The story of The Bangles

Three girls and a phone call

Susanna Hoffs was born in Los Angeles on the seventeenth of January 1959. Her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, was a painter turned screenwriter and film director, and her father Joshua was a psychoanalyst. Susanna danced ballet as a small child, got her first guitar lessons from an uncle, and grew up on Beatles records that a family friend at Capitol sent over the day they came out. At the University of California, Berkeley, she drifted between theater, dance and painting and graduated in art in 1980. What pushed her toward music were two concerts across the bay, Patti Smith and the very last Sex Pistols show at Winterland. At Berkeley she also started her first band, the Unconscious, with her childhood friend and boyfriend David Roback.[1] [2] [3]

Across town in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, lived the Peterson sisters. Vicki was born in January 1958 and Debbi in August 1961. Their mother woke the kids up to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and Vicki was writing songs by the age of nine. In ninth grade she formed the first of many bands, and because it needed a drummer she bought her little sister a drum kit. Debbi paid her back out of wages from McDonald's. Their high school group changed names constantly, from Crista Galli and Aishi to the Muze, the Fans and Those Girls, and for one short stretch they were even KooKoo and the DooDooHeads.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Home from college in 1980, Susanna went looking for bandmates. She put an ad in the free Los Angeles paper The Recycler and left hand drawn flyers in the ladies' room of the Whisky a Go Go during a Go-Go's show. In December she answered another Recycler ad, placed by a musician who was leaving Those Girls and happened to share a house with the Petersons. She was out when Susanna called, so Vicki picked up the phone. John Lennon had just been killed, and the two talked for ages about him and about their favorite sixties bands. When the sisters came over to the converted garage apartment behind the Hoffs family house in Brentwood, the three of them decided on the spot to start a band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They first called themselves the Colours, with a U, which Debbi said was very British. Then Susanna saw an old Esquire article about sixties hairstyles and they became the Supersonic Bangs, soon shortened to the Bangs. Susanna said they liked the double meaning and the gutsy feel of the name. Annette Zilinskas, who had answered Susanna's own ad, came in on bass and harmonica. In 1981 they pooled their savings, started their own label, Downkiddie Records, and pressed a single of Vicki's song Getting Out of Hand. The first thousand copies sold out. Susanna took one to the KROQ disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer, who put it on the air.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Bangs and the Paisley Underground

The Bangs found a home in a new Los Angeles scene. After punk, a handful of young bands had fallen for sixties psychedelia and jangling folk rock, among them the Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade and the Salvation Army, who became the Three O'Clock. They shared bills, threw barbecues together and in June 1982 even went camping together on Catalina Island. Michael Quercio of the Three O'Clock gave the scene its name in an interview, calling it the Paisley Underground, and it stuck. The bands sounded different from one another, but the Bangs were the Beatles lovers of the bunch, all harmonies and ringing guitars, and they would become by far the most successful band to come out of it.[1] [2] [3]

Miles Copeland, the manager of the Police and head of I.R.S. Records, saw the Bangs play and offered to manage them. Vicki was suspicious. Copeland also looked after the Go-Go's, and she did not want to become the poor man's version of anyone. The band even brought a tape recorder to their first meeting so they could not be fooled by promises. They signed anyway, and with five days' notice Copeland put them on tour opening for the English Beat. Then another band called the Bangs claimed the name, and a single had not protected it after all. In 1982 they became the Bangles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their first release on a label was a five song EP called simply Bangles, produced by Craig Leon, who had worked with the Ramones and Blondie. It came out in June 1982 on Copeland's Faulty Products label after a delay while the cover art was changed to the new name. Faulty Products soon folded, and I.R.S. reissued the EP in 1983. It included four originals, among them Hoffs and Vicki Peterson's The Real World, and a cover of a sixties song by the New Zealand band the La De Da's. Around the same time Hoffs and Vicki sang on Rainy Day, a Paisley Underground covers album put together by David Roback, with Hoffs leading versions of songs by Bob Dylan and Lou Reed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1983 Annette Zilinskas left. She mostly wanted to sing, the band mostly needed a bass player, and she went off to front the country punk band Blood on the Saddle. Her replacement had history. Michael Steele, born Susan Thomas in 1955, had been a founding member of the Runaways in 1975 under the name Micki Steele, singing lead and playing bass before the band ever made a record. Kim Fowley, who had put the Runaways together, pushed her out within months. Steele had sworn off all girl bands after that. But she liked the Bangles, heard there was a spare room in Vicki's house, moved in, auditioned, and got the job.[1] [2] [3] [4]

