FEATURE:
Emotional Thing
Shakespears Sister’s Hormonally Yours at Thirty
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THERE is something bittersweet…
celebrating thirty years of Shakespears Sister’s Hormonally Yours thirty years on. On 17th February, it marks a big anniversary (I would recommend you pre-order the great reissues coming out on 17th February). This was the second and final album from the group to present them as a duo of Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit. The title of Hormonally Yours derived from both members being pregnant while making the album. It is one of the best albums from the 1990s in my view. Hormonally Yours spawned five singles. Among them is the huge chart-topper, Stay. I have written about the album before and how it is underrated. I think a lot of fans will mark thirty years of a terrific album. I am going to source a couple of positive reviews for an album that boasts some superb deep cuts. I love the vocal blend of Fahey and Detroit. With a deeper husk from Fahey and a more operatic tone from Detroit, they weave so beautifully together. I cannot think of another duo like them in terms of the dynamic. What I remember most about the album and the videos is the gothic look. Dramatic and almost ghostly at times, there was something special about their look. Whilst a lot of the biggest songs are in the top half of Hormonally Yours, they do end with the single, Hello (Turn Your Radio On). Produced by Shakespears Sister, Alan Moulder and Chris Thomas, Hormonally Yours reached number three in the U.K.
I was seven when the album came out. I can recall the video for Stay being played a lot. My favourite song off the album, I Don’t Care. I shall concentrate on Stay in a bit, as the single turned thirty back on 13th January. This Wikipedia page looks at the reception to I Don’t Care:
“Tom Demalon from AllMusic described the song as "bouncy and resilient". Larry Flick from Billboard wrote that a "lively, guitar-anchored ditty is fueled by finger-poppin' rhythms and shaking tambourines." He added further that the duo's "unconventional vocal style charms, as do light, retro horn fills at the close. An adventurous pop delight with strong multiformat appeal.". Randy Clark from Cashbox called it an "upbeat, slightly quirky pop cut, with an almost '60s-ish jangle to it, featuring the dual vocals of the performance artists". The Daily Vault's Michael R. Smith noted Detroit's "ear-piercing wail" at the beginning of "I Don't Care”.
The video, ironically, sort of shows some of the tension that would have been present between Fahey and Detroit at the time. Whilst it is heightened, I wonder whether director Sophie Muller was alluding to that at all. It is a superb video and song. Now that the duo is back together and reconciled, I feel more comfortable discussing a time that was quite tense and fragmented. Not to go into the split, but it was rather unceremonious the way Detroit was informed she was not going to be part of the duo anymore (Fahey continued as a solo artist under the Shakespears Sister moniker).
Before getting to some reviews, it is worth spending time with the song most people associate with the album and the duo. Stay is a mega-hit that is dramatic, beautiful and unforgettable. In most songs, Fahey would take the lead and Detroit would do more of the backing. In this track, Detroit takes the lead; Fahey comes in at a point to provide a stirring drama and darkness in the song. On its twenty-ninth anniversary last year (13th January), Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit spoke about the inspiration behind the song:
“There was a time in the early 1990s when Shakespears Sister truly enjoyed a moment in the sun (or perhaps moon). The duo of Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit brought together influences as divergent as reggae, pop, punk and soul to create their own unique sound. That musical alchemy clearly worked and their second album, 1992’s Hormonally Yours went on to spend 55 weeks on the charts, gaining Double Platinum status along the way.
Much of that success was down to the single Stay, a gothic pop masterpiece which haunted the music world for many months. Helped in no small part by an appropriately eerie video, directed by Sophie Muller, the song perfectly showcased the contrast between Fahey and Detroit, as well as highlighting the latter’s distinctive vocals.
So it’s over to the reformed bandmates to reveal all…
“Siobhan Fahey: “We’d written about half a dozen songs for the album which went on to become Hormonally Yours. I would go over every morning to Marcy’s and work in her demo studio.
