Bananarama’s Sara Dallin, Keren Woodward and Siobhan Fahey (we think!) in their video for “Cruel Summer.”
When you think of the most popular female bands or girl groups of the rock era, such names as the Ronettes, the Dixie Cups, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Marvelettes and, in later years, the Go-Go’s, the Pointer Sisters, Spice Girls, the Bangles and others, may come to mind. But if you were of a certain age during the ’80s, your favorite may very well have been Bananarama.
In that decade in their native U.K., Bananarama reached the top 10 with no less than 13 singles, spanning such catchy numbers as 1982’s “It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)” and “Really Saying Something” (both recorded with Fun Boy Three) to “Na Nah Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” and “Cruel Summer,” both in 1982, and 1986’s “Venus” (which reached #1 in the U.S.). And don’t overlook their participation in the 1984 charity song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” as members of Band Aid.
Bananarama, front and center, along with such fellow stars as Phil Collins, Robert “Kool” Bell, Bono, Sting and George Michael, in the Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” from 1984.
At first a trio, the photogenic women in their early twenties were quickly embraced by MTV, and their videos for “Shy Boy” and “Cruel Summer” were in heavy rotation on the network. The uncomplicated clips were as laidback as the songs themselves, with the lithesome threesome often dressed in parachute pants and loose-fitting blouses of the era. And that hair!
Bananarama formed in London in 1980. Or maybe it was 1979. Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward, both 18 years old and childhood friends, had been living in a YWCA and were looking for an inexpensive place to rent. After a chance meeting with the Sex Pistols’ founding drummer Paul Cook, he offered the pair a room above the punk rockers’ old rehearsal space in Charing Cross.
The teenagers used to come in after clubbing, plug the guitars in and party. Dallin and Woodward had their first taste of the music business recording demos with bands in the studios of Denmark Street (previously used by the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Small Faces and Elton John). They also learned to play bass and did backing vocals for fun for Cook and fellow Pistols’ alum Steve Jones’ new band the Professionals.
While studying at the London College of Fashion, Dallin met fellow student Siobhan Fahey ,who, though born in Ireland, grew up primarily in England. Though three years their senior, they were drawn together by their similar, distinctive look, monkey boots and back-combed hair and a love of Patti Smith, and quickly became friends. To help make ends meet, Woodward was working as a clerk at the BBC. The three started writing songs while occasionally joining their art school friends’ bands on stage.
The trio didn’t have a name at this point, but they thought bananas sounded tropical and Dallin, a fan of Roxy Music, looked through their song titles and found “Pyjamarama.”
A track, sung phonetically in Swahili, was released as a demo and made a brief entry on the U.K. singles chart. A spin from legendary Radio 1 DJ John Peel brought the recording to the attention of Terry Hall, formerly of the ska band the Specials. He invited the three women to sing on some tracks with his new band, Fun Boy Three, including an easy, breezy cover of a 1939 song, “It Ain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It).” The single reached #4 in the U.K. in 1982.
Fun Boy Three returned the favor by singing on Bananarama’s first hit, “Really Saying Something,” the lead single from their debut LP, Deep Sea Skiving. “It happened so easily, we just assumed that was what happened when you made a record,” Fahey told The Guardian in 2017, in a group interview cheekily headlined “People wet their knickers when they find out I was in Bananarama”: the 80s trio return.
The back cover of Fun Boy Three’s debut album, co-starring Bananarama.
For the next five years, Bananarama was seemingly everywhere with many of those 13 U.K. top tens, such as “Na Nah Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” (a cover of the 1969 hit by Steam),despite the latter’s remarkably low-budget video.
Of their garb at that time, Woodward told Classic Pop in 2025, “We didn’t know what we were doing, and also we weren’t styled. We didn’t have any expensive clothes, so you really could be like us. It was maybe the last time when you could totally find your own way. Now, of course…it’s more slick and glossy.”
Then came “Cruel Summer,” which they co-wrote with the production team of Steve Jolley and Tony Swain. The follow-up to “Na Nah Hey Hey” soared up the U.K. singles chart, reaching #8 in 1983. But with no track record overseas, the song was held up in the U.S. until 1984 when it appeared in the film The Karate Kid, itself a sleeper hit in theaters, paving the way for American pop radio to embrace it. Indeed, U.S. audiences fell in love with it and the song became the group’s first Billboard Top 10. This time, the video was shot in New York with the girls working (unconvincingly) at a gas station.
“We made the routines up ourselves, to start with,” Dallin said to The Guardian in that same 2017 interview. “Do you remember that big choreographer who came up to us and said, ‘You’re dancing on the wrong beat. Who did that for you?’” laughed Woodward. “We did it all ourselves!” Fahey told the reporter their routines were simplistic on purpose. “It was very ironic. We were a girl group, so it was kind of a piss-take of being in a girl group, in our own, shonky way.”
As 1984 came to a close, the trio was part of Band Aid, the all-star line-up organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to sing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to raise funds to fight famine in Ethiopia. The single reached #1 in 14 countries and inspired USA For Africa’s “We Are the World.”
Two years later, they released their third album, and though it yielded only one big hit, that was enough. Bananarama’s cover of Shocking Blue’s 1969 worldwide smash, “Venus,” produced by the red-hot U.K. production team, Stock Aitken Waterman, became a #1 single in the U.S. (Surprisingly, they never scored a U.K. chart topper as a trio.)
Fahey, who had made the duo and trio when she joined, married Dave Stewart of Eurythmics in 1987. [They divorced in 1996.] She decided to leave Bananarama in 1988. “It had been a real pressure cooker, the three of us being together 24/7, for years. It couldn’t continue,” she told The Guardian. She was replaced by Jacquie O’Sullivan and the newly formed trio embarked on its first world tour.
[Meanwhile, Fahey formed the alt-pop group Shakespears Sister, where she was joined by Marcella Levy (aka known as Marcy Levy and Marcella Detroit), who had collaborated, notably with Eric Clapton, with whom she co-wrote “Lay Down Sally.”]
O’Sullivan departed in 1991, and Dallin and Woodward resumed as a duo. All the while, they continued to chart singles in the U.K., but not with the consistent success that they had become accustomed to in their earlier years. Fahey returned in 2017 for a tour, her first with Bananarama.
The group’s final U.S. Hot 100 entry was in 1988. Dallin, who turned 63 on December 17, and Woodward, 64 on April 2, continue to tour with several concerts scheduled in the U.K. and Europe in 2025. Tickets for many of the shows are available here. And their recordings are available in the U.K. here and in the U.S. here.
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2 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationWow! was a great album. I loved ‘I Heard a Rumour’, and all the various extended mixes.
I believe Siobhan’s sister was one of the babes chased by the Celtic Hillbillies in “Come On Eileen”.
Toora, loora, toora, loo-rye-aye!
These ladies spoke to me then and still do. Artists who have a good time working are my faves. Cruel Summer & Venus, wow. Good beat and you can dance to it!!