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Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 03:24 PM

OK, I couldn't do it. I couldn't make dandy* sit through a Phil Collins album So here's one that's been in my playlist pending pile for years. I've never heard it, though I did have their first album on tape, and enjoyed it.

HORMONALLY YOURS - Shakespears Sister (1992) CD, with tasteful white-based cover and packaging. Peaked at 3 in the UK charts and was critically and commercially successful.


Track 1: Goodbye Cruel World

The first track and the debut single for the album in late 1991, an odd choice, though it's upbeat quirkiness fits in with the first album and makes a nice bridge for those expecting more in that vein. Chris Thomas on production duties, and a Siobhan song (with co-help) - Chris has an impeccable CV on production: cough Beatles, Floyd, Pretenders, Sex Pistols, INXS. It's not quite up to those standards but what is....

Posted by: Roba. 4th February 2023, 03:29 PM

I've never heard the album in full but this is an interesting choice! I'll probably give it a check too.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 03:30 PM

Track 2: I Don't Care



This has got that Pretenders' Back On The Chain Gang groove, Marcella's soaring vocals are fun and the upbeat chugging track is quite catchy - Siobhan's lower register really needs the support of the range of Marcella Detroit's vocals, and they work well together on this co-write. I rated this a lot at the time and it's still fine. Bananarama were very much being outpaced by former member Siobhan Fahey at this point - no doubt encouraged by hubbie Dave Stewart -ex-Eurythmics.

Posted by: Jade 4th February 2023, 03:33 PM

Ooh! 'Stay' is one of my favourite hits of the 90s and 'Hello (Turn Your Radio On)' is great too. I've been meaning to check this out for a while but haven't got around to it yet.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 03:37 PM

Track 3: My 16th Apology



Laid-back summer vibes on this one, the 5th single off the album in early 1993, though lyrically it's not laid-back niceness, it's about friends who aren't friends. I'd forgotten this one, but I rather like it, another co-write from the girls and like most of the album produced by them along with Alan Moulder. Sadly, this was also their last single together until 2019, so the lack of promotion on it must have been letting us know something was amiss...

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 03:51 PM

Track 4: Are We In Love Yet

Not a single. No co-writers this time, just Siobhan and Marcella, and one I've never heard. Nice guitar riff in the backdrop, but where My 16th Apology was more suited to a low-key approach vocally (Marcella reigned in) this one is more Marcella than Siobhan, and it chugs along pleasantly, not bad, but lacking a killer hook.

Track 5: Emotional Thing

Not a single, still no co-writers, and back to Siobhan mostly on vocals and very much End-Of-Side-One syndrome, nothing special.


Track 6: Stay



And woah! How to start an album (or end side 2 if you must), Still their classic, and rightly revered. The video is amazing and so brings out the early spaciousness and subtlety of the ballad, Siobhan multi-tracked on backing chords, Siobhan giving it all her feeling. Then in comes the cynical Siobhan interrupting and plodding into an instrumental before Siobhan soars and shows Maria Carey how to reach those notes and mean it at the same time. Technique is very much not everything. Emotion is. I'm gobsmacked at how short the record is, 3:47 but it seems shorter. The previous track was 3:48 but it seemed longer! Total classic, no question.

Side 2: Starts here

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 04:22 PM

Track 7: Black Sky

Like Stay, back with the co-writers, and I think it shows when they get extra finesse on board (Jean Guiot taking on most of the key assists, notably on Stay). This one is a funk-rock track, piano-based, not a million miles away from The Stone Roses, and it riffs along nicely without ever jumping out as an obvious single, but I like the groove.

Track 8: The Trouble With Andre

Nice twangy Duane Eddy guitar and to be honest I'd have preferred a song about Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles with a few Klingon references, but alas it's all about Andre who apparently is a liar. The hook is more memorable than Black Sky and it's a bit darker, but I prefer Black Sky overall. This is pretty decent though.

Track 9: Moonchild

Back to the non-co-write mode, and I might even suggest this a little bit 70's Bowie-esque as a song, if not quite in production and key, and I like Moonchild-type hippy/scifi imagery. A little plodding, truth to tell, and the last minute could easily have been faded earlier.

Track 10: Catwoman

Well, I'm on board with the title already, anything DC Comics is great by me, and this (sorry to mention it but facts is facts and I don't believe in revisionism) is a Gary Glitter-influenced Glam Rock stomp, but slowed-down. They'd already done this more successfully on the first album, and the Glam stomp track went down a bundle with me on that tour. Fun, I like it. Glam, Superhero, moon, guitar riffing galore, of course I like it.