All Over the Place and a fan called Prince

Columbia Records signed the Bangles in 1983, and David Kahne, who had met them in San Francisco the year before, came on board as producer. Their first album, All Over the Place, came out in May 1984. Hoffs and the Petersons wrote nearly all of it, and the lead vocals went round the band. The opening single, Hero Takes a Fall, came from Hoffs and Vicki's shared copies of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and it plays on the way a hero in fiction is brought down by a fatal flaw. Critics loved the record, college radio played it, and it climbed only to number eighty on the Billboard album chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The second single was a cover of Going Down to Liverpool, a song by Kimberley Rew of Katrina and the Waves, sung by Debbi Peterson. The video was directed by Susanna's mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, and it starred Leonard Nimoy as a bored chauffeur who switches off the band's song on the car radio. Nimoy was an old family friend, and Susanna had gone to preschool with his son Adam. The clip went into MTV rotation in October 1984. That autumn the Bangles also opened for Cyndi Lauper on her Fun Tour, and they recorded a song for The Goonies soundtrack, co-written with Jules Shear.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Someone important had been watching. Prince saw the video for Hero Takes a Fall on MTV and liked the song so much that he learned it. He began turning up at their shows. At the Fillmore in San Francisco he walked on stage during that song and played a blistering solo, and afterwards the band would sometimes get a note backstage saying Prince was here and would like to join them. Vicki said her reaction was simply to hand him her Les Paul. On the English leg of their early touring they had another famous fan. Robert Plant came to their club gigs two or three times, and the starstruck band nicknamed him Saint Bob.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Different Light and the big breakthrough

In 1985, while the Bangles were recording their second album, Hoffs got a message that Prince was working at Sunset Sound nearby and had a song for them. She drove over and picked up a cassette. It held two songs, and one was Manic Monday, which Prince had written in 1984 for his protegee group Apollonia 6 and then pulled. He was credited under the pseudonym Christopher. Prince suggested they could just sing over his backing track, but the band insisted on recording it their own way. He came to a rehearsal, listened, gave them a thumbs up and left. Hoffs still keeps that original cassette.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Manic Monday was released in early 1986 as the first single from Different Light. It entered the Hot 100 in January and reached number two in April, held off the top only by Prince's own single Kiss. It also hit number two in Britain and Germany. The band first heard it on American radio while standing on a street corner in Washington after a punishing club tour of Europe, and they jumped up and down screaming. The album around it was glossier than their debut, with keyboards and session players, and Vicki said at the time that she liked it the way she might like a Whitney Houston album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the glossy sound, the sessions with David Kahne were tense. Kahne was both their producer and their man at Columbia, and he later admitted he was critical. The sharpest conflict was with Debbi. She said she could not get along with him, argued over his songwriting credits on her songs, and was outvoted when she asked for a different producer. Session players appeared on parts of the album, and Michael Steele later joked that she was the only member never overdubbed, because Kahne ran out of money. Steele also said the band had been sacrificed on the altar of the producer's career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kahne also brought them their biggest hit. Liam Sternberg, a songwriter from the Akron new wave scene, got the idea on a ferry across the English Channel, watching passengers lurch around with their arms out like figures in Egyptian tomb paintings. Toni Basil had turned the song down and Lene Lovich had recorded a version that was never released. Kahne found the demo on a cassette mislabelled as a different song. Kahne says Debbi was meant to sing it but disliked the song, and her vocal sessions fell apart. After a sing off, Vicki, Steele and Hoffs each took a verse. Kahne played the beat on a drum machine, which left Debbi on backing vocals only.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Walk Like an Egyptian was the album's third single. It reached number one in America on the twentieth of December 1986 and stayed there four weeks, and Billboard later named it the top song of 1987. In the video, Hoffs darts her eyes from side to side. She said she was only glancing between two people in the crowd to calm her stage fright, and never knew the camera was on her. Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley declared a Bangles Day. Debbi told Rolling Stone she felt almost like a failure, because she had not played or sung on the record. Different Light went to number two and later triple platinum.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Hazy Shade, Eternal Flame and the spotlight

