Robert Hodgens, AKA Bobby Bluebell, songwriter, guitar, vocals
I first glimpsed Siobhan Fahey at my publisher’s offices. Later that day, when I was being interviewed by Smash Hits, I told the interviewer: “I really fancy Siobhan from Bananarama.” The next night, she was at our concert, at the front. I remember saying to my bandmates Ken and Dave McCluskey: “I’m gonna get off with her.”
We met in the car park and liked each other. Soon afterwards, I moved down from Glasgow – into a London flat with the glamorous Bananarama girls. It was like the Beatles in Help! One night, we were lying in bed watching the Frank Sinatra film Young at Heart, one of my dad’s favourites, and talking about our backgrounds. Siobhan is Irish but her father was in the British army, so she’d moved around and changed schools a lot. I think she had just wanted to escape, so we started writing lyrics about how her parents had got married young to have sex and have kids, because that’s what people did then. It was the first time since I’d left home that I also realised what our parents had done for us, which fed into the line: “How come I love them now? How come I love them more? / When all I wanted to do when I was old was to walk out the door?”
Bananarama recorded Young at Heart, but their version didn’t quite have whatever their big hits had at the time. Our record company boss Roger Ames suggested the Bluebells record it. We were big pals with Dexys Midnight Runners so thought of asking Helen O’Hara, who played fiddle on Come on Eileen, to play on our version. Roger said that would be “too much cross-pollination”, but the old story about us finding a fiddle player in the pub isn’t true – Bobby Valentino, who played on the single, was a session-player who laid the part down in a few minutes, and Lawrence Donegan came up with a killer new bassline.
In 1984, the song got to No 8 but then nine years later it was used on a car advert and it spent four weeks at No 1. The pope actually complained that the lyrics promoted divorce, which I thought was really funny – although my mum is Italian so she wasn’t best pleased.
Siobhan Fahey, songwriter
Bob’s Smash Hits story is sheer fantasy and makes me sound like a stalker – but Bananarama did share offices in Covent Garden with the Bluebells. We were penniless and on the dole, so we’d go in there to use the phones or steal toilet roll. I met Bob there. He was – and is – the most charming, positive and inspiring person, so he sweet-talked his way into my affections and I took to him big time.
Bananarama had been living in a leaky loft space above the Sex Pistols’ rehearsal room, although we were all in a council flat when Bob used to come down and stay in my room. We weren’t long out of school, we were practically children, but it was an incredible time to be in London. We’d go dancing in the Wag Club and everyone there was in a band: Wham!, Culture Club, Sade.
Once Bananarama started having hits, we had to disguise ourselves to sign on for the dole in case they’d seen us on Top of the Pops. Then suddenly we needed material for an album. I remember Bob sitting with a guitar and going: “Let’s write a song.” He came up with the title Young at Heart after we watched the film, then I started writing lyrics about my relationship with my parents. You can hear the difference between our personalities in the song. My words reek with pain, his are more loving: two very different experiences of growing up.
Bananarama recorded Young at Heart as a northern soul stomper. We’d wanted Soft Cell’s producer but were told he only did synth bands, so instead we ended up with Barry Blue. It’s a flawed production but I like our version, although it doesn’t have the fiddle hook, which is so important to the Bluebells’ one. The song’s mix of dark and cheery lyrics with uptempo, uplifting music reminds me of Tamla Motown, which was the reason we formed a girl group. It was such an amazing time to be young, and we were two kids who wrote a song about our parents from the heart.
