Susanna Hoffs hasn’t really ever stopped producing music. But this new launch is different; this is a treasure trove of old songs from the ‘90s that didn’t get released. Hoffs recorded the tracks for The Lost Record in 1999. The songs were co-written with friends, including Bill Bottrell and Go-Go’s members Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, with Dan Schwartz joining her to produce the album. And the tracks were recorded in her garage, a setting that holds special significance for her. “I love garage rock. Many of my favourite songs were written in garages, and I even lived in them during the ’80s.”

Susanna Hoffs is Zooming from — for reasons that sound like they should be more interesting, but actually aren’t — the spare bedroom of Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding’s house in California. She is dressed in pink and black; she’s always dressed in pink and black when we talk. She very much likes pink and black.

Susanna Hoffs, photo: Shervin Lainez

“Are you going to get my age right this time?” she teases. “You’re not going to make me any older than I actually am, again?”

Early last year I conducted a flurry of interviews with Hoffs, best known as one of the co-founders of The Bangles (where I got some dates wrong, hence the teasing). She’s often described as the lead singer of the band that, from the early ‘80s onwards, tore up the charts with singles such as Manic Monday, Walk Like an Egyptian, Eternal Flame, and their cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade of Winter. Which (whisper it) I always thought was better than the original. But The Bangles — Hoffs, Vicki Peterson, Debbie Peterson, Michael Steele (the latter replaced founding bassist Annette Zilinskas, who later rejoined the band) — was always a four-vocals group.

Last year she realised a long-held ambition and saw her debut novel, This Bird Has Flown, published. And now comes the release of The Lost Record.

I tell Hoffs that it’s 40 years since the release of the Bangles’ debut album, All Over The Place, which would produce the singles Hero Takes a Fall and Going Down to Liverpool. “Are you sure?” says Hoffs. “You know what you’re like with dates.”

And yet, impossibly, it is. The band had previously released a five-track EP in 1982, but this was their first proper studio album. And it would bring them to the attention of not only the music industry, but artists such as Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis, who would get the band to open for them. And, most crucially, Prince.

The Bangles 1984. Photo: Aurelio Jose Barrera, Los Angeles

By the time the Bangles released Manic Monday in 1986 and Eternal Flame in 1989, their superstardom was assured — the latter single hit number one in nine countries. But the Bangles of five years earlier in 1984, when Hoffs was 25, was a less polished, more raucous affair.

“It was a very thrilling and exciting time to be in a band,” says Hoffs. “I mean, those pre-internet days. We advertised shows mostly by flyers, ads in free magazines like Recycler,” It was a real punk ethos, crystallised when she went to see what would turn out to be the last Sex Pistols live concert, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1978, when Hoffs was a student at the University of California, Berkeley.

She began studying theatre, then switched to dance, and finally settled on art, which was what she graduated with. “I jumped around a little, but by the end that all kind of coalesced into one big love of art in all its forms. And when I put that ad in for band members I think it was because at that point the idea of being in a band just seemed like the ultimate art project to me.”

Hoffs turned 65 in January. It seems a significant age.

I tell her that in the UK it was always a long-standing joke that when you hit that point you get your bus pass, though I have no idea if that’s still true. She laughs. “I know! Over here, we’d say I’m now eligible for Medicare!”

In the ‘80s especially, Hoffs was considered one of the most beautiful women on the planet. Before our interview she had posted on her social media a cover from Spin magazine, for which she was the cover girl for their “first annual swimsuit issue”. Given that the Bangles started off as a punky guitar band, how did she handle being called a sex symbol?

Hoffs laughs a little awkwardly. “I think part of that came from the rise of MTV in the 1980s,” she says. “Suddenly it wasn’t enough to just put out a record, there had to be a video with it. There were so many iconic videos at that time, and artists like Madonna were really pushing the sexuality. I used to handle that by creating a persona, really, for when I was performing.” She breaks out into a broad grin. “It’s like Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap. This dial goes up to 11. And that’s what it was like for me. I dialled it up to 11.”

Hoffs is a huge movie fan. Last year she did a feature for the Criterion film collection, highlighting her favourite movies. She included Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, La Piscine and Klute among her eclectic selections. One night she emails me out of the blue to ask if I’ve ever seen The Servant, the 1963 psychological thriller starring Dirk Bogarde.

It’s no surprise Hoffs loves film. She was born in LA in 1959, and her mother Tamar was then a film-maker, her father Joshua a psychoanalyst. Celebrities regularly visited the house (especially for her father’s expertise in a field that was in its relative infancy). One family friend was Star Trek legend Leonard Nimoy, who appeared in the video for Going Down to Liverpool. She is married to Jay Roach, the film director with the Austin Powers movies on his CV, among many others, with who she has two sons. She is currently writing the screenplay for the movie adaptation of her novel This Bird Has Flown, which was published a year ago.

