WORTH A LOOK?: *****
OUT: now
The last thing we suspected would result from Bananarama’s award-winning Original Line Up Tour was new material from Siobhan Fahey’s old group Shakespears Sister but here we are.
- Read on for reasons including what happened when the reunited Bananarama started recording
Siobhan told the NME: ‘After the Bananarama experience, which was a wonderful emotional laying-to-rest of the past and what we were, we never made new music together. They didn’t want to make new music with me. For me, that was very frustrating and I definitely did not want a repeat of that with Shakespears Sister. For it just to be a retro exercise. If we were going to tour again, I wanted to write something new together so we could have something new and valid.’
The 1st thing to notice with All The Queen’s Horses is that it could be from an Ennio Morricone soundtrack and boasts bluesy harmonica picked up and run with in a fabulous Western-inspired video directed by Sophie Muller.
It includes flashbacks to former glories, ruminates on the pair reuniting and even features a re-enactment of defining 90s enormous hit Stay on a pool table.
But it is in the lyrics, a world away from Bananarama’s rather two-dimensional new album In Stereo, that progress is made. We have the feminist update on the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme about putting something back together again that references the state of the band.
But also there’s a dash of the lyrical flair of early Marc Almond about the description of a failed love affair: ‘You took my innocence, my money and my pride but you can never take the love I keep inside.’
Reflecting on the Bananarama reunion, she told NME: ‘We went in to the studio to do a single which I thought was shaping up brilliantly and then it was squashed – and it wasn’t me who squashed it. So that was quite painful. And then I realised they just wanted it to be the tour and nothing else. But the great gift was that I was reminded by the universe that my purpose on the planet is to make music. After the Banana thing, I knew I was going to make another record. I just didn’t know it was going to be with Marcy.’
Shakespears Sister met a year ago for the 1st time in 26 years after an approach by Fahey.
The band return with a 14-date UK tour kicking off on 31 October including a gig at London’s Palladium appropriately entitled Shakespears Sister Ride Again. Compilation Singles Party (1988-2019) is out 19/7/19.
monstagigz 
Sounds like a rip off of Nancy Sinatra Lee Hazleword song Summer Wine
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Great song but a massive ‘summer Wine’ rip off!
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Never heard of “Summer Wine,” but yep I hear it. And for their 2nd single, “C U Next Tuesday,” they used the beat from Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “Goin to a Go-Go.”
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