The public had started to see Susanna Hoffs as the leader, whatever the band said. She sang lead on most of the singles, and because she was almost a foot shorter than the others she ended up at the front of nearly every photo. The rumors about Prince's interest in her did not help. Then in 1987 she starred in The Allnighter, a teen comedy directed, co-written and produced by her mother, and critics savaged it. The New York Times called it outstandingly dim. Rolling Stone's Susan Orlean wrote that all this lifted Susanna into celebrity beyond the Bangles, and someone close to the band put it more bluntly: now there was Sue, and then there were the other three.[1] [2] [3]

For the Less Than Zero soundtrack in 1987 they cut a song they had played live since the early days. Hoffs first heard Simon and Garfunkel's A Hazy Shade of Winter on an oldies station while sanding pottery at her aunt and uncle's ceramics factory, and she brought it to rehearsal that same night. Rick Rubin produced a hard rock version, all four sang lead together, and Steele said it was the record that sounded most like the band really sounded live. They cut a line about vodka and lime, so they sent Paul Simon the tape with a bottle of vodka and a sack of limes. It reached number two in February 1988.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For the third album, Everything, the band dropped Kahne and worked with Davitt Sigerson. Everyone wrote with outside writers, and Hoffs teamed up with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, the team behind Like a Virgin and True Colors. She told Steinberg about a band trip to Graceland, where the eternal flame at Elvis Presley's grave had gone out in the rain. The phrase reminded Steinberg of a little red light in his childhood synagogue in Palm Springs, and within an hour they had the lyric for Eternal Flame. Unusually for the eighties, it has no chorus at all, built instead like an old Beatles song around a middle section.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When Hoffs played the demo at a band meeting, Eternal Flame was voted down, and she was heartbroken. But Sigerson could not get it out of his head. With keyboard player John Philip Shenale he built a music box arrangement inspired by Patsy Cline records Hoffs loved. Miles Copeland heard it and said it would never get on the radio because it had no drums. Sigerson also told Hoffs that Olivia Newton-John sang her best vocals in the nude, so Hoffs tried it behind a baffle in a darkened studio. She liked it enough to sing most of the album that way. Everything came out in October 1988.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first single from Everything, In Your Room, another Hoffs, Steinberg and Kelly song, reached number five in America. Then came Eternal Flame in January 1989. It hit number one in the United States and in eight other countries, including four weeks at the top in Britain, where it became the third best selling single of the year. It made the Bangles only the third all female group to top the Hot 100 more than once, after the Shirelles and the Supremes. It was their biggest hit ever, and it sealed the idea that the Bangles were Susanna Hoffs and her backing band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Burning out in 1989

By now the Bangles had spent most of their twenties on tour buses. Michael Steele later described flying to Japan for the last time and crying on the plane, then crying again at the hotel. Only years afterwards did she realise she had had a small breakdown. She said the pressure was so intense it had to stop, or she would have fallen seriously ill. Hoffs recalled that the band was exhausted and did not want to tour, but went out anyway at the urging of management and the label. There were rifts at home too. According to El País, neither Hoffs nor Steele attended Debbi's wedding, which was taken as the first real warning sign.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After Eternal Flame the band tried to rebalance things. The third single from Everything was Be With You, written by Debbi Peterson with keyboard player Walker Igleheart and sung by her. It was only the second single with Debbi on lead, after Going Down to Liverpool, and to make room for it Eternal Flame was deleted in Britain while it was still in the chart. The plan failed. Be With You stopped at number thirty in America in June 1989. It was the last Bangles single to chart in the eighties, and it only deepened the sense that the public wanted one particular voice.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 1989 Hoffs and Steele called a band meeting at the management's house. Debbi remembered lawyers and business managers in the room, and she and Vicki looking at each other knowing something was up. They were told it was over. The split was announced in the autumn of 1989, months after Eternal Flame had topped the charts. Columbia put out a Greatest Hits album in May 1990 to fill the contract. It reached number four in Britain. Hoffs went solo, Steele moved to a farm in northern California, and the Petersons joined other bands.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The years apart

Hoffs released her first solo album, When You're a Boy, in January 1991, ten years almost to the month after the band began. Its single My Side of the Bed made the American top forty, but the record sold poorly and critics were mostly unkind. A second album followed only in 1996. She later called the solo life lonely and said she missed singing harmony. In 1993 she married the film director Jay Roach, and they had two sons. Management, she admitted, had whispered in her ear to go solo, and she had been vulnerable to it.[1] [2] [3]

