Shakespears Sister look back on their commercial peak.
You’d be forgiven for looking now at footage of 1992 and thinking that musically it was wall-to-wall check shirts and down tuned guitars, but the pop music machine was still working just fine, thanks, with artists like Snap!, KWS and Erasure all enjoying lengthy stays at number one.
They were all beaten, however, for weeks at the chart’s summit by the neo-gothic blockbuster Stay from Shakespears Sister, a smash that helped its mother album Hormonally Yours become one of the year’s best-selling releases.
Initially a solo vehicle for ex-Bananarama member Siobhan Fahey, her then husband Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame) recommended expanding the line-up. The idea sparked, and the subsequent hiring of American veteran Marcella Detroit – at first just to help on the single You’re History, then permanently – went a long way to changing Shakespears Sister’s creative dynamics.
Such was the sense of empowerment that for their first album working as a songwriting duo Fahey was determined to avoid much oversight from their label, with inspiration coming, for example, from the fifties’ schlock-horror movie Cat-Women Of The Moon.
Working with producer Alan Moulder guaranteed radio-friendly outcomes, but both were determined to have more than a little fun with it.
Whilst underground scenes like Riot-grrl had, to an extent, emancipated female musicians by this point, in the MTV/Top Of The Pops world having two women front a group was a harder sell in reality than on paper, especially when the women in question were less than inclined to participate in its familiar cliches; Hormonally Yours was so named because both players were pregnant at the time of recording.
Part of Shakespears Sister’s appeal was the contrast in the pair’s voices, with Detroit at one end of the register and Fahey the other. The material however was smart enough, so this effect didn’t slip into novelty and to complement that it retains a particularly neat line in sounding largely undated.
Away from the earworms, influences are still also writ large; Are We In Love Yet will have given Prince’s lawyers a decision to make, Catwoman swings gloriously with a Marc Bolan-esque hustle and Let Me Entertain You could, if listened to with the right set of headphones, have qualified as a Madonna B-side.
All of these gave more teeth and substance, although there was still an overkill-seeming five singles. There were misses though as well as hits; the first, the travelling circus reel of Goodbye Cruel World, left the public as underwhelmed as My 16th Apology, which was the last, although the latter’s subtle touches probably deserved more.
The elephant in the room is of course Stay. Initially a party piece sung to guests at the LA house Stewart and Fahey shared, the latter imagined it as part of the Catwoman related song-cycle, resting on a lyrical theme of a character who had to return to her planet, leaving a human love behind.
If this would’ve confused Smash Hits readers, the track’s epic, turned-up-to-11 schtick gave it all the bluster required and, without intent, at one level simultaneously both mined and sent up the emerging alt-culture of the era. Or at least that was the way it seemed.
Now re-released after three decades, Hormonally Yours can be seen for what it was; an oddly attractive, oddly subversive set of calculated risks that struck unexpected gold.
Unfortunately, the latent payoff rancour resulted in Detroit’s extremely awkward firing in 1993, after which followed a painfully long bout of mutual ‘you’re dead to me’.
At least check shirts were always someone else’s problem.
