Cal Vid's video: Bananarama Venus

In 1986, "Venus" by Bananarama was at the top of the Billboard pop chart. It was the British girl group's first and only number-one song. "Venus" also topped the charts in 1970 when it was released by the Dutch group Shocking Blue. The hit by Bananarama made "Venus" only the fourth song in the rock era to top the charts by two different artists. The others were "Go Away Little Girl," "The Loco-Motion," and "Please Mr. Postman." The Guardian article by Rebecca Nicholson: Bananarama was the biggest girl group of the 80s thanks to their gleefully shambolic pop hits and punk attitude. Then came their ‘painful divorce’. Can Siobhan, Keren, and Sara recapture their glory days? The last time all three founding members of Bananarama were properly together as a band was in 1988 at the Brit awards. They were performing their hit single Love in the First Degree, dressed in black cocktail dresses, flanked by a mini army of topless male dancers, much to the blustering horror of the host, Noel Edmonds. Shortly after that night, Siobhan Fahey walked out on her bandmates Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward, calling time on almost 10 years of pop history. It was a particularly acrimonious split. Dallin and Woodward kept the group going, even replacing Fahey for a couple of years with a different singer, but they were so mad at their former friend, who was mad at them in return, that it has taken almost three decades to rebuild their relationship. Today, in an out-of-the-way pub in north London – chosen to minimize the chance that fans will see them while their reunion is still a secret – they are Bananarama again. Appropriately, Dallin and Woodward arrive 10 minutes ahead of time, while Fahey, ever the rebel, is 10 minutes late (she flew in from Los Angeles, where she lives, just a couple of hours before we meet). “Shivers!” shouts Woodward, as Fahey strides into the room. “Oh, you poor love.” The three of them hug. “How are you, darling?” asks Dallin. “I might be a little slow,” smiles Fahey, that familiar voice hovering a couple of octaves lower than her friends’. For a time, seeing the three of them in the same room was about as likely as Morrissey and Johnny Marr reforming the Smiths. But here they are, the biggest girl group of the 80s, the blueprint for the Spice Girls, the punks who became pop stars, about to announce a substantial UK tour. “It was two in the morning, and lots of wine had been drunk, and we were all really emotional,” says Fahey, remembering the barbecue at her then home in Bethnal Green, east London, a couple of years ago, where the seeds were sown. Although they have appeared together twice since the 80s – on Eurotrash in the 90s, and at the 20th birthday party of London club night G-A-Y in 2002 – they had always said a full reunion would never happen. There was too much bad blood. They had to become mates again first. At Fahey’s house, it finally happened. Bananarama in 1986 is Siobhan Fahey, Keren Woodward, and Sara Dallin. “The feeling of love and friendship had been restored. That night, we really felt it,” she explains. A few months later, Woodward picked up the phone and told Fahey she should come on tour with them. They had never actually done a tour, the three of them, together. “Keren said: ‘You’ve got to,’” Fahey remembers. “‘You don’t know how much we’re loved. You don’t experience that.’” Did she really not know? “Well, obviously I have some sense of it because wherever I go, I’m Siobhan from Bananarama. People wet their knickers when they find that out.” Recently, she says, she met the rapper Rick Ross. She beams across the table. “I forgot to tell you! He literally bowed. He said, ‘Oh my God, you guys were so cool. I really want to do a dancehall remix of Cruel Summer.’” They swap stories of unlikely Bananarama fans: the bassist from the Cure, who had all their B-sides. The Cult. Judas Priest. The Prodigy. The Deftones. They did, after all, come from London’s punk scene. “I’m not sure that attitude’s altogether left us, really,” says Woodward. Bananarama started in London, in 1979. Dallin and Woodward had been best friends since they were four and their closeness, even now in their mid-50s, is palpable – they still sometimes go on holiday together, and say their kids are like siblings. Dallin and Fahey, meanwhile, met while studying fashion journalism, and soon the three of them were a unit. “Our thing was that we loved clubs and we loved music. We were ‘on the scene’, which sounds a bit 60s,” laughs Dallin. They knew musicians because they went to the clubs they all went to. When they found themselves without anywhere to live, they moved into Sex Pistol Paul Cook’s rehearsal room, full of instruments, and just thought: “We’ll have a go at that.” “We were breaking the rules of being in a band,” says Fahey. “We all just wanted to be vocalists, so we said: ‘Let’s just be vocalists.’ And that was very against the grain.” Woodward says.