Hoffs found an unexpected second home in comedy. With her friends Mike Myers and the power pop songwriter Matthew Sweet she formed Ming Tea, a fake sixties British band where everyone used a pseudonym and she became Gillian Shagwell. Myers was working up the character of Austin Powers, and when he wrote a film about him, Jay Roach directed it. Ming Tea turned up in all three Austin Powers films, and Hoffs sang Burt Bacharach songs on two of the soundtracks. She also sang the title song for the 1995 film Now and Then.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Vicki Peterson moved into roots music. She joined the Continental Drifters, a band that relocated to New Orleans, and formed the Psycho Sisters duo with Susan Cowsill of the family group the Cowsills. In 1994 and 1995 she filled in on guitar for a pregnant Charlotte Caffey on the Go-Go's reunion tour. Her private life was struck by tragedy. Her fiancé, Bobby Donati, died of leukemia in 1991. Vicki said she wrote a song about it in about twenty minutes, and that the loss made her part of the club of people who have known real grief.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Debbi Peterson married the English sound engineer Steven Botting in 1989 and later formed a duo called Kindred Spirit with the Irish singer Siobhan Maher, releasing an album in 1995. Michael Steele stayed furthest from the spotlight. She wrote songs for a solo album that never came out, sang and played guitar in a short lived band called Crash Wisdom, and played bass in a San Francisco group called Eyesore. Two of her Crash Wisdom songs, Nickel Romeo and Between the Two, would later end up on a Bangles record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Getting the band back together

The spark for the reunion came from Austin Powers. While Jay Roach was editing The Spy Who Shagged Me, there was a temporary song on the soundtrack he wanted to replace, and Hoffs offered to have the Bangles try something. The result, Get the Girl, stuck. It was the first time all four had been in a room together in almost ten years. Their first show back was at a Beatles tribute concert in 1999, and in 2000 they announced they were reuniting for good. Steele was the last holdout. She only agreed if they would make new music rather than become an oldies act.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

This time they set rules. Each member got a veto over the band's plans, and they promised to talk before problems got out of hand. They paid for their fourth album themselves out of touring money and released it on their revived Down Kiddie label. Doll Revolution came out in Europe in March 2003 and in America that September. Its title track was written by Elvis Costello, Steele contributed three songs, and Dave Grohl sang in a backing group credited as the Bangle Boys Choir. It did well in Germany after a slot on the television show Wetten dass, but made little impact elsewhere.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In July 2004 Paul McCartney handed the Bangles honorary diplomas from his Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, a nice moment for a band that had always wanted to be the female Beatles. But the reunion strained Michael Steele. Her bandmates now had young children and could not tour as much as she wanted, and her last concert was in early 2004. Her exit was only made official in May 2005, and she retired from music altogether. For one benefit show in 2004 the band even called on Amanda Hills Podany, Vicki's high school bandmate and now a history professor, to play bass.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Abby Travis, a session bassist who had played with Beck and Elastica, took over on tour in 2005. On New Year's Eve that year the Bangles played Hazy Shade of Winter and Eternal Flame in Times Square for Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Travis was let go in 2008 and Derrick Anderson took over bass on the road. The trio spent about two years making a fifth album with Matthew Sweet as co-producer. Sweetheart of the Sun came out on the twenty seventh of September 2011, and critics heard it as a return to the jangly sound of their earliest records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Back to the garage