“Dave [Stewart] had this idea that we needed to write a song that highlighted Marcy’s great voice and said he had an idea. I hadn’t heard his idea until he sat down…”
Marcella Detroit: “…Right, he came over at 09:30 in the morning one day and my husband came to wake me up, I’m a late riser. ‘Hey, Siobhan and Dave are here, get up, Dave’s got an idea for a song.’ I got the coffee and we all went to my little studio and he started to play this idea… a really beautiful idea.
“When we started the album it was a concept album. We were going to try and write about this film that we wanted to purchase the rights to called Cat-Women Of The Moon.”
SF: “It was a 3D B-movie from the 50s that was going cheap. We thought if we buy it we can write some new scenes and shoot them and put ourselves in and it would be a video album but it was a bridge too far for London Records. So the film idea didn’t come to pass but it did inspire many of the songs. The moon imagery and that extraterrestrial vibe.”
MD: “Stay… each of us had different characters that we identified with in the movie and then in this one scene my character was falling in love with an earthling and he was telling her that he had to leave and go back to earth, so that’s what that song was inspired by.”
SF: “Dave had the chords and the melody…”
MD: “…He had the first verse, he started playing it and singing and we got to the chorus where he had these chords and I just started singing, ‘Stay with me.’ It just happened, a little moment of magic.”
SF: “And then I started scribbling some lyrics and it was pretty quick.”
MD: “Yeah, then you came up with the rest of the lyrics and that was it. We then demoed it at my little home studio.”
SF: “Yeah the final recording is pretty faithful to the original demo, even the funny keyboard sound is on the demo.”
MD: “That was all on the demo, our background vocals and also my lead vocal. I did that at my home studio. That is the difference between technology now and then. Back then, I would send the tape reel over and they couldn’t quite get it to sync up. There was a problem with syncing it up, near the end it just started to go off. So Chris Thomas who was producing it had a little bit of a hard time but they finally got it to work properly. Then everything else was recorded properly, Siobhan’s vocal and any other things that needed to be added. We did the recording in a few different places.
“We did some stuff with Steve Ferrera and this bass player Ian [Maidman] who was so good. We actually put that down at George Harrison’s studio in Friar Park where we initially started the recording.”
SF: “In fact, we recorded most of the album at Friar Park, which was very auspicious. So so generous of George and his wife and son to have us there for a month and lend us his studio.
“I seem to recall that, at the time that we demoed it, Dave was making an album with Chris Thomas. Chris Thomas was producing his album so he was round the house when we brought the cassette home and freaked out and went, ‘That’s a No 1 record, I’ll produce it if you want.’
“It has got a classic melody. For us though it was just another song for the album that we were writing.”
MD: “And then very unusual, conflicting lyrics. It starts out all sweet, the subject is about this unrequited love and then it gets a little bit nasty. There was a great dichotomy between Siobhan and my characters”.
In fact, timed nicely to this piece that went live today (6th February) saw a feature in The Guardian where Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey discussed making Stay:
“Marcella Detroit, singer/songwriter
Stay came to life one morning in my converted garage in the back of my house in LA: a very unassuming studio, all knotty pine and carpet, my recording equipment in a cupboard. Siobhan Fahey lived down the road and her then-husband Dave Stewart [ex-Eurythmics] had given her a lift over, then he came in, because he had an idea.
The idea came from these amazing parties Dave and Siobhan used to have. You would not believe the crew that would show up – Tom Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne from ELO, Timothy Leary. Eventually, we would all start singing and jamming, and I would always end up doing ballads. Dave said: “You know how you always sing those ballads at our parties? Wouldn’t it be great to style a song like that to feature you?” And he had an idea for chords and a melody.
Stay was rewritten maybe four times – it sounded like a Prince song at one point – before Siobhan and I went back to the original, developed it, and made a cassette of it. We played it to Chris Thomas, the producer of Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, who was staying at Dave and Siobhan’s. We weren’t expecting anything, but I remember the room was completely silent: everyone was listening really intently. After it stopped, Chris stood up, and he went: “No 1 smash!” And we were like: “Yeah? Really?”