Track 11: Let Me Entertain You

I wonder if Robbie had bought this album? This is good, back with a co-writer, and a Siobhan vehicle for the most part, and more funk-based rock. A dance remix upping the bpm's might have made a good single, there's lots of nice interesting bits in it, not least the grunting "whuh!"s, almost Witch Queen Of New Orleans, (Redbone) in mood.

Track 12: Hello (Turn Your Radio On)



The 4th single, and a bit more ambitious in a Stay-stylee but without those peaks. Love that guitar, wonder if it was Marcella doing it (she's credited for a chunk of instrumentation). This is more restrained Siobhan than Marcella showpiecing, but it's very good. The intro just slides in quietly, classy, in comes the piano and vocal, the strings, some social commentary lyrics and then a great hook. Everything is beautifully understated, it's a constantly-changing musical palette underpinning the verses, and that sets up the chorus, which is also understated. This is their second-best record, no question. Great way to finale the album.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 04:26 PM

Goodo Jade, Ive been meaning to check it out for 30 years, so don't worry about not getting round to it unless you leave it till 2053 at which point you can start getting worried about ending up like me

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 04:29 PM

It's pretty good I think, having heard it now - there's a couple of tracks I wouldnt be fussed about skipping, but overall better than the first album, though the best tracks off that one and attached to the best of this one would give a very satisfying 16 or so

Posted by: Bjork 4th February 2023, 04:48 PM

I remember singles 2 to 5, but cannot recall single 1
never bought the album, despite loving Stay
so should definitely check the album not that we got streaming and we can check all the albums we want ;D

Posted by: Popchartfreak 4th February 2023, 06:08 PM

Have to say I'd also forgot single 1! It came back to me after I started playing it but I;m guessing the other 4 got most of the airplay, maybe that one wasnt playlisted much by Radio 1 until Stay took off...!

Posted by: King Rollo 4th February 2023, 08:38 PM

I could host a double bill synctube listen through of this album next week along with Dandy's next choice.

Posted by: Yobnedor 4th February 2023, 09:30 PM

This album is amazing! I love it! Great choice!

Posted by: dandy* 4th February 2023, 10:44 PM

I'd be very up for that!

Posted by: Popchartfreak 5th February 2023, 10:16 AM

Ooh thanks Rollo! I've never actually done one of those whatever it is

Posted by: Popchartfreak 5th February 2023, 10:18 AM

Thanks! I should have mentioned the title as well, making a point about sexism and I think also embracing being emotional as not a bad thing...

Posted by: Bjork 5th February 2023, 12:40 PM

Checked single 1 and now I do recall it too
Also gave the full album a spin and its quite rocknroll

Posted by: Colm 5th February 2023, 08:40 PM

I Don't Care is The Cure fronted by Chrissie Hynde

Posted by: Brer 6th February 2023, 02:10 AM

Ooh glad we have got a pick from you for January after all! Down for another double listenthrough with Dandy*'s next pick ~

I do like 'Stay' but think that's the only song I know from them, apart from of course the Richard Hawley collab that Suedey sent to BJSC.

Posted by: Bjork 6th February 2023, 11:12 AM

Found this great description of Shakespears Sister's sound:
"They were the idiosyncratic duo that threw glam rock, goth, B-movie kitsch, electro and art-pop into the blender to form an intoxicating stew."

Posted by: Bjork 6th February 2023, 11:15 AM

and lots of info and chat about this album in here:

From the start they both had a definite idea of the sound they wanted for the album. “We agreed we had to get away from the 80s electro sound and go for something more organic,” remembers Siobhan. So there were more guitars on it. I don’t think Hormonally Yours has dated at all, whereas Sacred Heart will always be much more of an ‘80s record’ because of all the synths.”

Many of the songs were inspired by a B-movie the duo had become enamoured with around this time. “Cat-Women Of The Moon!” recalls Marcella. “Really cheesy American 50s sci-fi. Terrible effects. Dave [Stewart] introduced me to it. We watched it and loved it and wanted to try to buy the rights to the movie and superimpose ourselves on top of it for the videos. But London Records wouldn’t allow it. So instead we just used it as inspiration – almost every song on the album is written about a scene from it.”

One that wasn’t was the lead single Goodbye Cruel World. “That was also inspired by the movies, but classic Hollywood films like Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?. Siobhan came up with the lyric. I think some of it was her angst that she was having with the label at the time. The chorus goes ‘Bye Bye Mister A’ and that was the head of the label at the time, who was, you know, actually always very supportive. But, you know, as artists we sometimes take it upon ourselves to use our music to tell people how we’re feeling!”

Another highlight was Are We In Love Yet, which was built up from an early 70s funk guitar lick. “We were trying to channel Sly And The Family Stone,” says Marcella. “That was kind of our tribute to them and that whole era.” Then there was the acoustic-led Moonchild, another Catwomen-inspired song (“That one was about being an outcast in society”) and The Trouble With Andre (“he’s a liar”) with its rich echo-y guitar, supposedly written about a friend of Siobhan’s.