From here on the Bangles leaned into their roots. In December 2013 they played two nights with the reunited Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade and Three O'Clock, at the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles, and joked they were playing songs they had not touched in thirty years. In 2014 they released Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bangles, a collection of early demos, radio oddities and the long lost first EP, on Thanksgiving Day. Hoffs said the goal was to remind people that their roots were in the great garage bands of Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2014 Annette Zilinskas began joining them on stage, and in 2018 she rejoined the band for good, reuniting the original four for the first time since 1983. That June they played the Arroyo Seco festival in Pasadena on the same bill as Robert Plant, their old Saint Bob. In November 2018 came 3 by 4, an album on which the Bangles, the Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade and the Three O'Clock each covered songs by the other three, and in May 2019 all four bands played the Grammy Museum. El País reported in March 2026 that the band had not played a concert since September 2019.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Loss has marked these years. In 2006 the Bangles played a tribute concert for Sandy West, Steele's old Runaways bandmate, who had died of lung cancer. Prince died in 2016, and in 2019 his own recording of Manic Monday was released on the album Originals. In February 2020 David Roback, Hoffs's first musical partner and the founder of Mazzy Star, died of cancer at sixty one. He had hidden his illness from most friends, and his last messages to Hoffs were about reissuing their old Rainy Day recordings. Susanna's father Joshua Hoffs died in 2024, after sixty seven years of marriage to Tamar.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Hoffs has kept busy on her own. She made three covers albums with Matthew Sweet, solo covers records in 2021 and 2023, and in 2023 published her first novel, This Bird Has Flown, which Universal bought for a film. In 2024 she finally released The Lost Record, songs she had recorded in her garage in 1999. In 2025 she re-recorded Eternal Flame with the chamber group yMusic. In February 2026 her co-writer Billy Steinberg died at seventy five after a long illness. Vicki, married since 2003 to John Cowsill, recorded an album of his late brothers' songs with him in 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The Bangles' legacy is bigger than their small catalogue. They were one of the few all female groups of their era who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments, and they were the one Paisley Underground band to reach the top of the charts. Their Hazy Shade of Winter was so strong that Simon and Garfunkel borrowed its arrangement for their own reunion shows in 2003. They were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Goldmine Hall of Fame in 2013. Hoffs has put it simply: she was a Bangle, she is a Bangle, and she always will be.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around The Bangles

Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson. They met on the phone in December 1980, talking about John Lennon's death, and founded the band that same week. They became the Bangles' main songwriting team, writing The Real World, Hero Takes a Fall and much of the early catalogue. Vicki handed some of her own songs to Susanna because she felt Susanna sang them better. The spotlight on Hoffs strained things, but it was Hoffs who later kept calling to bring the band back together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Vicki Peterson and Debbi Peterson. The sisters grew up in Northridge and played together long before the Bangles. Vicki bought Debbi her first drum kit because her band needed a drummer, and Debbi paid her back with McDonald's wages. They sang some of the tightest sibling harmonies of the eighties. When the band split, both felt blindsided by the meeting that ended it, and both returned for every reunion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bangles and Prince. Prince fell for the band after seeing the Hero Takes a Fall video, learned the song and started jumping on stage with them. He gave them Manic Monday under the name Christopher, and it was kept off number one only by his own Kiss. He approved their rearrangement with a silent thumbs up. His interest in Susanna Hoffs, real or exaggerated, helped push her in front of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bangles and David Kahne. Kahne produced their first two albums and was also their record company contact at Columbia, which gave him unusual power. He brought them Walk Like an Egyptian and their slickest sound. Debbi Peterson in particular clashed with him over drum machines and credits, and Steele said the band was sacrificed to his career. He learned he would not produce the next album almost by accident.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Susanna Hoffs and Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. The hit songwriting team met Hoffs backstage at a Bangles show in Hollywood. Together they wrote Belinda Carlisle's I Need a Disguise, then In Your Room and Eternal Flame. Steinberg wrote lyrics first and Kelly the music, a reversal of how Hoffs usually worked. Eternal Flame gave the pair a record run of number one hits five years in a row. Steinberg died in February 2026 at seventy five.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Susanna Hoffs and Jay Roach. Hoffs met the director on a blind date in the early nineties and married him in 1993. He converted to Judaism for the marriage, and they have two sons. His Austin Powers films gave her band Ming Tea a place on screen, and his need for a new song for the second film led directly to the Bangles' reunion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Susanna Hoffs and David Roback. They grew up a few blocks apart in Brentwood, went to the same grade school, and at Berkeley lived together and formed their first band, the Unconscious. Roback went on to Rain Parade, the Rainy Day album with Hoffs singing, and Mazzy Star. A bandmate recalled Roback crying after seeing how good her new band was. He died of cancer in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Michael Steele and Kim Fowley. Fowley assembled the Runaways in 1975 and hired Steele as singer and bassist through a radio audition call. She was gone by October that year. She says he fired her for rejecting his sexual advances and for mocking Cherry Bomb. He dismissed her as lacking star magic. The experience left her swearing off all girl bands until the Bangles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Vicki Peterson and John and Susan Cowsill. Vicki met Susan Cowsill of the sixties family band the Cowsills in the Continental Drifters, and the two sang together as the Psycho Sisters for over twenty years before finally releasing an album in 2014. Vicki married Susan's brother John in October 2003. The first album Vicki ever bought was by the Cowsills, and she jokes they are now her in laws and bandmates.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bangles and Miles Copeland. The Police's manager signed the Bangs to his Faulty Products label and managed them through their biggest years. Vicki at first feared he wanted a poor man's Go-Go's. His clout opened doors, but he also doubted Eternal Flame, telling Hoffs it would never be played on radio because it had no drums.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Susanna Hoffs and Matthew Sweet. Hoffs brought Mike Myers to see Sweet play, and the three formed the fake sixties band Ming Tea. Hoffs and Sweet then recorded three Under the Covers albums as Sid and Susie, covering the sixties, seventies and eighties. Sweet also co-produced the Bangles' 2011 album Sweetheart of the Sun.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bangles and The Go-Go's. Both were all female Los Angeles bands who played their own instruments, both were managed by Miles Copeland, and comparisons were constant. The Bangles worked hard to be seen as a rock band, not a second Go-Go's. Hoffs still credits the Go-Go's with inspiring her, Vicki filled in for Charlotte Caffey in 1994, and Caffey and Jane Wiedlin later co-wrote with Hoffs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about The Bangles

