The Bangles’ journey began in a garage, and took them around the world – and then, it was over, owing to a mix of music industry overreach and old fashioned sexism.
That’s according to a new book, “Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of the Bangles” by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, due Feb. 18. The tome takes readers through the band’s less-than-10-year journey from obscurity to pop-stardom and back again, a path illuminated with ’80s hits such as “Eternal Flame,” “Manic Monday,” “Walk Like an Egyptian” and an electric cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter.”
From outside the tour buses and executive boardrooms, the group seemed larger than life to many – including Bickerdike, a music academic as well as an author. She recalled to The New York Times that “when I first encountered the Bangles as a kid, I thought they were powerful, in control, just ruling everything.”
But as she dug into the story, speaking with Bangles founding members Debbi Peterson, Susanna Hoffs, and Vicki Peterson, she says “what was strange, sad and shocking was finding out just how much they had to deal with the agendas of these people surrounding them and the inherent misogyny of the music industry.”
She added, “It was hard to reconcile that with the image of the band that I’d always had.”
Indeed, the all-female group projected power and strength onstage. The latter trait remains theirs, but the former was removed by record label influences that had the group touring too much, and that created uncomfortable interpersonal dynamics by spotlighting and packaging some band members, while ignoring others. The grueling schedules and slighted feelings created rifts within the group – and then, one day, it was all over. The group broke up in 1989.
The fallout was painful for the group, professionally and personally. But time, and several attempts at reconnection, paved the way for healing and creation, they say. None of these efforts gained much traction in terms of chart performances or sales, but the Bangles are continuing to write together – and continuing to reclaim their own narrative.
Bangles former member Peterson says, on the group’s website, that it’s time now for the full truth of their story to come out – hence the book, and a documentary that is also on the way. “People only see certain aspects of the Bangles, especially as the media has twisted the past and we have been misrepresented for a long time.”
In addition to the tumultuous behind-the-scenes reality, she also wants readers to celebrate the fact that despite it all, “in the eighties, we were women making it in a man’s world.”
