WORTH A LOOK?: ****

With Madonna 4 nights into a 6-date run at The 02 celebrating her 40 years in pop, it seems high time that Bananarama – Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward – did similar to mark their 4 decades at the top.

• Read on for reasons including why you should be feeling the love as well as Glorious

New single Feel The Love is throbbing electro with multiple hooks, awash with lush vocal harmonies and lyrically filled with positivity.

It’s not for nothing that Bananarama are listed in the Guinness World Of Records for landing the most internationally charted hits by an all-female group.

The duo have written or co-written almost every song on Glorious, the aptly-titled 40-track collection out in March 2024 to mark those 4 decades including the new single.

Sara says: “We wanted this to be a unique collection, a celebration of all the twists and turns in our career. We compiled endless lists of songs, album tracks and hit singles and whittled it down to 40: our favourite tracks from the past 4 decades. Leafing through my early lyric books transported me back to that teenage girl writing poems and scribbles that would eventually be turned into songs. Each track … is a piece of the jigsaw and a connection to me. Together they create the bigger picture, the story of us as artists. It has been one almighty journey.” 

Keren adds: “At times we have maybe felt that we haven’t received the credit, respect, and recognition we deserve, certainly sometimes purely down to the fact we were born female. I feel the collection of songs we have amassed over the last 4 decades hopefully speak for themselves, so I don’t have to. Putting the music together for this project… made me realise how much we have achieved and how determined, tenacious, and hardworking we are.”

There’s also an April gig at the London Palladium to look forward to with tickets going on sale next week.

We’ve seen the band many times live and said of the last at Lafayette London in 2022: ‘We love how the album Masquerade evokes current artists like The Weeknd and Jessie Ware who are drawing on the past to make some of the most thrilling music of the present and it’s a revelation to hear almost all of that album in full tonight alongside some of the band’s best loved work of the duo years.’

Keren and Sara are right when they emphasise how downplayed their success has been because they are women and we hope both Feel The Love and Glorious win the acclaim they doubtless both fully deserve.

• Main picture by Mark Mattock via Facebook courtesy Bananarama Tickets
• Have you ever heard a Bananarama song before or seen them live? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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