• Susanna Hoffs recruited bandmates partly by leaving hand drawn flyers in the ladies' room of the Whisky a Go Go during a Go-Go's concert. In 1980 Hoffs also advertised in The Recycler. In the end it was her answer to someone else's Recycler ad that connected her with the Peterson sisters.[1]
• On the night Vicki Peterson and Susanna Hoffs first spoke, they bonded over the recent murder of John Lennon. Vicki answered the phone when Susanna called about an ad placed by her housemate. Lennon had just been killed, and they talked about what he meant to them and about their favorite sixties bands.[1] [2]
• The Bangs name came from an old Esquire article about sixties haircuts. The group started as the Colours, then became the Supersonic Bangs after Hoffs saw the magazine piece. That lasted about fifteen seconds before it was shortened to the Bangs.[1] [2]
• According to the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, the band chose the name Bangles in a Mexican restaurant on the way to Las Vegas. They had to change names after an East Coast band called the Bangs threatened legal action. Putting out a single to protect the name had not worked.[1] [2]
• Before the Bangles, one of Vicki Peterson's bands was briefly called KooKoo and the DooDooHeads. Her high school group cycled through names including Crista Galli, Aishi, the Muze, the Fans, Shanti and Those Girls. Vicki said they did not want a name that was easy to pronounce.[1]
• The Colours' original bassist left music for academia and became a professor of ancient history. Amanda Hills Podany left for graduate school in London in 1981. In 2004 she stood in on bass for a sold out Bangles benefit, and wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times.[1] [2]
• Leonard Nimoy played a bored chauffeur in the Going Down to Liverpool video because he was a Hoffs family friend. Tamar Simon Hoffs directed the video. Nimoy had given her her first film job, and Susanna went to preschool with his son Adam.[1] [2] [3]
• Prince's cassette for the Bangles held a second song called Jealous Girl alongside Manic Monday. Hoffs picked the tape up at Sunset Sound without seeing Prince. She says she still has the original cassette in storage.[1] [2]
• Walk Like an Egyptian reached producer David Kahne on a cassette labelled with a different song title entirely. The tape said Rock and Roll Nightmare. When Kahne called the publisher, she offered to send the right song, and he said no, he liked this one.[1]
• The shaker on Walk Like an Egyptian was a papier mache dog's head filled with beans. David Kahne recorded ten minutes of shaking during a painful divorce, then edited the best four minutes to use as the song's groove.[1]
• Toni Basil turned down Walk Like an Egyptian before the Bangles got it. Liam Sternberg's demo was sung by Marti Jones, who told him it was the dumbest thing she had ever heard. Lene Lovich recorded a version that went unreleased.[1] [2] [3]
• Billboard named Walk Like an Egyptian the number one song of 1987. It first hit number one on the twentieth of December 1986 and stayed there four weeks, carrying it into the new year.[1] [2]
• During Egypt's 2011 revolution, a protester's sign borrowed the title Walk Like an Egyptian as a slogan. Producer David Kahne was later shown footage of it. He said weird things have happened with that song.[1]
• The Bangles' cover of September Gurls earned Big Star's Alex Chilton enough royalties to buy a new car and some land. Chilton had struggled for money since the Box Tops. Michael Steele sang lead on the cover on Different Light.[1] [2]
• After cutting a line about vodka and lime from Hazy Shade of Winter, the Bangles mailed Paul Simon vodka and limes. Vicki said they sent him the tape with a bottle of good vodka and a sack of limes, and a note apologising for the missing line.[1]
• Hoffs first heard A Hazy Shade of Winter while sanding pottery at her aunt and uncle's ceramics factory. The oldies station on the radio was her only company. She took the song to rehearsal that night, and it stayed in their set for years.[1] [2]
• Simon and Garfunkel rearranged Hazy Shade of Winter based on the Bangles' version for their 2003 reunion tour. Hoffs met Paul Simon after the single became a hit and remembered him being very sweet about it.[1] [2]