Hoffs has appeared in movies. Notably as the delightfully-named Gillian Shagwell in the Austin Powers movies, part of the band Ming Tea. And in the 1987 movie The Allnighter, directed by her mother. The cover of The Allnighter very much leans into Hoffs’ sex symbol status, featuring her in pink underwear.

I wonder if Hoffs still considers herself a sex symbol. She is very active on social media, especially Instagram. Her Facebook account has comments turned off on posts, but within minutes of her putting up a video on Insta, there are thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, many of them from men declaring they are in love with her, in lust with her, and worse.

Last summer, when she was over in the UK to promote her book, we met for lunch in London, and I mused that her direct message inbox must be an absolute bin-fire. She winced a little, and said that she has someone to filter out the worst of it before she sees it. So, I ask her. Does she still feel like a sex symbol today?

“I don’t think of myself as a sex symbol. I don’t think of myself that way. Or are we talking about sex? I mean, I’m 65 now, I’m not going to retire from it, that makes zero sense. A lot of my friends are my age and older and, you know, we talk about it and we’re not going to retire from that, ever.”

I don’t think of myself as a sex symbol. I don’t think of myself that way

I find myself blushing. That said, there’s a fair bit of sex in her novel, This Bird Has Flown. It’s the story of Jane Start, an ever-so slightly faded pop star who goes to London to recharge her batteries, and ends up in a swoonsome relationship with a slightly uptight but good-looking Oxford professor. Jane is pretty much a one-hit wonder, now resorting to doing private shows for bachelor parties in nightclubs, her big success a song gifted to her by international superstar Jonesy. There has been speculation that Jonesy is a Prince analog; the purple one gifted the Bangles the song Manic Monday, and acted as something of a mentor for Hoffs. There was endless speculation about whether they were in a relationship, which Hoffs keeps her own counsel on.

She does call him a “supernatural talent” though, saying his live performances were just incredible to watch. In the 1990s Prince would help her indirectly, as well… when she was about to go on stage, when she was ramping up that public Susanna Hoffs performance to 11, she would listen to Let’s Go Crazy on her Walkman to get into the zone.

“It enabled me to make that transition from me to the other me” she says. “Things got giddy and crazy. And sometimes it took a while to come down from that, to get back to me.”

Susanna Hoffs Self Portrait in Garage 1994

Hoffs still performs and writes music. Around the same time her novel came out last year, she released a new album, The Deep End, her fifth solo album, before The Lost Record this year. For her, ageing is not something to be necessarily worried about.

“I think ageing is about learning to love yourself,” she says thoughtfully. “Acceptance is very important. We have to accept changes in our lives and bodies, because anything other than accepting who you are is going to drive you crazy.”

Hoffs often posts videos and photos of herself on her social media without make-up, just dossing around her house. “I think that’s important, too,” she says. “At least to me. Being comfortable in who you are, and who you’ve become. I think the trick is to stay positive, if you can, to find the joy in life, to keep active, to seek inspiration everywhere. One thing is guaranteed, we all get older, and I think life is better if you follow the direction of that river than fighting against it. We just need to embrace ageing and get on with life.”

“…You’re going to get older. The only thing about that which makes sense to me is just embrace it. I mean, what’s the alternative?”

It being 40 years since the first Bangles album came out, would Hoffs swap being 65 for being 25 again, if that magic of the movies could work? She laughs, “Oh, no chance. I think the wisdom and experience that comes with living is far more valuable.”

If we were going to employ that movie magic so Hoffs could meet her 25-year-old self, what would she tell her?

She thinks about it. “My job at that time was really stressful. Don’t get me wrong, it was very enjoyable, and I feel so lucky that I got to do it. There was so much travelling, and it was very difficult to stay grounded and to carry on relationships.

“I think I’d tell 25-year-old Susanna not to be so hard on herself. To not judge herself so harshly. To worry less. I’d tell her not to question herself so much and to be less afraid, to be more fearless.

“I think being in your 20s can be very anxiety-inducing, and I suppose that goes the same for young women today. You’re trying to figure out your place in the world. One thing is certain, and it’s probably not what young women want to hear or think about but it’s unavoidable. You’re going to get older. The only thing about that which makes sense to me is just embrace it. I mean, what’s the alternative?”

We wrap things up. Susanna Hoffs has a screenplay to write, and a new book to think about, and a new record to promote. The bus pass will just have to wait, it seems.

