It was a huge hit - Number One on both sides of the Atlantic and over a million copies sold worldwide. For a while, in the spring of 1989, wherever you were in the world, Eternal Flame was inescapable.
It was one of those monster singles, like My Heart Will Go On, Every Breath You Take or more recently Miley Cyrus’s Flowers, that have such a large gravitational pull that every note and word becomes imprinted upon your memory - whether you like it or not.
But less than six months later, The Bangles were no more. What should have been the platform for greater success in the coming new decade turned out to be a dead end for the most successful all-female band of their era.
The Bangles had formed back in 1981 as an ideal – four Beatles-obsessed friends from California, two of them sisters, playing 60s-influenced garage rock. All four wrote, and lead vocals were shared round equally. There was no lead Bangle.
Success came gradually, though a gift from Prince in the shape of their breakthrough hit Manic Monday, helped matters considerably. But by 1988, that all-for-one and one-for-all camaraderie was under severe pressure.
Recording their second album, Different Light had been a dispiriting experience – producer David Kahne had used session musicians to replace guitar lines, tried to insert himself into the songwriting and, in the case of Walk Like An Egyptian, made each member audition for their own vocal lines. And this when there was tension in the band anyway, due to the increasing focus on Susanna Hoffs as the ‘lead singer’ and, as some parts of the media were concerned, supposed sex symbol.
For the follow-up album, Everything, the band’s writing process was fractured further. Where once they would collaborate with each other, now each Bangle was choosing outside songwriting partners.
Susanna Hoffs chose Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, proven hitmakers who had written True Colors from Cyndi Lauper, Alone for Heart as well as Madonna’s Like A Virgin.
The inspiration for the song came from a visit that Hoffs had made to Memphis. “I went over to Billy’s house and was telling him about a Bangles trip to Graceland,” Hoffs told the Guardian in 2021. “When we got to Elvis’s grave, we started recreating Spinal Tap singing Heartbreak Hotel there when we noticed that the eternal flame by the grave was out because it was raining. Billy said: ‘Wait, eternal flame? That is a great name for a song.’ Within about an hour, we had the lyrics.”
It clearly sparked something in Steinberg. “It made me recall a childhood memory. My family was not very religious, but my parents did send me to Sunday school. It was quiet and dark in the synagogue and there was a little red bulb they used to call the eternal flame. I immediately took out a notebook and free-associated to the title.”
Having worked up a demo on a guitar, Hoffs then had to sell the song to her fellow Bangles. “The band sat down with our producer, Davitt Sigerson, to vote which songs would be on the next album. Eternal Flame was rejected, and I was heartbroken, but in the Bangles everybody played and sang and was represented creatively.”
But whilst the band and Sigerson started work on Everything, there was something about Eternal Flame that the producer couldn’t shake from his mind. He suggested to Hoffs that they work on the track and then present it to the rest of the band and see if they would reconsider. In a 2012 interview with Songfacts, Hoffs remembers how they went about it.
“He said, ‘You know, I have an idea for that song. I know you love Patsy Cline.’ I was into a very heavy Patsy Cline phase where I was listening to those records and singing along and loving them. So he said, ‘I'm envisioning a very kind of crafted little arrangement, kind of like a music box.’”
Work on the rest of the album continued and eventually Hoffs had to remind Sigerson about Eternal Flame. “I was sort of afraid to mention it. And Davitt said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. We're going to do it. I found a keyboard player and you and me will get together with him and we'll just work on the arrangement.’ So I'm glad I brought it up. I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't.”
The keyboard player was John Philip Shenale, who put together a little keyboard figure, with occasional triangle (which once heard is impossible not to notice). “So we created a little track, brought it to the studio and then we laid down these incredible harmonies. It was so much fun putting the track together because it was different from everything else on the record. It was all kind of pieced together in the studio. Vicki (Peterson) played a really beautiful guitar solo on it.”
“I remember our manager at the time, Miles Copeland, came in and said, "Nice song, but this'll never get played on the radio. It doesn't have drums on it."
For Hoffs’ lead vocal, the producer had special plans. Talking to Rock Cellar in 2012, she recalls that: “He said: ‘You know what, I think it’s best to record vocals at night and I would like you girls to schedule what night you want, and when it’s your night, it’s your night. I want to make you as comfortable as possible, so whatever you want the studio to be, whether it’s having stuff like incense or lighting a candle, you got it.’”
“He played this kind of practical joke on me – he knew I was very gullible – and he mentioned that he had just finished working on Olivia Newton-John’s record and said, ‘Oh, and she sings everything in the nude. And she just did her best performances ever that way.’ And I said, ‘Really? I had no idea!’”
Somehow Sigerson convinced Hoffs to perform her vocals – not just for Eternal Flame for but for the whole album – naked. It should be pointed out that there was a screen to save her modesty. “But just the notion of it was fun and the sensation of feeling emotionally naked as well somehow brought out these vocal performances on that record, that I don’t know if I would have achieved otherwise.”
Eternal Flame was the second single released from Everything, in early 1989. It wasn’t exactly hailed as a classic. New York Magazine described it as a “cloying ballad that Andrew Lloyd Webber could have written for Sarah Brightman.”
In the UK it was dismissed on Radio 1’s review show Singled Out and panned by no less an authority than the Saturday Superstore pop panel, whilst in Melody Maker Everett True (aka early Creation artist The Legend!) described it as a “standard throw-away-sob-your-heart-out-by-numbers fare we’ve come to dread from the increasingly soporific foursome.”
But something happened to Eternal Flame once it made contact with the general public. In the UK it was one of those old-fashioned sleeper hits of the pre-streaming era. Entering at a lowly 81 in January, it took two months just to get into the Top 40, before finally reaching Number One in mid April.
But despite its success, for some of the band, Eternal Flame was a step too far away from their garage roots. “I was feeling emotionally divorced from a lot of the music that was going on,” said Vicki Peterson on the Behind The Music Bangles special. “Eternal Flame is a beautiful song. Whitney Houston could have a hit with it. Why are we doing it?”
Peterson’s comments were understandable given the crumbling state of the band at the time, but even if Whitney could have sung it, it’s Hoffs’ delicate vocals (especially the way she only just reaches the falsetto in ‘do you feel the same’) that makes Eternal Flame. It sounds vulnerable, a song from the perspective of an everywoman embarking on a new relationship, scared but still hopeful.
The payoff, of course, is in the chorus, the ‘sunshine through the rain’ section. And when at the end, the piano, strings and Hoffs’ bandmates’ voices come in to reassure her, it’s like witnessing a magnificent sunrise. It’s a new dawn, a new day.
And Eternal Flame should have provided The Bangles with a fresh start. But when the follow-up single Be With You – with drummer Debbi Peterson on lead vocals – stalled at Number 30 on Billboard, 23 in the UK, Columbia and the band’s management team agreed that Hoffs would sing lead on all the singles going forward. It spelt the end. After a by-all-accounts strained US tour that summer, The Bangles broke up.
Since then, the stocks of Eternal Flame and the Bangles have arguably both risen. The group reformed in 1998 and released a new album, Doll Revolution, in 2003. Though there has been no band activity since Covid, you suspect that were they to announce another reunion tour, tickets would fly. They were the most successful all-female guitar group of their time, were great songwriters, expert harmonisers and left behind a scattering of all-time pop classics.
Of which, Eternal Flame is indisputably one. Power ballads from the 1980s tended to be huge, bombastic undertakings. But Eternal Flame’s fragile arrangement – which matches its subject matter – makes this a human-sized one that nearly 40 years later it’s hard not to warm to.