The most immediate track on the album was I Don’t Care, which was the duo’s take on The Cure’s oeuvre of slinky alt-pop. Siobhan: “it was inspired by tracks of theirs like The Love Cats. The verse and chorus both came very quickly but then we were stuck for a middle eight. In the studio I picked up this book of poetry which just happened to be lying around. I saw the words to this poem [Edith Sitwell’s Hornpipe] and just started rapping them. And it fitted just perfectly. Everyone just said, ‘Yes, that’s brilliant!’ It was – what do you call it? – kismet.”

For production, the pair turned to Alan Moulder, then best known for his work with shoegazing doyens Ride and My Bloody Valentine. “He was a good friend,” says Siobhan. “I wanted to work with someone who would be sonically great but who’d be supportive of my ideas. I also loved that he loved to experiment. He’d move microphones into all sorts of different places, down toilet bowls, you name it.”

“He was a great fit,” confirms Marcella. “He was fantastic at creating rock’n’roll sounds, and great at guitar sounds. He’d have all these off-the-wall ideas that somehow worked, like mic-ing up tiny amps and making them sound huge.”

The centrepiece, of course, was Stay, which was specifically written as a feature for Detroit. “Dave and Siobhan used to have these parties where you’d see Timothy Leary and Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and George Harrison would be walking around. At one point, there would always be a jam and I’d sing a song, I Will, by The Beatles.

“So one Sunday morning around 9.30am my husband said, ‘Wake up, Dave and Siobhan are here and they want to talk to you.’ I got some coffee and went into the studio to meet them. And they went, ‘Hey Marcy, you know how you always sing that song? I think we should write a song for you for the album, a real beautiful ballad where you can use your voice.’ ‘OK great!’

So she came up with the idea. He had started singing, ‘If this world is wearing thin’ [first verse]. When it came to the chorus he stopped and I don’t know where this came from but I started singing, ‘Stay with meee’. It just happened like that.”

The single revived their commercial fortunes in the UK – they’d hadn’t had a hit since You’re History – and reached No.1 in February 1992, remaining there for two months. “After a while it actually started to feel really bizarre,” remembers Siobhan. “Week after week it seemed to hang on at No.1 and we’d be on Top Of The Pops again. Things like that don’t often happen and when they do you don’t want to take it for granted because they’re so rare.”

Stay’s success was massively helped by the video and indeed the whole look of the Hormonally Yours campaign, which was created by Sophie Muller. “For a while, she was almost like a third member of the band,” recalls Marcella. “We would get together and talk about what we wanted and what inspired the songs – Sophie used Siobhan and I’s relationship as the inspiration for the videos.” Memorably, in Stay Siobhan appears as a sequin-encrusted angel of death tussling with Marcella for the life of her beloved. In I Don’t Care the pair are brandishing knives and slipping poison to one another over dinner.

Hormonally Yours sold 600,000 copies in the UK alone, staying, ahem, on the album charts for a year. But even as they enjoyed the success they had been working towards for years, the pair’s relationship was hitting the rocks. At what should have been a moment of collective triumph, the 1993 Ivor Novellos – where Hormonally Yours picked up Best Contemporary Collection of Songs – it was announced that Detroit had departed. Fahey continued alone, releasing two more albums in 2004 and 2009, but she didn’t speak with Detroit until 2018 when the plan for their current reunion was put into action.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 6th February 2023, 11:33 AM

Ooh thanks for the article that shines some light on what was going on, and as Colm says I Dont Care does sound like The Cure/The Pretenders so it all makes sense.

Posted by: Bjork 6th February 2023, 12:27 PM

and this is also a very interesting read about the origins of the band and their debut era and how it all happened:

They were never meant to be a duo though. Initially, Siobhan created the moniker because she was unsure about using her own name as a solo artist. “I remember that I didn’t want to go down that route,” Fahey explains. “I didn’t feel comfortable just going out as me. Plus, I wanted some company. I felt I worked much better in combinations. I wanted to create another band, though that didn’t happen immediately.”

The name was from a song by The Smiths, the mis-spelling deliberate – when the graphic artist who had designed the logo submitted it without the ‘e’, Fahey decided to keep it “because then it made it ours.” Her initial ally in the project was Richard Feldman, a producer/writer who had worked with Eric Clapton and just happened to live across the road from her.

“I’d just moved to Los Angeles, recently had a baby and had left Bananarama. But I still wanted to create urgently. And Richard introduced himself as our neighbour. We got talking and it turned out that he had a really cool demo studio in his garage with the same deck that they recorded My Way on. It was a very good vibe, a very creative place. I would go over there every day and write with him.” It was Feldman who suggested bringing Marcella on board. “We already had an electro pop style going on and Richard said, ‘I know this girl that I work with and I think her voice would work really well with yours. I’d love to invite her down’. Great! Why not?”

