“Cruel Summer” by Bananarama, Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Bananarama formed in 1980 when childhood friends Sara Dallin and Keren Woodword moved from Bristol to London and met Siobhan Fahey. Dallin and Woodword lived in the WYCA and were out of money until Sex Pistols’ drummer Paul Cook offered them a place to live above the band's old rehearsal room. Bananarama took their name from the Roxie Music song "Pyjamarama." The trio were fans of the punk rock and post-punk scene in London and ultimately became a New Wave hit making machine lasting from 1982 with their breakthrough hit as a featured artist on Fun Boy Three's "It Ain't What You Do" (It's How You Do It) to the early '90s.

IT’S TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. Bananarama were on the pop side of New Wave along with some of their friends in the music industry Wham! and Duran Duran. In 2020, the remaining members of Bananarama, Sara Dallin and Keren Woodword wrote a book about their experience throughout their almost fifty years of friendship and nearly forty years as a band titled, Really Saying Something: Sara & Keren - Our Story. On the Talking Success podcast the duo talked about the process of writing this book, being autonomous women in a music industry that preferred female artists to submit to the direction of managers and labels, and their reconciliation with the band's third member, Siobhan Fahey, who left the group in 1988 to form the alternative band Shakespeare's Sister. From this interview, listeners, especially us not alive or cognizant for the early crashings of the New Wave, can get a sense of what it was like to be an '80s pop star when MTV was still young and exciting, when the band's fashion was whatever they could afford from their day jobs. We can experience what their Top of the Pops success looked like and whaat it was like to be a self-curated fashion icon when it didn't matter how cheesy the video was as long as the song had a hook.

THE CITY IS CROWDED, MY FRIENDS ARE AWAY. Bananarama's debut record Deep Sea Skiving produced several hits in the U.K., but it wasn't until 1984 that they made an impact in the United States. The song was "Cruel Summer," which was the opening track on their sophomore eponymous release. "Cruel Summer" was a #8 single in the UK in the summer of 1983, and due to a key placement in the 1984 film The Karate Kid, the song reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984. Bananarama shot their music video in Brooklyn, and according to singer Siobhan Fahey in the 2011 book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Rob Tannenbaum there is quite an interesting story behind the video. Fahey explains that the video was "just an excuse to get us to the fabled city of New York for the first time." True to the nature of the song, the video was shot during a 100-degree heatwave. The group set up base in a bar under the Brooklyn Bridge, shot all morning, returned for lunch at the bar only to make friends with dock workers who shared cocaine which was their lunch, and they got back to shooting the video. "Cruel Summer" is not the typical feel-good summer anthem. Dallin said of the song in a 2018 Guardian interview, that the song is about the "darker side: it looked at the oppressive heat, the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by." 

Read “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama on Genius