• Eternal Flame has no chorus. Billy Steinberg pointed out that it is built like an old Beatles song, with the title tagged to the end of each verse and a middle section instead of a chorus.[1] [2]
• Eternal Flame made Steinberg and Kelly the first songwriting team to score a Hot 100 number one five years in a row. The run began with Madonna's Like a Virgin and also included True Colors, Alone and So Emotional.[1] [2]
• In Britain, Eternal Flame was deleted while still in the chart to make way for Be With You. It was withdrawn in June 1989 at number thirty eight after twenty weeks on the chart, ending as the country's third best seller of the year.[1]
• Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley declared a Bangles Day. The Guardian says it came on the day they got their first platinum disc. The Vocal Group Hall of Fame dates it to the twenty third of February 1987.[1] [2]
• Robert Plant repeatedly came to see the Bangles in small English clubs, and they nicknamed him Saint Bob. Hoffs said he came two or three times, and the band, big Led Zeppelin fans, could barely believe it was him.[1]
• In 1986 the Bangles opened for Queen at Slane Castle in Ireland. Steele remembered playing to around one hundred thousand people in the rain and mud. Vicki called watching Freddie Mercury from the wings a career highlight.[1] [2]
• Michael Steele's only single as lead singer, Following, was never released in America. It came out in Europe in 1987 as the last single from Different Light. Steele said the song was about her high school sweetheart.[1]
• Dave Grohl sings backing vocals on Doll Revolution. He is credited as part of the Bangle Boys Choir. The album's title track was written by Elvis Costello, who had released it on his own album the year before.[1]
• The name Ming Tea came from a fictional company in an obscure sixties Italian film. Hoffs said it came from a movie starring Ursula Andress, The 10th Victim. In the band she was Gillian Shagwell, and Myers was Austin Powers.[1]
• In 1987 the Bangles joked about a Bangle Baby Year when they would all get pregnant together. Vicki told Rolling Stone it was pencilled in for 1995 and would begin with a big party.[1]
• Little Richard appears in the video for Walking Down Your Street. The Bangles play a neighborhood band that wins a contest to open for him in Los Angeles. The song was their first US top forty hit written by a band member.[1]
• Vicki Peterson's 1965 Fender amp was drowned by Hurricane Katrina, then brought back to life by her bandmates. Her Continental Drifters bandmates had it restored by an expert, and she recognised it sitting on stage at a Los Angeles soundcheck.[1]
• Rain Parade's first single was written after David Roback cried watching Hoffs's new band. Bandmate Matt Piucci says Roback saw the pre Bangles Colours at a party and could not bear that his friend would succeed first, so they wrote What She's Done to Your Mind.[1] [2]
• Paul McCartney gave the Bangles honorary diplomas from his Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 2004. It was a fitting tribute for a band whose members had dreamed of being a female Beatles and who covered Going Down to Liverpool.[1] [2]
• The Bangles' Gilmore Girls appearance was filmed live in a Los Angeles theater with no retakes. Hoffs said creator Amy Sherman-Palladino was a fan and contacted them early in the show's run.[1]
• Debbi Peterson once used a borrowed studio light to read the size of her first big Bangles merchandise check through the envelope. Sid Griffin of the Long Ryders, who was living with her at the time, tells the story. He said it was a sizeable check, and he was happy for her.[1]
• Susanna Hoffs says she started years of Freudian therapy in the eighties to cope with the pressure of fame. She told The Big Issue that her anxiety soared once they signed, and she thinks many bands would still exist if they took a therapist on tour.[1]
• Hoffs says she stopped drinking entirely and believes it is why she was able to write a novel. She told The Big Issue in 2023 that she had been sober for eleven years, not because of a problem but out of curiosity.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.