Buy Susanna Hoffs The Lost Record here, released 18 October 2024

Buy This Bird has Flown, novel by Susanna Hoffs here

David Barnett

David Barnett is an author and journalist, originally from Wigan and now living in West Yorkshire. His latest novel is the folk horror WITHERED HILL, from Canelo, and forthcoming, a magical Christmas rom-com, THE LITTLE CHRISTMAS LIBRARY (Orion). He is married to Claire, a journalist, and they have two children, Charlie and Alice.

The post Susanna Hoffs: The Lost Record… and the good life appeared first on Silver Magazine.

When 11-year-old Mark Stay was enduring a double maths lesson, some time in 1984, a long siren sounded from outside the school buildings.

“Everyone froze, even the teacher,” recalls Mark, now 51. “It was very similar to the four-minute warning siren. Then she remembered that some buildings nearby were being demolished and this was a detonation warning. Still, nothing like the cold chill of imminent annihilation to clear the mind.”

It’s not surprising everyone was a little jumpy. The memory of Threads was still lingering in their minds. Broadcast at 9.30pm on the BBC on Sunday September 23rd, 1984, just a couple of weeks into the new school year, Threads has imprinted itself on the psyche of a generation, like the shadows of obliterated people burned into the pavements of Hiroshima.

Ask any Brit aged over 50 about Threads, and the chances are they’ll go a little pale, shudder, and start telling you about melting milk bottles and women weeing down their legs in the street.

The birth of the docudrama

It was what today we’d call a docudrama, a combination of the fictional stories of individuals caught up in a nuclear attack on Sheffield and the narration of science broadcaster Paul Vaughan, which gave the facts about atomic war he imparted a horrifying, familiar veracity.

This is what it would be like… this is what would happen to us

There was a ‘Play for Today’ vibe about the story of Jimmy and Ruth, a young couple preparing to get married after finding out Ruth is pregnant. In the background, TV reports and newspaper headlines outlined the growing international tensions with the Soviet Union, but it all takes a back seat to the domestic tribulations… until the nukes start flying, and Sheffield (among most other cities) is bombed.

The memory of the mushroom cloud rising over the city still chills. This is what it would be like. This is not some American science fiction drama, positing the destruction of New York or Los Angeles or other far-off places we only ever saw on TV or at the cinema. This is what would happen to us.

Those behind Threads, nuclear war film

Jimmy was played by West Yorkshire born Reece Dinsdale, who went on to star in A Private Function and the sit-com Home To Roost, while Ruth was Karen Meagher, who the following year took the role of Miss Broom in the ultimate palate cleanser, the kids’ TV show Jonny Briggs.

Threads was produced and directed by Mick Jackson, who, once he got nuclear annihilation out of his system, turned to romantic movies such as LA Story and The Bodyguard in the early 1990s. The screenplay was written by Barry Hines, the South Yorkshire-born author of A Kestrel for a Knave, later filmed by Ken Loach as Kes. Who among us can say we didn’t sit in an English class while a big old TV and a video player the size of a small family car was wheeled in for us to watch that?

Hines brought his trademark northern grit to the script, but there was to be no happy ending. Not even a slightly sad, though redemptive, ending in Threads.

There was just going to be endless bleakness and horror. The mushroom cloud rising over Sheffield, the milk bottle melting in the intense heat from the blast, the woman in the street losing control of her bladder as realisation dawned that this was it, this was the end… that was only the beginning.

Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) in Threads (1984)

Gary’s experience

Gary Wilkinson, of Lincoln, was 17 when he watched Threads, and a couple of years later he would head off to Sheffield for university. He’d been aware of Threads in the run up to broadcast largely thanks to the one-off drama being given a Radio Times cover, with what has now become an iconic image.

In the wake of the nuclear attack, government protocols kick in to try to control the remnants of the cities and keep the peace

Anyone with any official links is drafted in, including an unnamed traffic warden, pictured with half his face bandaged and looking genuinely shell-shocked, and carrying a gun. The traffic warden, played by Michael Beercroft, only appeared for a moment, as an example of how martial law would have to be declared in the wake of an attack. But it’s an enduring image. The writer and broadcaster Charlie Brooker even reproduced the costume for a Halloween party a few years back.

Gary, 57, recalls, “It all added to the general feeling of doom and gloom that nuclear war was imminent. It definitely stayed with me though because I went to Sheffield University a couple of years later. I remember recognising some of the filming locations as I walked around the city for the first time – the council building, and the shopping street with the mushroom cloud. Ironically the pub they shot in was a popular student pub, but it had had a makeover so I never realised until later.”

The culture of nuclear war

Threads didn’t come out of nowhere, of course. If you grew up in the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war was a very real one. The year 1984 had arrived carrying all the baggage of George Orwell’s dystopian novel. The rise of the surveillance society and admonishments that if you’d done nothing wrong, you had nothing to fear from the CCTV cameras suddenly sprouting on streets.

