Bananarama hopes the music industry is “a little less sexist now”.
The pop duo – which includes Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward – shot to fame alongside former member Siobhan Fahey in 1982 and were listed in Guinness World Records for reaching the highest number of chart entries in the world by an all-female band, but Keren admitted that life in music was “harder” for women in their prime.
She said: “I think it was harder [for women] then. I’d like to think the music industry is a little less sexist now, but looking back I realized we needed to work a little harder and be a little more determined [than men.] It was this old thing that if we wanted to do something and we said ‘Oh, we don’t do that’, or ‘We want to do that’, were called difficult and I think if we had been men, it would have been ‘Oh my God, they’re so rock and roll. A lot of little things really added up!”
The ‘Venus’ hitmakers released their biggest hit album ‘Masquerade’ on Friday (22.07.22) to celebrate their 40th anniversary and will back the record with two intimate shows in London in August, but Sara admitted the pair are not s didn’t expect to be on the road for so many more years down the line.
Speaking during the joint interview on ‘Good Morning Britain’, Sara said: “We started when we were teenagers and I don’t think we looked beyond the following Saturday night. We certainly didn’t didn’t think ‘Oh, we’re going to be doing this in 40 years, that’s pretty amazing. And we wrote a book in lockdown, so we kind of documented our whole career in that time and that’s something we’re really proud of, I guess.
‘Masquerade’ is now streaming on all platforms and is also available in cassette, vinyl and CD formats at https://www.bananarama.co.uk/shop/#foogallery-10921/i:1.