Later, when the final mix wasn’t working, we asked Chris to help. He rescued that song and made it sound incredible. Jennifer Maidman, from Penguin Cafe Orchestra, came up with the great synthesiser parts for the chorus, and Steve Ferrera, the drummer, also did great things.
It entered the charts at No 27. Then we played Top of the Pops and it kept steadily going up. When it got to No 1 and stayed there for eight weeks, it was really unexpected. But it was incredible that that could happen. I think it’s still one of the longest-running No 1s by a female band.
PHOTO CREDIT: Gie Knaeps/Getty
Siobhan Fahey
For our second album, Hormonally Yours, we’d had this lofty idea to acquire the rights to Cat-Women of the Moon, a fabulously kitsch 3D B-movie from 1953, and build songs around its narrative. The record company said no – they’re not known for their creative thinking are record companies – but we’d written half a dozen songs already, so carried on.
If I remember rightly – 30 years is a long time – the idea for Stay’s lyric came from a woman in the film who had to go back to her planet and leave her human love behind. I was worried about it being too saccharine, but alongside Chris Thomas we had Alan Moulder. He’d recently worked with My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain, who I loved. At that point, we were the only “pop” band Alan had ever worked with – and he went on to work with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. It meant there was nothing sugary about the production.
Sophie Muller , who was my best friend at the time, made the video. We were muses to each other. I’d been getting into gothic ringlets and sparkly glam-rock catsuits, enjoying becoming an unhinged Victorian heroine meets Suzi Quatro meets Labelle! Now that look was combined with me becoming the angel of death in the video, in dark makeup coming down the stairs from another dimension, trying to steal Marcella’s human love away from her – the video had a slightly different concept to the song.
We only had a day for the shoot. Most of it involved recording Marcy singing, so by the evening I was getting bored – but also the clock was ticking. At 8pm, I hit the vodka and by the time we filmed, I was, shall we say, in high spirits, in full deranged splendour. Performing as a darker character is always more fun than being peaches and cream.
I loved coming down the staircase, which was inspired by one of my favourite films, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. That character seemed to register with lots of people, which was amazing – there were lots of ludicrous takes on it [by French and Saunders as well as David Baddiel and Rob Newman]. I found that funny and the greatest compliment. Funnier still is how people expect me to be just like the angel of death in real life, 30 years on. They’re bitterly disappointed when I’m not”.
I hope that a lot of love is aimed the way of Hormonally Yours on its thirtieth anniversary on 17th February. Their debut, 1989’s Sacred Heart, is well worth hearing, but I think that Hormonally Yours is the best album from Shakespears Sister. Before wrapping up, I want to bring in one review. Entertainment Weekly gave Hormonally Yours a positive review. Even though they note a few songs are over-long, they have highlight the way their voices are different, yet they blend well:
“Most women really hate being accused of hormonally induced moodiness whenever they feel a little crabby, but the two women who make up Shakespear’s Sister clearly have no such qualms. In fact, their second album, Hormonally Yours, plays on the idea of female biological madness, and to its credit, it does so without sounding bitchy or melodramatic. Unlike band member Siobhan Fahey’s former group, Bananarama, Shakespear’s Sis isn’t afraid to emote: The cool detachment of yesteryear has been replaced by a warmer and more emotionally complicated sound. Fahey’s deep, uncannily male-sounding voice is perfectly complemented by her American-born partner, Marcella Detroit, who adds more soulful and feminine R&B-influenced backup vocals. Mostly, the combine sounds great-but several songs (notably ”Emotional Thing” and ”Let Me Entertain You”) go on way too long. Shakespear’s Sister isn’t going to start a turf war with Natalie Cole or Anita Baker, but taken on its own terms — as an original purveyor of lightweight, white-girl blues — this pair is excellent. B+”.
An incredible album that turns thirty on 17th February, I hope Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey recall good memories of that time – even though there were tensions and Detroit departed the duo in 1993. The duo released a 2019 E.P., Ride Again, so we may get another album from them soon enough. Crammed with so many terrific songs from an incredible duo, Hormonally Yours is a…
SENSATIONAL and hugely listenable album.