The miners went on strike and felt the steel rod of an authoritarian establishment. We had an Iron Lady in Downing Street and a Hollywood Cowboy in the White House, and the special relationship between the Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America seemed destined to take us on a mutually assured destruction collision course with the Soviet Union.

The year after Threads was released, America produced its own take with The Day After. WarGames, starring Brat Packer Matthew Broderick, had been released in cinemas the previous year and was a big hit on VHS in 1984, giving a Hollywood thriller gloss to impending nuclear destruction. Then Raymond Briggs’ When The Wind Blows was adapted as an animated film about the heartbreaking end of the world from the perspective of two pensioners.

The charts were the soundtrack to the apocalypse. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s pounding Two Tribes had a video featuring wrestlers wearing the heads of Ronald Reagan and Soviet Communist Party secretary Konstantin Chernenko. Nena’s 99 Red Balloons wrapped Armageddon up in a catchy Europop beat. The video to Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes was about a meltdown at a nuclear power station.

An unhappy ending

And all of these were just in 1984. It’s no wonder that by the time Threads was broadcast, we were all certain of only one thing: the world was going to burn. And if somehow we survived, Threads showed us how terrible that would be.

Moving on from the initial attack, it showed a reduced population of a few million trying to claw their way out of the dark ages. Ending with Ruth dying and her young daughter trying to survive in the ruins, getting pregnant, and giving birth to a stillborn, horribly mutated child.

There was not going to be a Hollywood ending if those nukes started flying.

Planning our way out

I was 14 when I watched Threads, and was already fearful of what felt like the inevitable nuclear war. I watched with my parents, feeling a growing sensation of mounting dread. My mum, watching the breakdown of society in the aftermath, said quietly, “If that happens I’m going to get a gun and shoot us all.”

“You’re not going to shoot me!” said my dad. He planned to go up to Scotland and basically go fishing if the mushroom cloud appeared. Nobody asked where mum was going to procure a gun.

My mum, watching the breakdown of society in the aftermath, said quietly, “If that happens I’m going to get a gun and shoot us all.”

The next day, everyone was talking about it at school. My main memory of that is people commenting gleefully about the coloured vomit issued by those slowly dying of radiation sickness.

“Kids at school were just making jokes about it,” agrees Mike Whittaker, a 52-year-old postman from Bolton. “But that was how 12-year-olds responded to everything, as far as I remember.”

Mike watched it alone on his black and white portable TV in his bedroom. “I was way too young, in retrospect. But they showed it in some schools, didn’t they? We got the Radio Times delivered so I must have seen that iconic cover. I think I had a bit of an obsession with nuclear apocalypse prior to Threads, to be honest. Scared and fascinated. Two Tribes and 99 Red Balloons didn’t help in that regard.

‘They’ve done it, they’ve bloody done it’

“The build-up was scarily real to me. The panic in the shopping centre was very upsetting. As was the ‘They’ve done it, they’ve bloody done it’ moment. The end section is obviously beyond bleak. It added to an already real sense of dread. I had apocalypse nightmares for years. Still do now occasionally.”

History repeats

The BBC has only shown Threads twice since that initial broadcast, but it’s being screened again. I’m not wholly sure I can bring myself to watch it again, even 40 years later. The unrelenting bleakness and the sheer lack of hope makes it a difficult watch.

“It brought home that a nuclear attack wouldn’t just be an awful experience that would last a week, or a month, but for decades.”

“It was grim,” agrees Steve Tanner, 56, of Birmingham. “It brought home that a nuclear attack wouldn’t just be an awful experience that would last a week, or a month, but for decades.”

Perhaps if Threads was just a piece of television history about a time long gone, we might be less traumatised by it. But aside from a few years in the 1990s, the threat of nuclear annihilation never really went away, and given the current global situation, sometimes feels as likely as it ever did in 1984.

Still, at least if it does happen, we can all live-Tweet the apocalypse and get one last joke in when the four-minute warning comes. And, as Frankie had it, if you’re unsure what the air attack warning sounds like… this is the sound…

If you can cope with it, Threads is on BBC4 on 9th October, 10:15pm

David Barnett

David Barnett is an author and journalist, originally from Wigan and now living in West Yorkshire. His latest novel is the folk horror WITHERED HILL, from Canelo, and forthcoming, a magical Christmas rom-com, THE LITTLE CHRISTMAS LIBRARY (Orion). He is married to Claire, a journalist, and they have two children, Charlie and Alice.

The post Threads; the closest you ever want to be to nuclear war appeared first on Silver Magazine.