and acknowledge the quality of Eternal Flame, it seems that disagreements over the band’s future musical direction - they’d drifted away from their early power-pop/rock sound - were just one of the reasons why The Bangles would break-up shortly after Eternal Flame’s release.
A new authorised biography of the band, written by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike and called - yep - Eternal Flame, also suggests that the increased focus on Hoffs (it’s believed that Prince offered them Manic Monday after seeing her in The Bangles’ music videos, causing huge media interest) and the mislabelling of her as the ‘front woman’ could have been a factor, too.
It’s also been suggested that Hoffs’ desire to pursue a solo career could have been behind the split, but she doesn’t agree with that characterisation of her.
“It was upsetting to read words being put in my mouth, and painting me as somebody ambitious in a way that the rest of the band wasn’t,” she says. “Because we were all ambitious to have success. Yes, there would be squabbles. There would be jealousies. But that’s what you would expect in any family.”
Debbi Peterson puts it rather more bluntly: “If we were a boyband, we’d have just punched each other out,” she says. “But we didn’t want to confront things. I remember once Michael Steele got really mad and threw a chair across the dressing room - so there were episodes, but generally there was nothing. We just didn’t talk. And we should have.”
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