POPFESSIONS

Amy Ronge

I was born in 1987, meaning I really missed the glory days of Bananarama – my mum being a big fan. When the Greatest Hits Collection album was released in 1988, I was one-year-old. Still not quite old enough to properly appreciate the tunes, but somewhere, Bananarama was subliminally affecting me. Fast forward a few more years to the early 1990s and I was Bananarama’s biggest fan. After hearing their version of ‘Help!’ by The Beatles, featuring French and Saunders, I assumed this was the original version of the song (shock, horror! I hear you cry) and loved it. Yes, it’s true.
 
The opening bars of ‘Venus’ will never leave me, and then the first lyric – “Goddess on a mountaintop” – well YES, I am that goddess! She’s got it, baby she’s got it… Indeed. I bloody well do. Skip ahead to ‘Love In The First Degree’ and I was happily singing along, with not a clue what I was singing about (I was only about six or seven) but I was happy.  I was curious to see who Nathan Jones was, and why he’d been gone too long, to find out who was really saying something, and more importantly: who was Robert De Niro, and who was he waiting for, and WHY was he talking to Tanya? (NB – I didn’t know the words back then. I prefer my interpretation.)
 
I’d play that album repeatedly on the CD player in the lounge, and rope my younger sisters into dancing around the coffee table with me to ‘Aie a Mwana’ (what does that even mean?) until we were bloody knackered. (That would be followed by Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Runaway Horses’ and Fine Young Cannibals’ ‘Good Thing’, but that’s another story.)
 
Those choppy bobs on the front cover stuck with me, and inspired me to take the plunge, and have my hair cut into a short bob, fringe and all (and if you know me, you’ll know how bad I looked, even if I was pre-double figures in years).
 
I don’t resent Bananarama for my hair choice – that was a mistake that needed to happen for me to appreciate having long hair. Instead, I applaud them for coming into my life in a wonder of crass, tinny beats and pretty rubbish lyrics, and making my Saturday afternoons spent dancing round the coffee table that little bit more fun. Whether my sisters shared my level of enjoyment or not is questionable, but c’est la vie. I’m the oldest sister, so they don’t get a choice.