The first track they worked on was Break My Heart, which would be released as their debut single, a year ahead of the album. It saw Siobhan consciously adopt a new vocal style. “It was a very deliberate choice to sing at the really low end of my range. I wanted to sound unpretty. I definitely wanted to sound very different from how I did in Bananarama.”
“I remember they [Siobhan and Feldman] had this idea they had come up with,” remembers Detroit. “There wasn’t much to it but I remember the backing track sounding really edgy, really progressive. I recall going over to the studio and he asked me whether I wanted to sing and maybe play some stuff on it. So I started with some backing vocals.”

Marcella’s soprano provided a striking counterpoint to Fahey’s new deeper voice, a combination that would soon become the band’s calling card. “It was pretty immediate,” remembers Fahey. “As soon as she put the vocals down for Break My Heart it was obvious that we complemented each other really well.”

Sacred Heart took shape over the course of the next year in studios on both sides of the Atlantic. Several of the tracks, such as the stomping Primitive Love showcased Siobhan’s love of what was in the late 80s a defiantly unfashionable influence: glam rock. “Ha, it’s never been out of fashion for me! People like Marc Bolan were a major influence in my youth. That was a deliberate harking back. There’s always been a glam element to whatever we’ve done.”

In amongst the glam and electro pop there was also room for a slinky cover of Bob Marley’s disco crossover hit Could You Be Loved. “Richard is a big reggae fan,” explains Marcella. “He’s worked with lots of major reggae artists like Toots And The Maytals and Peter Tosh. I don’t know if he suggested it, but Siobhan was a big fan of it and I thought it was a really cool song. I think we made it our own.”

But despite this, the record company hadn’t yet heard a hit. So after sessions in Los Angeles and London, the duo were dispatched to New York ‘for inspiration’. Marcella: “Dave [Stewart, Siobhan’s now ex-husband] was there working on his album and we went along with Richard and were writing up until the eleventh hour. We were in this hotel room, writing away. And suddenly we came up with You’re History, we were all like, ‘YES!’ It was the result that we needed. Siobhan came up with the title and the whole thing flowed from there.”

“It was one of those songs that just pops out really quick,” Siobhan reflects. “The lyrics came very quickly, too. It was obvious it was the hit that London [Records] were looking for. It had a much lighter dance feel than a lot of the other tracks. It sounded really playful.”

You’re History did the requisite commercial business, reaching the Top 10 in August 1989 and Sacred Heart followed it a month later, going gold in the UK and cementing the band in the public consciousness. By now Detroit was officially a member. “I was going over there to England and they suggested it – ‘you guys should be a duo because you work really well together’. After You’re History became a hit it gave me more of a place within Shakespears Sister and gave us more of an identifiable sound. We went over to do a load of promo for the album and by the time we were ready to start the new album it had just become a reality.”

Posted by: Popchartfreak 6th February 2023, 04:25 PM

I hadnt realised they were working in the States! Interesting stuff, thanks Bjork!

Posted by: Bjork 7th February 2023, 08:03 AM

Also funny to read that all the songs from Hormonally Yours were based on movies, so it's not like personal life stories or anything
and in particular mostly it's just one movie that inspired the whole thing

Posted by: King Rollo 8th February 2023, 05:50 PM

The listen through for this album will be this evening at 8.30.

Posted by: King Rollo 8th February 2023, 08:16 PM

Starting in 15 minutes here:

https://sync-tube.de/room/yfweF2_6

Posted by: Brer 9th February 2023, 11:04 PM

This album got off to a fairly slow start for me, then had a run of great tracks in the middle, then started to drop off again near the end with tracks 10 and 11 in particular being very inessential (although it finished on a high note). 'Stay' kind of sticks out like a sore thumb on there to be honest but it is still a fab song of course! I just always thought it was surprising a song like that came from a Bananarama member, but much of the rest of the album sounds much more like I'd expect from that

Top 5:

1 Stay
2 Black Sky - love the drum loop on this
3 Hello (Turn Your Radio On)
4 The Trouble With Andre - who is Andre though
5 I Don't Care - I said on SyncTube that this one kind of sounds like a sitcom theme iirc lel but not in a bad way x

'Are We In Love Yet' and 'Emotional Thing' were good too. I think I said one of these songs had some Kate Bush esque vocals on it but I forget which one it was (I really should have just posted this mini review last night whoops)

Posted by: Bjork 11th February 2023, 06:49 AM

Andre was Siobah's friend

After giving it a couple spins there's a huge divide between the top 3 songs in the album (Stay, Hello, I Don't Care) and the rest